Coming of Age in the Land of Two Genders (1997)

©1997, 2014 by Dallas Denny. Printed pages reproduced courtesy of Prometheus Books.

Source: Denny, Dallas. (1997). Coming of age in the land of two genders. In B. Bullough, V.L. Bullough, M.A. Fithian, W.E. Hartman, & R.S. Klein (Eds.), “How I got into sex,” pp. 75-86. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

 

 

 

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Marginalization and stigmatization have until now stifled the voices of transexual scholars. This was due in no small measure to a literature which depicted us as manipulative, pathetic, and dysfunctional, and to identity politics, which until recently kept us deep in our closets and out of communication with one another.

This began to change in the mid 1980s, with the formation of the transgender community, and reached critical mass only recently, when a conference was held in which the transgender/transexual and academic credentials of presenters were accorded equal status.

Until recently, all major theoretical papers, all of the descriptive studies, and all of the textbooks about transexualism had been written by nontransexual persons. This ludicrous situation was analogous to the study of Black history and identity without the involvement of Black scholars, or of gay and lesbian history and identity without gay and lesbian scholars.

The problem was not that transexual persons are unable to write—indeed, some of our most talented and beloved authors, including Carson McCullers, Daphne Du Maurier, and Ernest Hemingway [1], seem to have had significant transgender tendencies (it’s often impossible to tell, because transgender status is so often a well-kept secret). No, the problem was that we were marginalized, kept so busy with our struggle to understand and cope with our condition, and to defend ourselves against those (often our own family members, and often “helping” professionals) who acted with hysteria and malice to us if we dared to disclose our transexual natures, that we had little time or energy to educate the masses, or even each other. What we have published, until of late, has been because of our curiosity value (the ubiquitous transexual autobiography), or more often than not materials distributed at our own expense in order to help other transexual people through the very difficult process of self-discovery and self-invention.

Before the mid-1980s, most transexual people—that is, men and women who wished to change their bodies to more closely resemble those of the other sex—knocked on the doors of gender clinics which offered a one-stop, one-size-fits-all approach which was nevertheless very obstructionistic; only those transexual people who fit the clinics’ frequently inaccurate and sexist notions of what they should be like were served, and they only by jumping a rigorous set of hurdles designed to discourage them or turn them into highly stereotyped caricatures of nontransgendered men and women (Denny, 1992).

Many clinics, citing confidentiality restrictions, actively discouraged transexual people from interacting with each other. Except for brief and usually anonymous contact with others in therapist-led support groups, transexual people were isolated, unable to communicate with each other, and forced by the clinics and by societal and peer pressure to assimilate as “normal” men and women in the larger world.

Meanwhile, crossdressers, who for the most part had escaped the attention of the medical community because they did not need specialized endocrinological and surgical services to change their bodies, had met in secret since the 1950s. This was largely due to the courage of Virginia Prince, who, through contacts garnered by publishing the magazine Transvestia, formed the Hose and Heels Club, which eventually evolved in the United States into the present day Society for the Second Self, a national organization for heterosexual crossdressers and their partners; there are more than a thousand members. The Beaumont Clubs of Western Europe and the Seahorse Clubs of Australia are also legacies of Prince’s early work.

Prince published widely, popularizing the notion that many crossdressers are heterosexual, an idea which before her time had scarcely seemed credible. Like the early twentieth-century researcher Magnus Hirschfeld, who was reputed to be a crossdresser, Prince contributed to the scientific literature, publishing in a variety of medical and psychological journals (Bullough & Bullough, 1993). However, Prince, although living as a woman, did not identify as transexual, but as a transgenderist. She could not and did not speak for transexual people. The voices of transexual scholars were conspicuously absent from the literature.

