Transgender Nation

Transgender Nation

By Gordene Olga MacKenzie

1994, Bowling Green State University
Popular Press

172 Pages


From the Cover

Gender is the mine field we pass through every day. In the United States of materialism, gender is all too often determined by which anatomical sex you are. From birth we are bombarded with gender propaganda that supports a repressive dual gender system that pits the sexes and the genders against each other. Transgenderists as gender nonconformists challenge us to rethink traditional discourses on sex and gender. Transgender Nation dares to look at the male-to-woman transgenderist and transsexual from a sociocultural and sociopolitical perspective and maintains that it is not the individual transgenderist that is sick and in need of treatment but rather the culture that must be treated.

Transgender Nation explores historical sexological categories and decodes contemporary medical transsexual ideology, charging that contemporary "treatments" like sex reassignment surgery all too often encourage assimilation and negate differences. Proposals for endocrinological euthanasia are examined for what they reveal about personal and cultural attitudes about gender. In addition popular cultural representations of transgenderists as homocidal maniacs dressed to kill are contrasted with the grim reality that in a transgenderphobic, homophobic, and misogynistic culture they are more likely to be killed because they dress.

Table of Contents

1. Transsexualism in America: A Tremor on the Fault Line of Gender

2. Historical Explanations and Rationalizations for Transgenderism

3. Transsexual Ideology: The Medicalization of Transsexualism and Gender in America

4. Images of Transsexuals and Transgenderists in American Popular Culture

Photographs

5. The Gender Movement

Conclusion