Cine porno trans

The New Wave of Trans Cinema
The latest transporn breaks down both boundaries and inhibitions
by Tristan Taormino
April 8th, 2008 12:00 AM

I spent my weekend watching transpeople fuck on film. A lot. OK, a lot is a relative term. I mean it took up a chunk of time, but there’s not exactly an abundance of independently produced tranny porn around. In fact, there’s a big disparity within the genre that breaks down by (what else?) gender. Most porn featuring transwomen is slick, heterocentric, and all about fetishizing “chicks with dicks”—it occupies a comfortable, profitable niche in the mainstream adult-film industry. Most porn featuring transmen and other genderqueers is homemade, do-it-yourself, grassroots fare that’s rough around the edges and self-distributed. (Buck Angel is the major exception to this rule—much of his work has mainstream distribution and acknowledgement.) It’s queer, genderfucking, community-based, and political. That’s what was in my DVD player.

Couch Surfers is the second movie from San Francisco–based Trannywood Pictures (trannywoodpictures.com), a project of Brazen Garage Squad, which also owns Eros, the Bay Area’s well-known sex club for men, and one of the few bathhouses in the country that welcomes transmen. The film was shot at Eros, and about half the people involved are current or former employees. As soon as you open the DVD case, it’s clear that this company is working on an entirely different model: How many pornos do you know that come with educational literature? Trannywood’s first production, Cubbyholes, included a well-written booklet on safer sex for transguys; Couch Surfers comes with A First-Timer’s Guide to Playing With Transguys, a succinct, helpful little missive with tips on how to get down with a transmasculine person.

Transexual varón embarazado

UN TRANSEXUAL ESTADOUNIDENSE
¿El primer hombre embarazado?

* El bebé, fruto de un proceso de inseminación artificial, podría nacer el 3 de julio
* Thomas decidió quedarse embarazado al ver que su mujer no podría ser madre

26/03/2008

ELMUNDO.ES

MADRID.- Thomas Beatie, de Oregón (EEUU), es un transexual en su quinto mes de embarazo. Si todo sigue bien, en cuatro meses se convertirá en el primer hombre en dar a luz en la vida real, fuera de las pantallas cinematográficas.

“Para nuestros vecinos, mi mujer Nancy y yo no parecíamos para nada inusuales. Nos veían como lo que somos, una pareja feliz y profundamente enamorada. Deseábamos trabajar duro, comprar nuestro primer hogar y formar una familia; nada fuera de lo común. Hasta que decidimos que yo engendraría a nuestro hijo”.

Así comienza Thomas su testimonio en la publicación ‘The Advocate’, una revista dirigida especialmente a lectores homosexuales. Su confesión ha dado la vuelta al mundo.

Para cambiar de sexo, algo que hizo hace unos años, Beatie, que nació mujer, se sometió a una operación en la que le quitaron el pecho e inició una terapia hormonal. Sin embargo, mantuvo sus órganos reproductores femeninos.
Sintió la llamada de la maternidad

Pero en una decisión sin precedentes, optó por dejar su tratamiento bimensual de testosterona porque sintió la llamada de la maternidad. Así como suena. Thomas, que es legalmente un hombre desde hace años, ha querido quedarse embarazado.

“Dejé de ponerme las inyecciones de testosterona. Había estado ocho años sin tener la menstruación, así que no fue una decisión fácil de tomar”, comenta Beatie en el artículo. “Mi cuerpo se reguló por sí mismo después de cuatro meses y no tuve que tomar estrógenos o progesterona o cualquier otro fármaco que favoreciera la fertilidad para ayudar la concepción”, añade.

Su paso al frente, muy meditado, se debe a que su pareja Nancy, con la que comparte su vida desde hace 10 años, tuvo que someterse a una histerectomía en el pasado a causa de una enfermedad.

Las ganas de tener un niño son tan grandes que la pareja piensa que puede vencer todos los obstáculos con los que se han encontrado y va a encontrarse durante la gestación. “Cuando se lo contamos a nuestros familiares se quedaron muy sorprendidos y muchos médicos rechazaron tratarnos”, declara Thomas, para quien “tener un bebé no es una necesidad únicamente femenina, sino que es parte del ser humano”.

