Becoming a Visible Man

A California transsexual activist offers insights into the challenges of gender dysphoria. Born with a female body, and in a lesbian parent relationship prior to sex reassignment surgery, Jamieson begins his frank personal and analytic account by asking how we know our sex. He discusses the complexities of the answer for those whose sex and gender are mismatched; medical options; psychosocial and legal implications; and media representations of "transpeople." A sociologist introduces Jamieson's identity quest as a core human struggle. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Library Journal

A leading advocate for transsexuality and the author of the "Visible Man" column on the web (www.planetout.com/people/columns/ green), Green argues that the transsexuality movement is a struggle for fundamental human rights. The author is a female-to-male transsexual who deploys his autobiography to illustrate political points about gender and sex diversity. He asserts that transsexuals seek to balance their gender identity (an abiding sense of oneself as a man or woman) with their physical bodies. Like recent literature on the history of the body, this text differentiates biological sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Green's call for tolerance is important, but he fails to answer the concerns of sympathetic gender theorists. For example, Green asserts illogically that gender identity is both a naturally occurring "essence" and a mutable social construction. And despite Green's repeated denials, his arguments inadvertently reify sexual stereotypes. The result is less scholarly than Joanne Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States yet less scandalous than Edward Ball's Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love. Recommended with reservation for public libraries and undergraduate libraries. Katherine C. Adams, Bowdoin Coll. Lib., Brunswick, ME Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Jamison Green is currently board chair of Gender Education and Advocacy, a non-profit educational corporation, and a board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute and the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. He has also been featured in eight documentary films and numerous articles and books. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Oregon.