| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 307 words from this article are provided below; about 779 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2002. Pp. 363. $29.95.

In this absorbing and meticulously researched study, Joanne Meyerowitz traces the emergence of transsexuality in the United States as a category of identity distinct from homosexuality and transvestism. Building on the work of such scholars and activists as Susan Stryker and Judith Halberstam, Meyerowitz shows how the phenomenon of transsexuality transformed understandings of the relationship among sex, gender, and sexuality, not only in the medical and legal professions but also in the popular consciousness. Especially after Christine Jorgensen's sex change made headlines in 1952, sex was no longer seen as the biological foundation of gender and sexuality but was thought to exist independently of them. Influenced by Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering homosexual rights activist who founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, European doctors tended to believe that human beings were innately "bisexual," that all men and women carried within them some aspects of the "opposite" sex. Jorgensen's Norwegian doctors used this understanding to justify her surgical and hormonal alteration, and she herself repeated it to reporters, thus providing a biological explanation for her cross-gender identification, one that distinguished it from homosexuality and cross-dressing. By contrast, American doctors remained committed to a dimorphic understanding of sex and increasingly used the concept of "gender identity" to justify sex reassignment surgery, a concept developed in the 1950s by the psychologists John Money and Robert Stoller to describe a person's subjective sense of self, which was not always in alignment with his or her sex. For doctors influenced by this concept, it was easier to alter a person's sex than it was his or her gender identity, which was thought to be fixed at a relatively early age.

. . .

There are about 779 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.