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Archives of Sexual Behavior pp881-aseb-466813-18 May 24, 2003 17:36 Style file version July 26, 1999
Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 32, No. 4, August 2003, pp. 387–396 (
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2003)
Book Reviews
Normal:TranssexualCEOs,Cross-DressingCops,and
Hermaphrodites With Attitude. By Amy Bloom.
Random House, New York, 2002, 140 pp., $23.95.
Reviewed by Anne A. Lawrence, M.D., Ph.D.
1
Writer and psychotherapist Amy Bloom is best known for
her short stories, which display her gifts for detailed ob-
servation and psychological insight. Normal is Bloom’s
first book of nonfiction. It contains three essays exam-
ining the lives of persons who are usually regarded as
anything but normal: female-to-male (FtM) transsexuals,
heterosexual crossdressers, and intersexed persons. The
essays are bracketed by a preface and an afterword that
criticize conventional concepts of normality and suggest
that understanding these unusual individuals can inform
and expand our ideas about what is genuinely normal.
The centerpiece of Bloom’s book, literally and figu-
ratively, is “Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses,”
which deals with heterosexual crossdressers. A shorter
version of this essay appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in
April, 2002, and anyone who read and enjoyed it there
will not want to miss this significantly expanded edition.
Bloom accompanies two dozen crossdressing men, their
female partners, and one male-to-female transsexual on
the Dignity Cruise to Catalina Island, and observes par-
ticipants at the Fall Harvest 2000 gender convention in
St.Louis. ShealsointerviewsJaneEllenand MaryFrancis
Fairfax, the guiding spirits behind the crossdresser orga-
nization Tri-Ess, andsolicits the contrasting viewsof psy-
chologistRay Blanchard, the bˆetenoire of many transgen-
dered persons, due to his willingness to discuss the erotic
aspects of their behavior.
Although the crossdressers Bloom meets invariably
claimthattheir“hobby”isaboutrelaxationandexpressing
their feminine side, Bloom is skeptical of these explana-
tions. Her observations lead her to conclude that cross-
dressing is primarily an erotic fetish, the expression of
which sometimes taxes even her capacity for tolerance
and empathy:
Crossdressers wear their fetish, and the gleam in their
eyes, however muted by time or habit, the unmistakable
presenceofalustbeing satisfied ora desire beingfulfilled
1
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e-mail: alawrence@mindspring.com.
in that moment, in your presence, even by your presence,
is unnerving. The mix of the crossdressers’ own arousal
and anxiety and our responsive anxiety and discomfort is
more than most of us can bear. (pp. 94–95)
Bloom devotes considerable attention to the wives
and female partners of crossdressing men. She observes
that,withsomenotableexceptions,theircircumstancesare
nothappy, and she wondersaloud howthe feminism many
crossdressers espouse could permit them to inflict their
erotic compulsion on their partners. In the end, Bloom
finds little genuine femininity in the crossdressers she
meets:
For these men, the woman within is entirely the
Maybelline version, not the Mother Teresa version, not
the Liv Ullmann version, and not even the Tracy Ullman
version. There is no innate grasp of female friendship, of
the female insistence on relatedness, of the female tradi-
tion of support and accommodation for one’s partner and
of giving precedence to the relationship overall. (p. 95)
Although the tone of these excerpts may seem grim,
the essay generally is not. Bloom’s descriptions of events
ontheDignityCruiseandatFallHarvestarealivewithfas-
cinating detail, and her keen eye for the ironic and the ab-
surdisrevealedinmanyhumorousanecdotes.Blanchard’s
comments provide a witty counterpoint to the author’s ob-
servations. If a more insightful or more entertaining treat-
ment of heterosexual crossdressing has been published,
this reviewer has not seen it. “Conservative Men” is es-
sential reading for anyone interested in transgender phe-
nomena, and is itself worth the price of the book.
Bloom’s two other essays do not succeed quite so
well. The first of these, “The Body Lies,” deals with FtM
transsexuals.Itwasoriginally publishedinthe NewYorker
in 1994, and has been updated very little for this volume.
Bloom interviews half a dozen FtM transsexuals, some
well known (e.g., writer Jamison Green and photographer
Loren Cameron), most not. A few family members and
female partners of FtMs also contributetheir perspectives,
as do several professionals who work with transsexuals,
including Ira Pauly, Don Laub, Friedemann Pf¨afflin, and
PeggyCohen-Kettenis.Laub, a surgeonwhoperforms sex
reassignment operations, is a particular focus of Bloom’s
attention. She portrays him as a sensitive and conscien-
tious clinician who nevertheless remains slightly out of
touch with the feelings and needs of his FtM patients.
Bloom’s descriptions of her informants are masterpieces
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2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation