Synopses & Reviews
In the autumn of 2012, Maxim Februari—known until then as writer and philosopher Marjolijn Februari—announced his intention to live as a man. The news was greeted with a diversity of reactions, from curiosity to unease. These responses made it absolutely clear to Februari that most of us don’t know how to think about transsexuality.
The Making of a Man explores this lacuna through a deeply personal meditation on a profoundly universal aspect of our identities.
Februari contemplates the many questions that sexual transitions entail: the clinical effects of testosterone, the alteration of sexual organs, and its effects on sexual intimacy; how transsexuality figures in the law; and how it challenges the way we talk about sex and gender, such as the seemingly minor—but crucially important—difference between the terms “transsexual” and “transgender.” He analyzes our impressions of effeminate men and butch women, separating apparent acceptance from actual prejudice, and critically examines the curious requirement in many countries that one must demonstrate a psychological disturbance—a “gender identity disorder”—in order to be granted sex change therapies. From there he explores the seemingly endless minutiae changing genders or sex effect, from the little box with an M or an F on passports to the shockingly sudden way testosterone can adjust physical features.
With his characteristically clear voice combined with intimate—sometimes moving, sometimes funny—ruminations, Februari wakes readers up to all the ways, big and small, our world is structured by sex and gender.
Review
A thorough and fascinating academic study...Meyerowitz in this fine book uses the history of transsexuality and the narrative arc of Jorgensen's story as a means by which to study our ever evolving notions of man and woman, sex and gender. The key word here is evolving. We haven't figured anything out, but at least we're asking questions. -- Amanda Laughtland - The Progressive
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[A] fascinating account of how transsexuality has challenged American concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality in science, medicine, law, and popular culture in the 20th century...With her sympathetic reporting on the lives of individual men and women coming to terms with their transsexuality--especially Jorgensen, who lived until 1989--Meyerowitz gives serious social history an engaging human face. Informative and absorbing. -- Publishers Weekly
Review
This unusually intelligent and straightforward cultural history...convincingly shows that our coming to view "biological sex"--the physical markers of femininity and masculinity--as malleable rather than immutable constituted one of the most profound moral, social, legal, and medical changes in twentieth-century America. -- Kirkus Reviews
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How Sex Changedis a sober, comprehensive cultural history that draws on previously unavailable archival sources. It is likely to become a standard reference in the field. How Sex Changedfollows the growing self-identification and assertiveness of transsexuals in American society. One of its great strengths is its examination of the intersection and interaction of science and culture, a type of inquiry that should serve as a model for future work on gender issues...[This is] an intelligent, even indispensable, account. -- Dinitia Smith - New York Times
Review
How Sex Changedis a sober, comprehensive cultural history that draws on previously unavailable archival sources. It is likely to become a standard reference in the field.How Sex Changedfollows the growing self-identification and assertiveness of transsexuals in American society. One of its great strengths is its examination of the intersection and interaction ofscience and culture, a type of inquiry that should serve as a model for future work on gender issues...[This is] an intelligent, even indispensable, account.
