Normal
Subtitle: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude
Edition: 1st edition
Publisher: Random House
Published: October 8, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 160
ISBN-13: 9780679456520
Subjects: Transvestism; Transsexualism; Alternative Sexual Behavior; Sociology; Psychology; United States; Transsexuals; Gender Studies; Human Sexuality; Psychology & Psychiatry / Human Sexuality; Portraits
First sentence: What would you go through not to have to live the life of Kafka's Gregor Samsa?
Description: "Bloom takes us on a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of "people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic" - female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transgender transition.

On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband. "Melanie, "who devote themselves to the cause of "ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension." And we meet Hale Hawbecker, "a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy" with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender.".

"Bloom shows the essential humanity in this infinite variety, allowing us to appreciate these people as they really are - both like and unlike everyone else - and inviting us "to see into these particular worlds and back out to the larger one we all share." Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender, and identity, about what it means to be male or female.

Bloom reveals new facets to ideas about happiness, personality, and character, even as she brilliantly illumines the very concept of "normal.""--BOOK JACKET.