Mercedes Milá y la transexualidad

La semana pasada, al dar una charla de educación sexual en un instituto de la Comunidad de Madrid, explicaba a los adolescentes que la identidad sexual consiste en sentirse hombre o mujer. Al preguntarles, como ejemplo de transexual, por Amor de Gran Hermano, hubo asentimiento general en que era una mujer si así se sentía. Salvo una chica que expresó sus dudas: “Yo creo que aunque la tenga chiquitita, sigue siendo un hombre”. Si los genitales son lo definitorio, le pregunté, ¿qué pasaría si tuviesen que extirparte el útero y los ovarios por un cáncer? ¿Seguirías siendo mujer? “Sí, claro”, me contestó. ¿La identidad sexual depende entonces de los genitales o de lo que pase por tu cabeza? Tras un balbuceo y una mueca de lucha interna, musitó: “depende de la cabeza”.
Si una chica de 15 años es capaz de reflexionar sobre sus prejuicios, no espero menos de Mercedes Milá (”una mujer lo es en la medida en que físicamente tiene todo lo que debe tener una mujer”. EL PAÍS 27/11/2007). Y no lo digo por politiquería correcta o incorrecta, sino por sentido común, ciencia y decencia.

(Carta enviada al director de EL PAÍS el 28/11/2007)

Historias de transexuales

The Journal of Sex Research. Nov 1, 2004

A chorus of transgender voices

Finding the Real Me: True Tales of Sex and Gender Diversity. Edited by Tracie O’Keefe and Katrina Fox. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003, 293 pages. Paper, $17.95.

Reviewed by Dallas Denny, Gender Education & Advocacy, P.O. Box 33724, Decatur, GA 30033-0724: e-mail: aegis@mindspring.com.

Challenging our own sense of self, looking inward to find who we
are, using the process of autobiography that we know so well, is
producing some very interesting answers that challenge the very
binary structure of the complacent world in which gender was
invented, and by which it has become obsessed. (from foreword
by Stephen Whittle, p. xi)

Strange as it may seem, gender-variant people–those who were out of the closet, at any rate–made almost no contributions to the professional literature on gender variance prior to the 1990s. Exceptions that come to mind are Magnus Hirschfeld in turn-of-the-century Germany and transgenderist Charles (now Virginia) Prince, who presented at sexology conferences and authored and coauthored a number of articles in medical journals from the late 1950s on (e.g., Prince, 1957). With regard to transsexuals, there were no exceptions; not a single transsexual had written or edited a text or been even the second or third author of a journal article.

Transsexuals nonetheless made their voices known. They did so by writing autobiographies. Between 1952 and the end of the millennium, as many as 100 different transsexual autobiographies were published. Even as medical journals speculated on the causes of transsexualism and debated the advantages of different surgical techniques, transsexual men and women were revealing in print their innermost feelings and describing the steps they took to find comfort in their lives. And, in considerable numbers, the public was reading and learning about transsexualism and adjusting its attitudes.

Today, of course, transsexuals and other transgendered people have a significant voice in the literature of gender variance. Still, there is a continuing demand for transsexual autobiographies. They continue to be published in significant numbers (e.g., Boylan, 2003) and continue to influence public attitudes. This is not the case with non-transsexual transgendered people, however. It’s almost as if the criterion for acceptance for publication of an autobiography is a 3-hour genital operation. The personal stories of crossdressers and transgenderists–and for that matter, intersexed people–are rare.

Satisfacción con la genitoplastia feminizante

 Most happy with male-to-female sex change surgery

Wed Oct 3, 3:04 PM ET

Most people who undergo male-to-female sex change surgery are satisfied with the results, according to a follow-up study of patients treated at one UK practice over a 10-year period.

Dr. Jonathan C. Goddard and colleagues from the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust reviewed the cases of 222 individuals who had undergone the procedure, known medically as feminizing genitoplasty.

