Transvestites & transsexuals: Mixed views

by Deborah Heller Feinbloom

Sexual Studies, Homosexual Studies, GAy & Lesbian Studies

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[t.s. cronenberg]

I stumbled upon this book by accident in a bookstore and was hesitant, thinking it would be a clinical and dated overview of the subject, but I found a copy online after because it still left me curious after flipping through some of the pages. Months later and I wish I had bought it at that moment because it's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read, and BADLY deserving of a re-release and proper recovery from obscurity. There's insights in here that most of the world is just barely beginning to engage with, especially from the trans girls themselves who display an understanding of gender and our world decades before their time and at the dawn of the women's + gay liberation movements. And Deborah herself is such an incredible researcher with a near unprecedented for its time willingness to understand and engage with her "bizarre" subjects as human while keeping an academic clear-sightedness. I did some research into her life piecing together what fragments online I could find and her journey while writing this book alone over the period from the late 60s to mid 70s is befitting a movie, but her whole life is equally inspiring. She came from a working class Jewish family, got a scholarship to a prestigious private women's college in the early 60s where the unstated expectation of the student body was still that it's a pit stop to marriage, and began this book as a graduate student after her colleague was outed and subsequently fired for crossdressing in 1968. This with her burgeoning foray into women's liberation led her to study the subject, assisting her friend along the way in her journey from conceiving herself as a heterosexual transvestite to a transgender woman. Sometime in the early 70s, in the course of her research, she began one of the first Gender Identity Clinics in the US in Boston, assisting transgender people with healthcare needs and transition resources including safe psych referrals and hormone treatment. Sometime after the book was published she left her husband who she had married sometime in the mid-60s after college, as was expected of her, and the next biographical record I could find is sometime in the 80s where it appears she was now with a female partner. And from the time she founded the gender clinic during the course of this book to the records I could find in the 80s, she had been consistently fundraising and advocating for trans rights and gender & women's health access. I would love to find out what she's up to now and hear her tell firsthand the incredible trajectory and story of her life.