C. Todd White: Todd White holds masters degrees in English and anthropology and is currently working toward his Ph.D. in social anthropology at the University of Southern California.
CHANGING SEX: TRANSSEXUALISM, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE IDEA OF GENDER contains a brief preface and engaging introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue. In the introduction, Hausman proposes that “transsexuality is a category of experience and identity that can be read as a result of specific social and cultural conditions” (3). She includes a brief critique of the works of Marjorie Garber, Judith Shapiro, Teresa de Lauretis, and Janice Raymond.
Chapter one, “Glands, Hormones, and Personality,” introduces “the discursive apparatus of medical endocrinology.” Hausman reminds us that science and “the social” are interconnected: “science depends upon, indeed is constituted by, an intimate relation to social institutions and beliefs” (25). She shows how sexologists divorced sexuality from psychology, linking it instead with “the glands of internal secretion” (30) and making it a medical rather than psychological disorder.
Chapter two, “Plastic Ideologies and Plastic Transformations,” focuses on the history of reconstructive genital surgery as applied first to those disfigured by nature, accident, or war and later to anyone requesting cosmetic surgical enhancement. Chapter three, “Managing Intersexuality and Producing Gender,” details how sexologists, psychologists, and physicians have become “gender managers” who act to normalize the gender dysphoric. Hausman reveals how the gender managers began to “uphold binary gender by producing binary sex” by providing many examples from the medical literature, detailing several case studies and including photographs.
Chapters four and five, “Demanding Subjectivity” and “Transsexual Autobiographies,” consider the history outlined in the first part of the book through the perspectives of transsexuals themselves. Hausman shows that transsexuals have embraced Ulrich's notion of being “trapped” in the body of the “opposing” sex to facilitate their demand for surgical sex reassignment. Chapter six discusses the insights and limitations of gender theorists that have come before her—especially the work of Judith Butler and Thomas Lacquer. While acknowledging the relevance of those theorists, Hausman concludes by advocating a slightly different agenda: “I prefer the proliferations of sex to those of gender because the former category is more closely connected to the body than the latter” (180).
The Epilogue reminds us that transsexuals can never truly become the “opposite” sex, no matter how convincingly they pass or how skilled the surgeon. Hausman is clear that she does not wish to portray transsexuals as victims of the medical establishment but rather in partnership with physicians in the drive to “depathologize transsexualism” and abandon “the stigma associated with psychiatric diagnosis” (199). She asserts “that the attempts at technological sex change do not achieve the changes desired” and suggests that we keep an eye out for a new breed of transsexual, one who settles for a partial sex change enacted through hormones.
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