At the first outpatient visit after the surgery, 88 percent said they were “happy” with the results, 7 percent reported being unhappy, and 5 percent had no comment.

Among patients who had undergone construction of a “neoclitoris” using penile tissue, 86 percent said the new organs were sensitive. Thirty-six patients required repeat surgery to correct urinary problems.

Disputas teóricas sobre la transexualidad

August 21, 2007
Criticism of a Gender Theory, and a Scientist Under Siege
By BENEDICT CAREY

In academic feuds, as in war, there is no telling how far people will go once the shooting starts.

Earlier this month, members of the International Academy of Sex Research, gathering for their annual meeting in Vancouver, informally discussed one of the most contentious and personal social science controversies in recent memory.

The central figure, J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has promoted a theory that his critics think is inaccurate, insulting and potentially damaging to transgender women. In the past few years, several prominent academics who are transgender have made a series of accusations against the psychologist, including that he committed ethics violations. A transgender woman he wrote about has accused him of a sexual impropriety, and Dr. Bailey has become a reviled figure for some in the gay and transgender communities.

To many of Dr. Bailey’s peers, his story is a morality play about the corrosive effects of political correctness on academic freedom. Some scientists say that it has become increasingly treacherous to discuss politically sensitive issues. They point to several recent cases, like that of Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish researcher who was fired in 2006 after he caused a furor in the press by reporting a slight difference in average I.Q. test scores between the sexes.

“What happened to Bailey is important, because the harassment was so extraordinarily bad and because it could happen to any researcher in the field,” said Alice Dreger, an ethics scholar and patients’ rights advocate at Northwestern who, after conducting a lengthy investigation of Dr. Bailey’s actions, has concluded that he is essentially blameless. “If we’re going to have research at all, then we’re going to have people saying unpopular things, and if this is what happens to them, then we’ve got problems not only for science but free expression itself.”

To Dr. Bailey’s critics, his story is a different kind of morality tale.

El arcoiris de la evolución

Nature 429, 19 - 21 (06 May 2004); doi:10.1038/429019a

Sexual diversity and the gender agenda

SARAH BLAFFER HRDY

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA. Her most recent book is Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection.

Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People
Joan Roughgarden
University of California Press: 2004. 472 pp. $27.50, £18.95

CHRISTIAN DARKIN
Rather than being one coherent book, the narrative of Evolution’s Rainbow shuttles between three interwoven agendas. The first is a passionate cry from the heart for greater understanding of sexual diversity in nature and greater tolerance for the many gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders and others who do not fit comfortably into male or female binary categories.

The author, eminent Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden, who is herself a transgendered woman previously known as John, cites poignant case studies that illustrate the anguish leading up to decisions to switch genders. As one such transgendered woman put it: “I’ve laid everything I’ve achieved in life — job, relationship, family, health, future — on the table, and it seems fate will decide what I am allowed to keep, if anything. It’s kind of like starting life all over again.” Roughgarden even includes rare practical advice on how to inform your boss that you intend to switch genders without losing your job. Few readers of Nature will disagree with the main tenets of what is essentially a human-rights agenda, even if they don’t agree with all of Roughgarden’s interpretations or policy recommendations.

The second, and for me most interesting, book-within-a-book provides a cornucopia of information about sex and gender diversity across human societies and the natural world. There are vignettes about homosexuals in Ancient Greece, eunuchs in Rome, hijras in India, and Native American ‘two-spirits’. Roughgarden then takes us on a whirlwind tour through the zoological counterpart of human gender studies, introducing fish that change from females into males; intersex kangaroos that have a penis as well as a pouch equipped with mammary glands; kangaroo rats, in which up to 16% of a population have both sperm- and egg-related plumbing; intersex bears that give birth through the penis; hermaphroditic whales; and homosexual black swans that turn out to be more successful at rearing young than their heterosexual counterparts.

