Becoming a Visible Man

May 1, 2004
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 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2004
Gender goes beyond chromosomes, a point broadly knowledgeable transgender activist Green makes early in the compelling, immensely readable story of his FTM (female-to-male: Jamie to Jamison) transsexual experience, from which he emerged fortysomething chronologically yet younger than 20 psychosexually as a consequence of biochemical and surgical sex reassignment. In discussing adjustment to a man's body, Green remarks that those whose bodies originally "match their gender identity take their bodies for granted in the process of identity formation"--a luxury "transgendered and transsexual people don't have." Perhaps nontranssexuals may more easily grasp Green's journey from Jamie to Jamison via the concept of realizing personal integrity, and thereby gain immeasurably from his testimony. Meanwhile, they will be educated by Green's detailed descriptions of available transsexual surgeries--he underwent metoidioplasty, the transformation of female genitalia into a male-appearing organ that, sometimes called a micropenis, is significantly smaller than average for penises, though functionally normal--and by his summary of his expenses since 1989 and his comparison of them to the costs of similar procedures today.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)