In 1979, the Gender Identity Clinic at the Johns Hopkins University. which had taken the lead in transexual treatment and study since its inception in 1967, abruptly shut down as the result of a scheme concocted by psychiatrist Paul McHugh and carried out by Jon Meyer, the head of the clinic, who submitted a study of the effectiveness of transexual surgery to the journal Archives of General Psychiatry (Meyer & Reter, 1979), and called a press conference to announce the findings—conveniently timed so that psychologist John Money, the primary power behind the clinic, was out of the country (Ogas, 1994). This study was immediately and soundly criticized on a number of fronts, and has been thoroughly demolished by reviewers on any number of occasions, but had its intended effect; the clinic was closed as a result of political pressures brought as a result of the publicity it engendered. [2]

The closing of the prestigious Hopkins clinic had a domino-like effect. By 1991, of the more than 40 university-affiliated gender identity clinics in the United States, all but two had closed their doors. However, market pressures brought to bear by thousands of men and women seeking sex reassignment led to the development of a transexual grapevine which channeled those who wanted sex reassignment to private practitioners who were willing to provide services.

Riding piggyback on the support network which had arisen for heterosexual crossdressers, or attending one of a very few support groups for transexual people which had sprung up across the country, a few transexual people began to come into contact with one another in the early 1980s. Most, however, remained firmly in the closet of assimilation. In 1986, Merissa Sherrill Lynn founded the International Foundation for Gender Education. Although Lynn frequently and loudly proclaimed that IFGE was not an umbrella organization, it served admirably as such, bringing into frequent and often conflict-ridden contact with one another both crossdressers and transexual people, and a newly emerging class of people who did not fit either category—transgenderists like Virginia Prince.

To Prince’s consternation—she had coined the term to refer to people like herself, who lived across genders without genital surgery—the term transgender soon came into use as a global term for the entire community. The term has gained wide recognition of late in the gay/lesbian/bisexual—and now transgender as well—press, and is now officially part of the mission statements and names of many organizations which once actively excluded transgendered and transexual persons. Incidentally, many transexual persons do not identify as transgendered, but as men or women. However, the term transgender, especially when considered to be shorthand for “transgressively gendered,” (Bornstein, 1994), is the term most widely used to describe the constellation of transexual people, transgenderists, crossdressers, drag kings and queens, stone butches, passing women and men, and gender blenders.

As part of the increasingly recognized community of transgendered persons, transexual and transgendered scholars and authors are at long last coming into prominence. Kate Bornstein and Martine Rothblatt, both of whom have had genital surgery, have written books for general audiences (Bornstein, 1994; Rothblatt, 1994) which were released by mainstream publishing houses. Leslie Feinberg, who once identified as transexual and now considers hirself to be a transgenderist, has found enormous grassroots popularity with hir semi-autobiographical novel Stone Butch Blues. When the president of Bradford College recently vetoed Feinberg as keynote speaker at graduation, angry students took over the administration building; after re-negotiation, Feinberg spoke, after all.

Transexual scholars were writing and presenting papers at scientific conferences, but the first published contribution to the academic literature by an acknowledged transexual person, so far as I have been able to tell, was an essay by Sandy Stone in Epstein & Straub’s 1991 book Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, in which she pointed out some of the many ways in which transexual people had been misapprehended and maligned by nontransexual writers. Her essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” immediately achieved legendary status among the scholars of the transgender community.

So far as I knew, the first submission by an admitted transexual published in a psychological journal or book (excluding “what it’s like to be transexual” articles) was my response to a review by Charles Mate-Kole of Anne Bolin’s In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage, which was published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 1993. [3] However, one of the authors in Blanchard & Steiner’s (Eds.) 1990 Clinical Management of Gender Identity Disorders in Children and Adults was written by a transexual woman under her former name. Recently, (1995), she used her new name as co-author of an article in a peer-review journal which frequently publishes articles about transexualism. [4]

My work for Garland Press, Gender Dysphoria: A Guide to Research, is the first academic book-length contribution by an out transexual author. It is a mammoth (650 pp.+) annotated bibliography of the literature of transexualism and crossdressing. However, even though I am extremely visible, both locally and nationally, as a transexual woman, I did not mention my transexualism in the book. I am planning to discuss it in my forthcoming edited text for Garland, Current Concepts in Transgender Identity: Towards a New Synthesis. [5]

