Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us Author: Kate Bornstein Publisher: ROUTLEDGE ISBN: 0415908973 Publishing Date: 1994 Pages: 245 Format: Hardcover
Gender has been described as the battleground for the 90s. As we watch the emergence of 'gender-bending' in popular culture, the lines are being drawn and sides taken up. Somewhere above both sides stands Kate Bornstein, with a unique, funny and lucid voice. Gender Outlaw is the work of a woman who has been through some changes - a former heterosexual male and one-time Scientologist and IBM salesperson, now a lesbian writer and actress who makes regular rounds on the TV talk shows. In her book, Bornstein covers the 'mechanics' of her surgery; everything you've always wanted to know about gender (but were too confused to ask); the place and politics of the transgendered; and the questions of those who give the subject little thought. Kate Bornstein takes on various communities: gay, lesbian, straight, S/M and transgender, along with the 'society at large'. In her witty incisive observations is the foundation of a radical new politics of sexuality and gender. The book also includes Bornstein's play, Hidden: A Gender . Gender Outlaw is an ideal response to the belief that everyone talks about gender, but no one does anything about it. Kate Bornstein has taken (dramatic) steps, and invites the reader along for the trip.
Becoming a Visible Man Author: Jamison Green Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press ISBN: 082651457X Publishing Date: May 1, 2004 Pages: 264 Format: Paperback
Written by a leading activist in the transgender movement, Becoming a Visible Man is an artful and compelling inquiry into the politics of gender. Jamison Green combines candid autobiography with informed analysis to offer unique insight into the multiple challenges of the female-to-male transsexual experience, ranging from encounters with prejudice and strained relationships with family to the development of an FTM community and the realities of surgical sex reassignment. For more than a decade, Green has provided educational programs on gender-variance issues for corporations, law-enforcement agencies, social-science conferences and classes, continuing legal education, religious education, and medical venues. His comprehensive knowledge of the processes and problems encountered by transgendered and transsexual people?as well as his legal advocacy work to help ensure that gender-variant people have access to the same rights and opportunities as others?enable him to explain the issues as no transsexual author has previously done.
Brimming with frank and often poignant recollections of Green?s own experiences?including his childhood struggles with identity and his years as a lesbian parent prior to his sex-reassignment surgery?the book examines transsexualism as a human condition, and sex reassignment as one of the choices that some people feel compelled to make in order to manage their gender variance. Relating the FTM psyche and experience to the social and political forces at work in American society, Becoming a Visible Man also speaks consciously of universal principles that concern us all, particularly the need to live one?s life honestly, openly, and passionately.
The Transgender Debate Author: Stephen Whittle Publisher: Garnet Pub Ltd ISBN: 1902932161 Publishing Date: May1, 2001 Pages: 64 Format: Paperback
Transgender has become a cultural obsession. From the high camp of Rue Paul to the working class transsexual icon, Hayley of Coronation Street, it pervades our lives. Yet for many it remains a freakish interest on the sidelines. For transsexual and transgender people, though, it is a reality bound up in complexities, legal contradictions, family discord, and a desperate need to explain what it means to be a man or a woman, or neither, or both.
Addressing the historical, social, legal and medical issues surrounding this new community, this book throws a light onto the complex issues, clarifying them in a way that all those who think they know what they mean, will be called to question the certainties that gender roles are no longer about.
Lessons from the Intersexed Author: Suzanne J. Kessler Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 0813525306 Publishing Date: 1998 Pages: 208 Format: Trade paperback
Focusing on intersexuality - having physical gender markers that are neither female or male - the author examines the social institutions that are mobilized to maintain the two seemingly objective sexual categories. She argues that we need to re-think the meaning of gender, genitals and sexuality.
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us
Becoming a Visible Man
transsexual
The Transgender Debate
Lessons from the Intersexed