Documentos TV: transexualidad y travestismo

Ayer por la noche pusieron en Documentos TV un reportaje sobre la transexualidad y el travestismo titulado Cuerpos desobedientes. Como la 2 es una cadena en la que cabe la esperanza de ver algo digno, me animé a ver una hora seguida la televisión. Hablaron casi a partes iguales de la transexualidad y el travestismo, pero encontré la presentación de la transexualidad más sobria y equilibrada.

Para hablar de la transexualidad salió Andrea Planelles, presidenta de la Fundación para la Identidad de Género, y dos mujeres transexuales más: Claudia, una chica triste y muy femenina, con el acento de Enrique Iglesias; y Olga Cambasani, antigua profesora de Filología inglesa en la UAM.

No entraron en muchos detalles y básicamente explicaron en qué consiste la transexualidad (discrepancia entre el sexo biológico y la identidad sexual) . Se plantea la transexualidad como algo que uno no elige, aunque sí puede aceptarlo o reprimirlo. En este último caso, acabará saliendo tarde o temprano, y es más duro cuánto más tiempo hayas vivido en un sexo distinto al que realmente sientes que perteneces. En general, ya de niños lo saben y se descubre en juegos que son “gritos silenciosos”, aunque lo suelen ocultar al ver la reacción de los padres. Se pregunta Planelles ¿cómo saber cuál es la identidad sexual de una persona? Solo hay una manera de saberlo: preguntándoselo.

Respecto al travestismo, mostraron a Óscar Casado, “La Demonio”, travesti gay que no se excita al vestirse de mujer y para quien el travestismo es simplemente un trabajo; a Nacho Galán, “Nachalamacha”, para quien tampoco es una liberación vestirse de mujer y sí un trabajo (aunque le gustaba travestirse de pequeño); y a Jordi Roca, “Gina Burdel”, y Gorka Show, Drag queens, sección espectáculos varios. Finalmente, los últimos tres minutos, en tono entre sensacionalista y tenebroso, mencionaron un último tipo de travestismo: el de closet o anonimato. Ocultando su cara e identidad, un hombre habla del sentimiento íntimo de feminidad que necesita satisfacer vistiéndose con ropas femeninas. Descubrió esa peculiaridad suya hacia los veintitantos y lo ha mantenido escondido porque la sociedad lo juzga. Al cabo del tiempo, se lo contó a su pareja con gran culpa. Ahora ésta le anima a salir a la calle; experiencia juzgada muy positivamente. Entre medias, Georgina Burgos comparece como experta en travestismo, lo que resulta un tanto curioso dada su trayectoria y publicaciones, pero todo lo que dice resulta ser sensato (por ejemplo, en contra del estereotipo, que la mayoría de los travestis son heterosexuales).

Jan Morris

El viajero era ella

JACINTO ANTÓN
EL PAIS SEMANAL - 06-07-2007

Cuando la gran escritora de viajes Jan Morris (Clevedon, Somerset, Inglaterra, 1926), decana y maestra indiscutible del género reverenciada por Chatwin, Thubron o Theroux, aparece frente a la taberna Las Plumas (Tafarn Y Plu) en esta limpia mañana en el pueblecito de Llanystumdwy, en el corazón de Gales, puro qué verde era mi valle, entre el mar y las montañas de Yr Eifl -en las que destaca la cima del Yr Wyddfa, el Snowdon-, uno no puede dejar de sorprenderse. La ya octogenaria autora, de la que ahora se publica en España Un mundo escrito (RBA), un maravilloso compendio de medio siglo de viajes e historia, llega conduciendo su propio automóvil, un moderno y deportivo Honda. Saca la cabeza, hace seña de que se la espere y pisa a fondo para dar la vuelta al final de la calle, ignorando olímpicamente el cartel de “Conduzca despacio, por favor” (en galés, “Gyrrwch yn araf”).

