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TRANSGENDER ISSUES Susan Stryker, TRANSGENDER HISTORY. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008. 190p. illus. bibl. index. pap., $12.95, ISBN 978-1580052245.
Reviewed by Wayne Gathright
As someone who identifies as transgender, I approached this volume with a bit of trepidation, since the books I've previously read on transgender issues have varied in their approaches from medically dry to negatively biased.
Reading the prologue revealed that the author of this Seal Press title is a historian by profession. She is also transsexual. This gave me hope that the book would portray the transgender community in a positive light and be reasonably complete and accurate. I knew that chronicling transgender history is a journey fraught with many perils. How do you best convey the history of a movement with such a wide variety of players?
Chapter 1 lays out the terms and concepts relevant to transgender history and the transgender community. Stryker's comparison of the terms sex and gender spells out what each word refers to and how the two terms have come to be used so interchangeably. "Sex," she explains, "refers to reproductive capacity or potential" (p.8) (does the body produce eggs or sperm?), while "[g]ender is the social organization of different kinds of bodies into different categories of people" (p.11). She...