How Sex Changed

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.

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., 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., How Sex Changed brings 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., 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., 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.

Joanne Meyerowitz is Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University and Co-Director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.