Es cierto que Morris, de 81 años y con nueve nietos, es una abuelita muy especial: fue oficial del exclusivo 9º Regimiento de Lanceros Reales de la Reina (los Delhi Spearmen, con 12 cruces Victoria ganadas durante el motín de los cipayos), formó parte de la expedición de 1953 que conquistó por primera vez el Everest (Morris dio al mundo la noticia de la llegada a la cima), trabajó como corresponsal de guerra y ha escrito una de las mejores historias del Imperio Británico -la espléndida trilogía Pax Britannia (Faber & Faber)-, amén de la única biografía del almirante lord Jacky Fisher (Fisher’s face, Viking, 1995). Y es que esta viajera ha viajado a sitios impensables, cruzado arduas fronteras: durante 35 años de su vida, Jan Morris fue un hombre, James Humphry Morris, y otros 10 los pasó en un “estado intermedio”, como lo llama ella -a veces le decían en unos lugares que debía ponerse corbata, y en otros, el mismo día, que no podía entrar con pantalones-, con tratamiento hormonal, hasta que en 1972 dio el paso decisivo y se sometió a una operación de cambio de sexo en Casablanca (todo el proceso, incluidas las partes más escabrosas, lo explica en uno de los libros más conmovedores y hermosos que jamás se hayan escrito sobre la condición humana, Conundrum (F&F, 1974). Siempre supo que era una chica en el cuerpo equivocado. Lo sintió por primera vez a los cuatro años bajo el piano de su madre cuando ésta tocaba a Sibelius. Lo seguía sintiendo entre los oficiales de su regimiento de lanceros, donde vivió su oculta feminidad como “un espía en un cortés campo enemigo”. Cada noche de su vida hasta culminar su cambio rezó para que éste se produjese y expresó ese recóndito y vehemente deseo a cada estrella que vio caer.

¿Dónde están los niños gays?

The Queer Issue
Queer in the Crib
Gay adults like to say they were born that way. So where are the gay children? Everywhere? Fabulous, baby.
by Julia Reischel
June 19th, 2007 3:48 PM

On a recent spring Saturday afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, the carpeted atrium beneath the giant blue whale in the Milstein Hall Ocean of Life teems with children. Preschoolers and kindergartners lounge on the carpeted floor and race from diorama to diorama while their beleaguered parents try to catch their breath. I’m here to meet the family of a three-and-a-half-year-old boy who’s not like other boys. His father, whom I’ll call Arnold, has watched for the past six months as his son clung to dolls and tried on dresses. Arnold joined a national Listserv that connects parents of children who express this kind of gender-atypical behavior. Today, his son, the unusual Joseph, is somewhere in the throng below me.

If you think a boy who’s acting girly would stick out in a crowd, you haven’t been around five-year-olds lately. At the museum, boys who seemed feminine were everywhere I looked. Was Joseph the little blond one clinging fearfully to a stair rail? The boy in purple with the Farrah Fawcett hair? It turned out Joseph wasn’t any of them. He turned up wearing boyish jeans and a T-shirt, and sneakers with tiny red lights blinking in the soles. Up close, his curly brown hair is shaggy and long, tufting delicately out over his ears, but he’s hardly shy or clingy. Instead, he’s bold and gregarious: He immediately jumps out of his stroller to meet me. Nothing about Joseph seems notably feminine, until he holds up a doll dressed in a bright pink dress. “See my Barbie?” he says, proudly.

Sexismo visto por una transexual

Transsexual finds sexism in feminism

Reviewed by Julie Foster

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Whipping Girl

A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

By Julia Serano

SEAL PRESS; 390 PAGES; $15.95 PAPERBACK
Femininity is under attack, and not just from the usual culprits. According to writer, biologist and spoken-word artist Julia Serano, in our society being feminine is still second rate. And in her erudite and entertaining analysis of the issue, nobody gets away without a “shame on you” for perpetrating these calcified notions of womanhood.

“This scapegoating of those who express femininity can be seen not only in the male-centered mainstream, but in the queer community, where ‘effeminate’ gay men have been accused of holding back the gay rights movement, and where femme dykes have been accused of being the ‘Uncle Toms’ of the lesbian movement. Even many feminists buy into traditionally sexist notions about femininity.”