1995 was a watershed year in the emergence of transexual scholars. In February, a historic conference took place in Van Nuys, California. The International Congress on Cross Dressing, Gender, and Sex Issues, hosted by the Department of Sex Research at the University of California at Northridge, was attended by more than 300 scholars, transgendered (many of them transexual) and nontransgendered alike. For the first time, transgender credentials were as important as academic credentials. I was proud, at a workshop I gave on the first day of the conference, to proclaim that my first credential was as a transexual woman. [6]

It was something I could never have done before.

 

The Birth of a Transexual Academic: My Story

 

For those who like the usual, here it is: transexual autobiography. However, I include this because it is not the usual. It is the truth; unlike many who have come before me, I have not been forced, either by internal or external constraints, to legitimize my transexualism by forcing my history into anyone’s preconceived notions of what it should have been like.

To say that I had great difficulty understanding and dealing with my transexual feelings would be an understatement. However, unlike many of my peers, I did not go into deep denial of the fact that I had a desperate desire to live as a member of the other sex. Nor did I make that desire public. What I did was to learn to hide it, for I came of age in the Mid-South in the 1960s, and I was somehow wise enough in that time and place to sense that revelation of my feelings would not obtain help for me, but censure, and maybe even psychiatric hospitalization.

From the age of 13 or so, I would dress up furtively. When I was old enough to drive, I would go to downtown Nashville in stealth mode, just another 18-year-old girl. Well, not exactly just another 18-year-old girl, but superficially so, certainly. I looked the part, but a closer inspection would have shown that the hair was not all mine, and that my curves were artificial.

Things were not much better in the 1970s. In my mid-twenties, with a marriage just ended, I sought help at a community mental health center, and later, at a gender clinic. Help was not forthcoming at either place.

I finally did find assistance, but by then it was the late 1980s. I had been on female hormones for ten years, and my body had become feminized. Fortunately, the transgender community had begun to form, and I was lucky enough to find it. I gleaned the little bit of information that I needed in order to stop living as an ostensible man and start living as a woman, and promptly did just that, gliding almost unnoticed across the gender border. When bells and whistles didn’t go off (in fact, I was lucky enough, or “real” enough, to immediately land a professional position as a woman), I prepared to assimilate, to go into the woodwork, into what I call The Closet at the End of the Rainbow—in other words, to disappear forever into denial of the fact that I had not always been a woman.

For many years, I was too preoccupied with my condition and personal circumstances to pay much attention to the sociology and politics of transexualism. Indeed, the prevailing model was the medical one, in which transexualism was viewed as a form of mental illness that could not be cured; however, by altering the body, it was possible to provide some relief to the poor distressed individual. Transexual people were pictured as pathetic, dysfunctional, and manipulative types whose presentations in the new gender were, to put it mildly, excessive. Transexual people were loud and abrasive, with borderline personalities. Furthermore, they were manipulative, promiscuous, notorious for lying about their pasts, and unreliable. [7] The literature was full of journal articles and books proclaiming these things and “poor, pitiful me” autobiographies which seemed to me to be written primarily as a justification for or celebration of having changed sex. The pages of these books were full of pain and magical relief, the onset of which miraculously coincided with the three-hour genital surgical sex reassignment procedure, as if happiness were to be found only at the business end of a scalpel. Typically, the author felt like a girl (or boy, if a girl) from the earliest age, suffered torment from his or her peers growing up, and eventually realized he or she was “trapped in the wrong body” and, against all odds, and while living the life of an ascetic, sought and pursued sex reassignment.