Review
Gender is a fundamental part of human identity, yet for some people the question, "Male or female?" is not easily answered. These individuals feel they are trapped in the wrong body. Their history, and especially their efforts to change their bodies through surgical and medical interventions, is the subject of this new book by Joanne Meyerowitz...This is a scientific work, but Meyerowitz keeps the very human side of the issue front and center throughout. -- Jonathan Ames - Bookforum
Review
This splendid, beautifully written history of sex changing is also a history of changing sexual politics, social and political identities, and new technologies that have combined to change all our lives. A "must have" for all scholars of sex, sexual mores and sexual and gender politics, as well as required reading for all transsexual and transgender people. It is a reclamation of our history, of where we have come from and where we are going. -- Leila J. Rupp, author of
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How Sex Changedbrings transsexuals into the canon of U.S. history. Meyerowitz provides the disciplined analysis of the emergence of this minority that we need in order to bring them into our evolving gender history. This is one of the most original and useful contributions to the history of sexuality in a decade. -- Susan Stryker, Executive Director, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Transgender Historical Society/International Museum of GLBT History
Review
In addition to examining these definitional battles, Meyerowitz details how transsexuality became a lens through which post-war American culture's concerns with "the limits of individualism, the promises and pitfalls of science, the appropriate behavior of women and men, and the boundaries of acceptable gender expression" were refracted. She uses the story of Jorgensen's personal transformation to frame a riveting social, medical and cultural history of transsexualism in the United States...The richness of Meyerowitz' incisive and accessible history lies in the breadth and depth of her research. -- Psychology Today
Review
Quite simply the best work on transsexual history yet produced. How Sex Changed is a wonderful introduction to the topic for newcomers as well as a solid point of departure for specialists already working in the field. A lucid, readable tour de force of archival research. Susan Stryker, Executive Director, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Transgender Historical Society/International Museum of GLBT History
Review
How Sex Changedbrings the reader to the revelation that transsexuality functioned as both a cause and effect of surrounding notions of what sex, gender, and sexuality do or don’t have to do with each other...[it] also provides a compelling look at many of the most prominent researchers and clinicians involved in transsexuality. Reading this book one is struck not only by the astounding number of theories that were put forth to explain (and sometimes explain away) transsexuality but also by the stark contrast between those clinicians and researchers who wanted to help transsexual people and those who were only interested in advancing their own careers...This book ought to be required reading for everyone engaged in the study of sex, gender, and sexuality, since everyone so engaged can use the understanding Meyerowitz provide of how tangled ideas about sex and gender can become and how harmed those entangled can be. The writing style—blessedly free of the needless jargon that chills so many would-be sexy books—makes How Sex Changeda pleasure to read and accessible even to undergraduates. The use of primary and secondary literaturefeels like scholarship at its best without being plodding. Meyerowitz performs a masterful job showing how the popular press, the medical literature, and the autobiographies of transsexual people ended up playing off each other; a narrower historical study of transsexuality could easily have missed these critical insights. -- H. G. Cocks - Journal of Contemporary History
Review
A masterful history. Drawing on extensive and compelling evidence, Joanne Meyerowitz shows how transsexuals, the doctors who treated them, and the media not only expanded the possibilities for individual sex change but also transformed the cultural meanings of sex, gender, and sexuality in twentieth-century America. Estelle B. Freedman, author of < i=""> No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women <>
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An absorbing tale. In Meyerowitz's deft telling transsexuality becomes a complex phenomenon that shook the foundations of American thinking about the ostensibly natural linkages among sex, gender, and sexuality. This is a masterful work. -- James W. Reed, Rutgers University
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How Sex Changedsucceeds brilliantly in bringing together cultural, medical, and social histories of transsexuality, and in giving powerful voice to transgendered and transsexual people's role in making that history. This is a compelling and important book. -- Stephen Whittle, author of
Review
Meyerowitz's easy, readable style makes her thorough research in a wide range of fields accessible and enjoyable, even when she is detailing such subjects as internecine fighting among psychiatrists over the merits of sex-change operations...[How Sex Changed] is an invaluable introduction to how ideas about gender and sexuality have evolved. -- Regina Kunzel, Williams College
Review
Meyerowitz, teacher and editor...uses both skills to explain a confusing subject and pilot readers through a morass of changing terminology and interpretations...The book might have bogged down in the anatomical, chromosomal, psychological, and social aspects of the differences between men and women, but Meyerowitz avoids this by maintaining focus on major trends and attitudes. She cites carefully chosen persons, organizations, and publications to demonstrate the gradual development of the now generally accepted idea of maleness and femaleness occupying a qualitative continuum rather than representing polar conditions. Detailed and informative, and well supported by references and notes, Meyerowitz's work is commendable to anyone seriously interested in transsexuality. -- The Atlantic
Review