The seed for this noteworthy collection of essays, “Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity,” took root after Serano attended Camp Trans in 2003. Serano, who lives in Oakland, explains that she had the good fortune to have transitioned in one of the “trans-friendliest places on the planet.” Though the process wasn’t easy, Serano was able to keep her wife, her friends, her housing and her job. Still, she was cognizant of the prejudice toward transsexual women.

Boys don’t cry: guía didáctica

(Extraído de Edualter, una página sobre recursos educativos para la paz, el desarrollo y la interculturalidad. En particular, la sección de materiales relativos a Los derechos sexuales y reproductivos a través del cine: sexualidad, identidades y relaciones de género. El sitio consta de 20 fichas didácticas sobre esta temática.)

FICHA TÉCNICA

Dirección: Kimberly Peirce
Guión: Kimberly Peirce y Andy Bienen
Producción: Jeffrey Sharp, John Hart, Eva Kolodner y Christine Vachon
Duración: 119 m.
Países: EEUU
Año de producción: 1999
Reparto: Hilary Swank, Chloë Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard, Brendan Sexton, Alison Folland

Sinopsis: Basada en un hecho real, la película relata la vida de una persona con una crisis de identidad sexual. Se llama Teena Brandon y tiene cuerpo de mujer, pero se siente y aparenta ser un hombre. Cuando se descubre su situación, la discriminación y la intolerancia desencadenará la tragedia.

FICHA DIDÁCTICA

1. OBJECTIVOS PEDAGÓGICOS

o Reflexionar sobre la diversidad de identidades sexuales y cómo son valoradas socialmente.
o Analizar la construcción de la masculinidad, cómo se aprende a ser lo que tradicionalmente se considera ser hombre.
o Reflexionar sobre el hecho de que la sexualidad puede orientarse de modos distintos a lo largo de la vida de una persona.

Cuerpos insumisos

Cuerpos insumisos 

Por Beatriz Preciado, profesora en la Universidad París VIII -Saint-Denis, y autora del Manifiesto contra-sexual (LA VANGUARDIA, 20/05/07):

He aquí tres momentos de la historia política del cuerpo: la ascesis mística, el suplicio del condenado, Cambio radical. La modernidad podría ser entendida como un proceso de secularización del cuerpo. Si el cuerpo premoderno era un organismo cerrado habitado por la divinidad cuyo destino y significación estaba regido por los las leyes teológicas, el cuerpo moderno se caracterizará por expulsar progresivamente a Dios, aceptando al Estado y sus instituciones disciplinarias como nuevos inquilinos de la corporalidad. En los últimos dos siglos, el cuerpo progresivamente desalojado por lo sagrado, lo metafísico y lo estatal, cuerpo libre al riesgo de verse desencantado, se deja okupar por las fuerzas del capitalismo global.
Para complicar las cosas, este cuerpo no tiene sus límites en la envoltura carnal que la piel bordea, ni puede entenderse como un sustrato biológico fuera de los entramados de producción y cultivo propios de la tecnociencia. Dicho con Donna Haraway, el cuerpo contemporáneo es una entidad tecnoviva multiconectada que incorpora tecnología. Ni organismo, ni máquina, ni naturaleza, ni cultura: tecnocuerpo. La nuevas técnicas quirúrgicas y farmacológicas ponen en marcha procesos de construcción tectónica que combinan modos de representación figurativos que provienen del cine y de la arquitectura, como el montaje, el modeling en 3D o el diseño de personalidad, según los cuales los órganos, tejidos, fluidos y moléculas se transforman en materias primas a partir de las que se fabrica nuestra corporalidad.

Literatura erótica femenina en Indonesia

Beneath the burqas

The world’s largest Muslim country is ground zero for a fledgling literary movement whose topic is sex and whose practitioners are women.

 

By Paul Watson, Times Staff Writer

 

Bandung, Indonesia — TEACHING high school chemistry, she was the picture of propriety, not an inch of flesh exposed except her hands and a cheerful face framed by a tightly pinned head scarf. Her students were separated according to the Islamic school’s strict rules: boys on one side of the class, girls on the other. Lessons stuck to dry theory, like rote explanations of the periodic table and how atoms and molecules bond.