None of this sounded like me. I had maintained a monogamous relationship through seven years of marriage and a second which spanned a decade, with no thoughts of straying, and had put myself through college and graduate school while working full time. I was quiet and thoughtful and reasonably honest; most of the lying I had done in my lifetime had been to conceal or deny my secret desire to be a woman. Nor did I hate my genitals (although I considered them inappropriate, and would have preferred others), or have any significant thoughts of suicide—things which, according to the literature, were the defining characteristics of being transexual. I wasn’t particularly feminine while in male mode, and, unlike the transexual people I was reading about, I had never been tormented as a child for being too feminine. I had no history of wanting to play with dolls, and no memory of wanting to be a girl before about age eleven or so. Nor was I particularly attracted to males, although I had dabbled with them (always with them thinking I was a girl) in my earlier years. On the other hand, I was mightily attracted to females, and was, in fact, just before my transition to the female role, in a terrible and passionate relationship with a woman who despised the woman she was increasingly coming to believe I really was, and for whom I was prepared to delay, perhaps indefinitely, the outward expression, by crossliving, of that womanhood. My life, if far from perfect, certainly wasn’t hell on Earth. Surely, then, since I didn’t feel the requisite amount of pain, I couldn’t be transexual; I was just a man who desperately wanted to be a woman.

And yet I had been spectacularly successful at passing as a girl in my teen years, and as a woman in my twenties. I did not have to practice feminine speech or mannerisms; I had only to cover up the more obvious physical characteristics caused by a history of testosterone—things like facial and body hair, and the beginnings of baldness. My thoughts and actions were, as nearly as I could tell, much like those of any other woman my age would have been in a predicament in which everyone she knew expected her to dress and behave like a man, and in which her body kept causing her to grow hair in places where she didn’t want it and lose it in the places she did.

After the dissolution of my marriage, I began to come to terms with my transexualism. I still didn’t admit to being transexual, but I acknowledged that my desire to be a woman was not going to go away. I took my clothing and makeup out of the box I kept under my bed and put them where they belonged, on hangers, in the dresser, on the vanity. I told my friends I crossdressed (they had little immediate apparent reaction; it was just one more idiosyncracy to put into the already bulging Dallas file), and I began searching for professional help.

In 1979, I made a serious attempt to get some assistance at the gender identity clinic at Vanderbilt University. I applied for admission to the program, paid fees for intake and evaluation, took a battery of psychological tests administered by a graduate student who seemed nervous to be in the same room with me (even though I was not crossdressed), and answered inane and largely irrelevant inquiries on a questionnaire which seemed to assume that I was a prostitute, rapist, or pedophiliac, or maybe even some combination of the three.

I was absolutely honest with the clinic about the genesis and course of my condition and my desire for sex reassignment. Because, however, I did not fit their preconceived notion of transexualism, I was denied services. I was specifically told by Dr. Embry McKee, the head of the clinic, that my sexual orientation (i.e., my lack of attraction to males) and my proven ability to function in the male role were the primary factors in the clinic’s decision to deny me hormones and surgery. In other words, I was not dysfunctional enough to be transexual.

I thought it unbridled arrogance that medicos, by denying me services which I needed in order to change my body in ways which would allow me to live as a woman, were consigning me forever to the ghetto of my own male body. And predictably, as had become my habit throughout life when faced with nonsense and bureaucracy, I revolted. I spent six months in the medical library at Vanderbilt University, digging up and photocopying journal articles which seemed to prove to me that Dr. McKee had been right. I could not possibly be transexual; I wasn’t screwed up enough. But when I had amassed enough information to make me feel reasonably comfortable about doing so, I pulled the Physician’s Desk Reference from the shelf, selected a brand of estrogen and a dosage, and wrote a prescription for it on a blank form which I had lifted from the office of a physician I had visited in a vain attempt to get hormones.

I remember sitting in my car outside the pharmacy after having the prescription filled, shaking with fear and relief and triumph, reflecting on the fact that the course of action on which I was about to embark might shorten my life and would certainly change it, and popping two pills into my mouth.

Whether or not the hormones I have taken since that day in 1980 will shorten my life has yet to be determined—although I am still alive 15 years later, and the outcome of my life, had I not taken them, is unclear. But they have certainly changed my body. When, ten years after swallowing those two pills, I transitioned from one gender role to another, I looked very little like the unhappy young man I had been before I started taking them, and even less like the unhappy middle-aged man I would have been had I not taken them. I looked, instead, like the much less unhappy middle-aged woman I had become.

