By: Rebecca,
on 10/11/2007
Today is National Coming Out Day and for all of you coming into your own I thought I would provide some useful resources. Below are some websites and books that should help your journey. Congratulations!
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 8/17/2007
Regarding my "Born to Choose" post, a friend gently suggested the whole discussion gets more complex, thorny, and controversial if you include discussion of transgender issues. This is very true, and though I had considered adding something about the controversy over Gender Identity Disorder (GID), my knowledge of that subject is superficial, and I figured I was going out on enough of a limb already that I probably shouldn't risk inadvertently simplifying a subject so vital to people's lives and livelihoods.
My friend made the useful distinction (which she says may have come from Julia Serano) between de-pathologization of transgenderism and de-medicalization of it, with the former being desirable and the latter not so much, given how much distress trans people can be in before they can get support or therapy, or before they are able to transition.
Though I can't offer an informed opinion on this topic, what I can do is provide some links to discussions of GID by people more knowledgeable than I. Please add others in the comments if you know of any.
It gets even messier if you go into the congenital intersex conditions.
I reviewed Jonathan Ames's anthology Sexual Metamorphosis for American Book Review a year or so ago. It presents some well-written and illuminating excerpts from memoirs by Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards and others.
The Ames anthology looks really interesting -- I missed it when I was reading a lot about trans issues (around the time I reviewed a pretty good anthology on transgender rights for Rain Taxi Online, though I think the review suffers a bit from having originally been written for the print RT, where I was very limited on wordcount).