But during the school break for the holy month of Ramadan, Dinar Rahayu was free to indulge her fantasies. At a desktop computer, in the middle-class home where she lived with her parents, she wrote a novel whose two main characters think they are incarnations of the god Apollo and a Valkyrie, a Nordic deity. Theirs is a world where women dominate men with abusive sex.

It is an explicit story from the start, conjuring scenes of strippers, child rape and sadomasochism. In one of the opening chapter’s tamer passages, the skillful strokes of a transsexual named Dinar persuade her lover Jonggi to put down his can of soda and the TV’s remote control.

“I like to be with him,” Dinar says of Jonggi. “I do everything to make him happy. And I bet he’s happy. I’m sure of it. In fact, he lets my hand slide inside his underpants toward that bulge.”

Rahayu, 36, is one of a small but bold group of female writers exploring the transgressive edges of sexuality in Indonesia, home of the world’s largest Muslim population. The country got a global reputation for prudishness last year when Playboy’s debut on the newsstands sparked protests and prosecution. But far edgier work by the country’s most provocative female authors is printed without fuss by mainstream publishers, including some of the biggest names in Indonesia’s book industry, and widely available in bookstores. Instead of banning or burning the books, government and religious leaders have largely ignored the erotic works, even as some of the best-written race up the bestsellers list.

Laura Dillon: primer hombre transexual

Gender benders

By Jan Gardner | March 18, 2007

Before Christine Jorgensen shocked the world in the 1950s by undergoing a male-to-female sex change, Laura Dillon went the other way. Dillon, a British medical student, is the first person on record to make the switch from female to male via surgery.

In “The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution,” Somerville author Pagan Kennedy offers an absorbing biography. Dillon started taking testosterone in 1938, at age 23, and underwent a series of surgeries in the 1940s. Interestingly, it was advances in surgery for men injured in World War I that made sex-change operations medically possible.

Michael Dillon, the man-made man, hoped to marry Roberta Cowell, a post-operative male-to-female, but she rebuffed him. Dillon became a Tibetan Buddhist and died in desperate fear that his past would be uncovered by the tabloid press.

Hombres transexuales (de mujer a hombre)

Journal of Sex Education & Therapy

Transmen & FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities. By Jason Cromwell. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 201 pp., notes, bibliography, index. Paperback, ISBN 0-252-06825-4, $19.95.

    Reviewed by Dallas Denny, MA, Gender Education & Advocacy, Pine Lake, GA.

 

 

 

When anthropologists turn their attention to contemporary Western culture and, in particular, to sub­jects studied by Western social scientists, it would be­hoove social scientists to pay attention. Unfortunately, this doesn’t often happen. Even though anthropologist Anne Bolins (198 study of male-to-female (MTF) transsexualism focused on the interactions between transsexuals and their caregivers, it has been largely ig­nored by clinicians. When Bolin’s book was finally reviewed, the reviewer unfortunately concluded that Bolin’s book “may offer greater assistance to the stu­dent or avid reader in sociology/anthropology than to the clinician or psychology/psychiatry student” (Denny, 1993; Mate-Kole, 1992). Yet today, more than 10 years after publication, Bolin’s book remains a must-read for anyone interested in the clinical treatment of transsexuals and other transgendered people.

Bolin chose to limit her observations to MTF trans­sexuals. A companion volume on the gender variance of those born with female bodies has, to date, been lacking. Now anthropologist Jason Cromwell gives us Transmen & FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities. Like Bolin’s In Search of Eve, Cromwell’s book is based on his dissertation and other work he did while in graduate school. Portions—and in some cases, expansions—of his previously published works have found their way into the text. Cromwell skillfully interweaves them, but I found myself wish­ing he had included them in their original forms and then commented upon them. Those who have not read the originals will not notice which portions are new and which are not, although the update may make the reading seem a bit choppy or redundant in places.