Because my facial features were small and delicate and my skeleton not too large, and my voice and mannerisms not overly masculine, and because I had no Adam’s apple and had retained most of my hair, it required only a course of electrolysis to complete the work that the hormones had started. When the beard removal reached a certain point, I went immediately from being perceived by strangers as a man to being perceived as a female, even in my usual masculine attire (shirt, jeans, sneakers, long hair). Suddenly skirts and makeup were not crossdressing, but merely things that made me look more “mainstream” as a woman, and less like a butch lesbian (a look I in fact admire). I continued behaving much as I had all my life; the only difference was that I no longer felt the need to impose restrictions on my dress and behavior lest others think me “too feminine.”

My name, like my body, had always been androgynized, although it took me many years to realize it. I did not change it; instead, I merely did a little pronoun policing in my references, so a constant barrage of he’s and his’ wouldn’t give me away.

In December, 1989, with my paperwork androgynized, I left my home state for a new one, carrying everything I owned in a U-Haul Truck. As soon as I was unpacked, I went job hunting, and was lucky enough to find a suitable position almost immediately. I went to work bereft of, so far as my employers or fellow employees knew, any past history as a male, and was immediately and unhesitatingly accepted as a nontransgendered woman. It was wonderful—or perhaps I should say that for the first time since I had reached my teens there was not a nagging sense that things were not right, and I felt comfortable and normal. Which is in fact pretty wonderful.

I wasn’t playing woman; I was just inhabiting and accessorizing my redesigned body and being the person I always had been, but who no one but me had ever been able to envision. I was being myself. The constraints that had been placed on my behavior and social and romantic relationships because I had a male body and a male history had been removed. After a year or two, I slipped away for two weeks and had sex reassignment surgery; everyone at work thought I was vacationing in Europe.

And that would have been the end of the story, had things worked out as I had planned. I would have lived forever and forever, happy as a woman, the end, my life as a male eradicated, my guilt and shame internalized. But that didn’t happen, either for me or a number of my contemporaries.

What happened instead is that we came into communication with each other. Unlike those who had gone before us, who had lived in isolation, we, as part of the newly emerging and rapidly consolidating transgender community, were in communication with each other, attending support groups and national conventions, talking on the telephone and sending mail and e-mail to each other and writing for each others’ magazines. And as we shared our experiences, our insights into ourselves and each other grew, and we began to explore and expand the definition of who and what we were, and to realize that the answer lay not in denying our pasts, but in embracing them, not in denying the duality of our nature, but in celebrating it.

At some time in the recent past, in 1994, or maybe 1993, matters transexual reached some sort of critical mass. Many of us came to realize the futility and senselessness of pretending to be something we were not, which was nontransgendered women and men. Some of us—not all, by any means, but many of us—made choices not to disappear into the closet of assimilation, but to own and glory in our identities, to sally forth as proud transgendered and transexual warriors.

With this willingness to be public has come confidence, and with the confidence has come acceptance, and with this newfound acceptance, our voices will now be heard. [8]

Notes

 

[1] In No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Gilbert & Gubar discuss the extensive erotic transgender imagery in Hemingway’s Garden of Eden. Garber (1991) notes that as a child, Ernest Hemingway was crossdressed by his mother, and that apparently this went somewhat beyond the custom of the times (for instance, Garber describes a photo of Hemingway at nearly two years of age which bears the title “Summer Girl”).

According to Margaret Forster, an autobiographer of Daphne du Maurier who had the cooperation of her children and full access to her unpublished works, Du Maurier, who was intensely homophobic, had private fantasies of being emotionally a male. Similarly, Virginia Carr, an autobiographer of Carson McCullers, concluded that like the somewhat transgendered main character in A Member of the Wedding, McCullers secretly desired to be a man.