[How Sex Changed] examines changing definitions of gender through the prism of transsexuality, that most mysterious of conditions in which a person is born with normal chromosomes and hormones for one sex but is convinced that he or she is a member of the other. Dr. Meyerowitz shows how mutable the words "male," "female," "sex," and "gender" have become, and how their meanings have evolved through time. Hers is one of several new books on the subject of the transgendered...In terms of the scientific quandary of gender, [this book] is the most important. -- Booklist
Review
Meyerowitz details the advancement of medical treatments for transsexuals along with accompanying changes in the scientific as well as the popular lexicon...Though doctors have published a number of medical texts on transsexuality, and several transsexuals have published their autobiographies, Meyerowitz's book stands out as a comprehensive, scholarly volume that incorporates research from a wide range of sources, including the perspectives of many transgender people themselves. -- Julia M. Klein - The Nation
Review
Beginning with the 1950s, Joanne Meyerowitz shows how sex-change surgery forced people into rethinking gender beyond binary categories of male and female
Meyerowitz is too smart to fall for the charms of such simple essentialism, and also shows that transsexual patients who hoped for surgery were prepared to structure their life stories, and their sense of self, to fit in with the institutional meanings and interpretations of their "condition"
Meyerowitz is correct to turn away from the more simplistic theoretical idiom which posits transsexuality as only ever a hybrid symbol of thirdness that denaturalizes and parodies gender binaries. -- Paisley Currah - Women's Review of Books
Review
“In his provocative new book, The Making of a Man, the Dutch novelist and newspaper columnist reveals with humor and insight what a body in transition goes through under the influence of testosterone . . . . While details like these illuminate the journey of the transsexual, Februari has created something far more than a portrait of gender evolution. With celebrities such as Bruce Jenner drawing attention to the issue, Februari has done our culture a service. . . . His intellect and honesty allow us to see gender, in all its manifestations, as simply one component of the complicated human experience. Februari leads us away from a common belief that our perception of ourselves as male or female is determined by our genitals.”
Synopsis
How Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, transsexuals questioned biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all.
From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today's growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists, as they debated the big questions of medical ethics, nature versus nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights.
In this story of transsexuality, Meyerowitz shows how new definitions of sex circulated in popular culture, science, medicine, and the law, and she elucidates the tidal shifts in our social, moral, and medical beliefs over the twentieth century, away from sex as an evident biological certainty and toward an understanding of sex as something malleable and complex. How Sex Changed is an intimate history that illuminates the very changes that shape our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality today.
Synopsis
From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today's growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists.
Synopsis
2003 Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association's
Synopsis
2002 ForeWord Book of the Year, Gay/Lesbian Nonfiction Category
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Honorable Mention, 2002 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies
Synopsis
In the autumn of 2012, Maxim Februari, known until then as writer and philosopher Marjolijn Februari, announced his intention to live as a man. In The Making of a Man he describes how the news was greeted: the unease, the interest, and the slightly too comradely tone in which people suddenly started to address him. Whatever the reaction, there was always an element of ignorance. Hardly anyone seemed to understand what a sex change actually involves or how best to react to it.
Februari analyzes our impressions of effeminate men and butch women, and examines apparent acceptance and actual prejudice. Curiously, to gain access to medical treatment you are required to demonstrate that you are psychologically disturbed—you need to be diagnosed as suffering from a “gender identity disorder”—and the book examines the implications of this requirement. Then there are the far-reaching demands of officialdom that must be met so that, for example, “you can go on holiday with a passport that gives your correct gender.”
Februaris account of his own transition is fascinating. Although the process of changing sex is of course a lengthy one, the outside world experiences it as a fairly abrupt switch. From one day to the next, as the testosterone took effect, Februari started to find himself addressed as a man rather than as a woman. “What had changed?” he asks himself. “In the intervening twenty-four hours I hadnt had a haircut, I wasnt wearing different clothes; it was just that the testosterone had altered the subtle signals by which my body suggested its sex.”
Februaris characteristically clear, philosophical voice, combined with his intimate, sometimes moving, sometimes funny experiences make this account unique. He analyzes and describes, charts and enquires. Above all, he makes us think.
About the Author
Maxim Februari is a columnist for NRC Handelsblad and the author of several collections of essays and two novels, including, most recently, The Book Club. He lives in the Netherlands. Andy Brown is a translator specializing in Dutch. His translations include The Encyclopaedia of Liars and Deceivers, also published by Reaktion Books. He lives in The Netherlands.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Identity: Gender and Sex
2. Language and Etiquette: What You Should and Shouldn’t Say
3. Rules and Laws
4. Body
5. Society: The Tensions Surrounding the Transition
6. Testosterone
7. Relationships
8. Woman: “If I Were a Man…”
9. Man: “As if Men Have it So Easy!”
10. Famous Figures
End
Acknowledgements and Sources