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Book Cover
E-book
Author Meyerowitz, Joanne J. (Joanne Jay), author.

Title How sex changed : a history of transsexuality in the United States / Joanne Meyerowitz
Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2004, ©2002

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Description 1 online resource (363 pages, 19 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations
Series ACLS Fellows' publications
Summary This is a social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the US. It tells a human story about people who had a deep and unshakeable desire to transform their bodily sex. 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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Transsexualism -- Europe -- History
Transsexualism -- United States -- History
Gender transition -- Europe -- History
Gender transition -- United States -- History
Gender transition
Transsexualism
Europe
United States
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 0674013794
9780674013797
0674009258
9780674009257
9780674040960
0674040961