 

[2] There is no doubt there was a conspiracy. In a 1993 article in American Scholar, McHugh noted that his intention upon coming to Hopkins in the mid-1970s was to terminate that institution’s participation in sex reassignment. See Ogas (1994) for the story of the closing of the Hopkins clinic, and Blanchard & Sheridan (1990) for a devastating critique of Meyer & Reter (1979).

 

[3] As a single illustration of the stigma attached to being transexual, Bolin (personal communication, 1994) told me that when a rejected manuscript was returned to her, one of the reviewers had penciled “Obviously a transsexual” on his copy. Obviously, the reviewer felt that no transexual could possibly have anything relevant to say about transexualism!

Bolin is not transexual, but she has been outspoken in her criticism of the medicalization of transexual persons. In this instance, challenging the orthodoxy of the literature got her branded as transexual and silenced.

 

[4] It’s ironic, but hardly surprising, that those most attracted to the field of transgender studies have frequently had their own unacknowledged issues with gender and/or sexuality. There’s no telling how many authors have been secret crossdressers, or secretly transexual, or secretly or openly gay or lesbian. And there’s little doubt that many clinicians and researchers are in the field because they are morbidly fascinated with or sexually attracted to transgendered and transexual persons.

 

[5]  Transexual and transgendered attorneys are gaining ascendancy, as well. The International Conference on Employment Law and Employment Policy, founded by Texas attorney Phyllis Randolph Frye, is in its fourth year, and is beginning to make its influence felt on both local and national levels.

Frye is in no small measure responsible for the increased visibility of transgender and transexual issues. Her threat to disrupt the 1994 March on Washington if the word Transgender were not added to the title brought into sharp focus the need for inclusiveness of transgendered and transexual persons in the gay/lesbian/bisexual community.

 

[6]  Transexual scholars have much to do—or rather, to undo. Much of the writing— and especially the harsh critiques of transexualism by Janice G. Raymond and others—has been done by those without firsthand experience of the condition. Raymond wrote an entire book based on interviews with 15 transexual people (Raymond, 1979, 1994). One of the “interviewees,” and seemingly the only one quoted by Raymond, was revealed in a recent interview of Sandy Stone by Davina Anne Gabriel to be Angela Douglas, who, before the publication of the book, had sent an angry letter to Raymond in protest of her treatment of Stone. Apparently, one of Raymond’s 15 “interviews” consisted of a reading of Douglas’ letter. Incidentally, Douglas still sends angry and nearly incoherent polemics around the country, complaining that Eric van Damme and dozens of others have made movies based on her life, and threatening to sue. She is hardly representative of transexual persons—and yet Raymond’s ill-conceived and venomous book has been influential, in no small measure because transexual writers had no outlet for their writings.

 

[7] Unlike previous researchers, who had worked almost exclusively in clinical settings, anthropologist Anne Bolin studied transexual subjects in everyday situations (Bolin, 1988). She found that many of the clinical truisms—for instance, that transexual persons had highly stereotyped notions about what men and women were like—were inaccurate. Moreover, she discovered that because clinicians served as gatekeepers for much-desired hormonal therapy and surgical sex reassignment, transsexual people were less than honest with them.

… inherent in the Standards of Care and in the policy relations of caretaker to client is an inequity in power relations such that the recommendation for surgery is completely dependent on the caretaker’s evaluation. This results in a situation in which the psychological evaluation may be, and often is, wielded like a club over the head of the transsexual who so desperately wants the surgery. Such power dynamics often breed hostility on the part of transsexual clients. (p. 51).

Stone (1991) noted that transsexual people actively study how to present themselves in order to maximize their chance of being accepted for treatment.

Some gender clinics had “Barbie and Ken” standards; only those who were exceedingly feminine (or masculine), with sexual interest in the same biological sex, and who had been completely unable to function in their original gender were likely to be diagnosed as transsexual and offered treatment (Kessler & McKenna, 1978). Others, like myself, were defined as nontranssexual and turned away.

