The History of Transsexuality (Volume 1)

How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 363 pp.

The connection between history and sexuality has only grown more complex since Foucault put them into vexed and vital relation twenty-five years ago. Whose experience counts as history? Whose experience is recognizable as sexuality? From a historian's point of view, what does the "official story" of the emergence of a sexual identity recount, and what or whom does it marginalize? Joanne Meyerowitz addresses these questions in How Sex Changed, a thoroughly researched, conceptually rich, lucid study of transsexuality in the United States. Through her reading of transsexuality Meyerowitz offers a history of sex itself. She argues that common cultural understandings of and attitudes toward sex, gender, and identity were changed by the publicity surrounding Christine Jorgensen's transition in 1952. Simultaneous fascination with and anxiety about Jorgensen's celebrity led to the cultural consensus that a common understanding of sex was necessary, and Meyerowitz suggests that a more fixed concept of sex itself emerged in response to the entrance of transsexuality into the national lexicon. Americans "had never before had reason to spell out a legal definition of sex. They had simply assumed that male and female were readily apparent and immutable" (241). Meyerowitz contends that through the appearance and circulation of the topic of transsexuality in the popular press, the very notion of sex changed.

History is something of a vexed term here, as it invariably is in texts addressing the question of transsexuality. Transsexuality has often been understood in one of two ways: either as the effect of a medical discourse, an identity created by doctors and other medical professionals and foisted on the gender confused, or as the representation of an inner, authentic self, opposed to and independent from (if these can be compossible) larger cultural discourses on gender, bodies, and identity. As Bernice L. Hausman did in Changing Sex, Meyerowitz has compiled a history of transsexuality from the official discourses of doctors and other medical practitioners.¹ But Meyerowitz's text positions itself more critically than Hausman's in relation to the "official" story of transsexuality as documented in medical records, scholarly works, and personal correspondence, and it does most of its work at the interstices of these discourses. More important, Meyerowitz offers a nuanced and compelling account of transpeople's own relations to and deployments of that official discourse, a relation that is sometimes enthusiastically accepting, sometimes strategically mimetic, and sometimes flatly hostile. Meyerowitz shows that far from being "unreliable historians" (159), as some doctors charged, transpeople deployed compelled narratives—the script, as it were—in ways that were both sophisticated and efficacious.

As Meyerowitz tells it, transpeople were neither the dupes nor the authors of gender. They were led by a "fierce and demanding drive" to become who they felt themselves to be (130), and much ought to be made here of the temporal and ontological vertiginousness of that formulation. At the same time, they needed to enlist the help of these doctors: "Who could decide whether a person was or should be a man or a woman? Who could decide whether to change the bodily characteristics of sex? Transsexuals hoped to decide for themselves, but they needed the consent and cooperation of doctors" (153). This was no small task, for it often required a transperson to be a supplicant and an educator at once, since "transgendered people often had more knowledge about their own condition than the doctors they approached" (153).

Much of the book centers on Jorgensen, who functions as its heroine, with Harry Benjamin playing the role of the sometime hero. Meyerowitz offers Jorgensen as the figure through whom transsexuality in the United States might be understood, though the case that her celebrity was the origin of public discussions of the meaning of sex is sometimes overstated. In chapter 5, "From Sex...