Cover: How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, from Harvard University PressCover: How Sex Changed in PAPERBACK

How Sex Changed

A History of Transsexuality in the United States

Product Details

PAPERBACK

Print on Demand

$33.00 • £28.95 • €30.95

ISBN 9780674013797

Publication Date: 04/01/2004

Academic Trade

400 pages

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

20 halftones

World

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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.

Awards & Accolades

  • 2003 Stonewall Book Award–Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association
  • Honorable Mention, 2002 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies
  • 2002 ForeWord Gay/Lesbian Nonfiction Book of the Year

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