Small wonder, then, that the literature did not depict transsexual people in a positive light. Those of us who were the most functional were turned away; the others wound up as subjects in the clinics’ studies, and eventually in the literature.

 

[8] My own efforts have been squarely centered in the educational arena. My career as an applied behavior analyst has taken back seat to the much more pressing need of persuading others to take a rational approach to such a highly emotional and value-laden issue. By associating myself with a nonprofit educational agency, I have been able to more effectively challenge the orthodoxy than I could have at an academic institution or in private practice.

The literature itself has been my primary tool, for its shortcomings and the biases and secret agendas and unfounded assumptions of many of its authors have, with time (as is the case with the closing of the Hopkins clinic), become glaringly obvious.

It has slowly become clear that the pathology which has been ascribed to transexual people in fact a pathology of our culture; it is not we who are sick, but a society which attempts to force a veritable rainbow of gender expressions into two little boxes marked male and female.

References

 

Blanchard, R., & Sheridan, P.M. (1990). Gender reorientation and psychosocial adjustment. In R. Blanchard & B.W. Steiner (Eds.), Clinical management of gender identity disorders in children and adults, 159-189. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press.

Blanchard, R., & B.W. Steiner (Eds.). (1990). Clinical management of gender identity disorders in children and adults. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press.

Bornstein, K. (1994). Gender outlaw: On men, women, and the rest of us. New York: Routledge.

Bolin, A. (1988). In search of Eve: Transsexual rites of passage. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.

Bullough, V.L., & Bullough, B. (1993). Cross-dressing, sex, and gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Carr. (1975). The lonely hunter: A biography of Carson McCullers. New York: Carroll & Graff.

Denny, D. (1992). The politics of diagnosis and a diagnosis of politics: The university-affiliated gender clinics, and how they failed to meet the needs of transsexual people. Chrysalis Quarterly, 1(3), 9-20.

Denny, D. (1993). Letter to the editor: Response to Charles Mate-Kole’s review of In search of Eve: Transsexual rites of passage by Anne Bolin. (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey). Archives of Sexual Behavior, 22(2), 167-169.

Denny, D. (1994). Gender dysphoria: A guide to research. New York: Garland Publishers.

Denny, D. (Ed.). (in press). Current concepts in transgender identity: Towards a new synthesis. New York: Garland Publishers.

Feinberg, L. (1993). Stone butch blues. New York: Firebrand Books.

Forster, M. (1993). Daphne du Maurier: The secret life of the renowned storyteller. New York: Doubleday.

Gabriel, D.A. (1995, Spring). Interview with the transsexual vampire: Sandy Stone’s dark gift. TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, 5, cover, 14-25.

Garber, M. (1991). Vested interests: Cross-dressing and cultural anxiety. New York: Routledge.

Gilbert, S.M., & Gubar, S. (1989). No man’s land: The place of the woman writer in the twentieth century. Volume 2: Sexchanges. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hemingway, E. (1986). The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner’s.

Kessler, S.J., & McKenna, W. (1978). Gender: An ethnomethodological approach. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Reprinted in 1985 by The University of Chicago Press.

McHugh, P.R. (1992). Psychiatric misadventures. American Scholar, 61(4), 497-510.

Mate-Kole, C. (1992). Review of A. Bolin, In search of Eve: Transsexual rites of passage. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 21(2), 207-210.

Ogas, O. (1994, 9 March). Spare parts: New information reignites a controversy surrounding the Hopkins gender identity clinic. City Paper (Baltimore), 18(10), cover, 10-15.

Raymond, J. (1979, 1994). The transsexual empire: The making of the she-male. Women’s Press. Reprinted in 1994 by Teacher’s College Press.

Rothblatt, M. (1994). The apartheid of sex: A manifesto on the freedom of gender. NY: Crown Publishers.

Stone, S. (1991). The empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto. In J. Epstein & K. Straub (Eds.), Body guards: The cultural politics of gender ambiguity, pp. 280-304. New York: Routledge.