True Selves - Book Review
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Where were you twenty-five years ago Millie? How many lives could your book have saved? How many families? How much anguish?
The transgendered world has been crying out for a book like this for more than a quarter of a century. A book which explains what ordinary people need to know about Gender Dysphoria … and how to HELP.
Christine Burns reviews the book which everyone ought to have on the shelf, ready to lend.
August 8th, 1997
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TRUE SELVES: Understanding Transsexualism - For Families, Friends, Coworkers, and Helping Professionals By Mildred L. Brown & Chloe Ann Rounsley. Hardcover (November 1996) JB Jossey-Bass Publishers; ISBN: 0787902713. Price (UK) £16.95 Order this book on-line from Amazon.co.uk |
A great deal has been written over the years about transsexuality.
An awful lot … and a lot that’s awful.
It’s surprising in fact, in view of the amount of literature, that there’s still so much ignorance and damaging folklore about the subject.
The books that have been written so far tend to divide into distinct categories, however:
There are lots of books by transsexuals … books which recount the processes of self discovery, denying, dealing with, surviving and making peace with a transgendered personality. Many of these are purely autobiographical. Jan Morris’s Conundrum is possibly the best remembered, but others by April Ashley, Julia Grant, Caroline Cossey and (more recently) Mark Rees and Raymond Thompson all provide very similar themes for study.
There are lots of medical texts too. Books specifically about transsexuality by Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Surgeons, Endocrinologists and Lawyers (for instance) used to be quite rare. Before John Money’s efforts in the early 1970’s you would normally only find chapters or the odd paragraph buried in more general works. A General Practitioner once showed me the single sentence in which transsexuality was described and dismissed in the collection of text books he learned medicine from as a student. (The same sentence was also describing transvestism.) The last few years have seen a significant growth in the professional literature but, sadly, much of it still tends to look down on its’ subjects as creatures to be dissected and described, rather than intellectual equals with an insight to be shared.
More recently, we’ve seen the emergence of a third book category. Works which start where the purely clinical books stop and which examine the socio-political implications of (and explanations for) transgenderedness … trying to unpick the complex web of fears and assumptions behind western society’s powerful antipathy towards the subject. Some of these are heavily academic … works which seek, for instance, to challenge previous treatises about feminism and gender politics … an area where transgendered people have been viciously and ruthlessly mis-portrayed and mailigned in the past. Others, such as Liz Hodgkinson’s BodyShock, take a purely lay perspective to examine and explain transgendered people for a popular audience. There are some which lie somewhere between too, such as the recently published Trans-X-u-all by Tracie O’Keefe and Katrina Fox. Tracie is a psychotherapist who happens also to have once been transsexual, and her book advances lots of ideas which challenge more naïve attempts to put people into just one or two categories. The book defines at least nine, in fact!
None of these are very good places to start if your child is metamorphosing from daughter to son … or a colleague at work suddenly turns the simple act of going to the washroom into a serious threat to everything you’ve always taken for granted about them … and about life. In short, the world at large has had very little help or tuition in coming to terms with a newly-revealed transsexual in its’ midst.
Mildred Brown is a clinical psychologist whose professional interest in gender identity was kindled eighteen years ago by a chance encounter at a conference. It was an encounter so profound as to alter the direction of her career.
In the book’s introduction she describes being taken to meet what was (then) the only support group in the entire San Francisco Bay Area …
At that meeting I saw a level of emotional pain greater than I had ever previously imagined possible. After listening to one individual after another share heartbreaking stories, I was overwhelmed. "My God," I said, "where do you all go for help? Who works with you?" They said they had no one. My heart went out to them. That night, I decided to dedicate myself to working with this special group of people.
Millie quickly learned that transgendered people are people first, with an adjective second, and she says that the key to understanding her initially-bewildering emotions was to see gender from a human perspective. "Before that I had been operating on the intellectual level .."
For all that, of course, Mildred Brown, Ph.D. is very much an intellectual too … and so she’s teamed up with a Bay area journalist, Chloe Ann Rounsley, to produce a book that’s written in a warm, informative and understandable style.
The result is a simple, unpretentious classic.
Initial chapters explain what transsexuality is, and (just as importantly) what it isn’t. The lonely, frightening, experience of being a transgendered child is painted in a way that few outsiders can intuitively imagine, and few transsexuals wish to relive. Then the reader is led into the horrors of an alien puberty … layer by layer of perceptions and experiences laid, one upon another, so logically that the descriptions of self-mutilation attempts and suicide come as no real surprise by the end of chapter three.
A trip into the adult years follows and then, the turning point, therapy. … That day when the transsexual hopes they may at last have found someone who understands … someone who is (dare they hope this?) on their side.
Continuing its’ logical progression, Mildred then treats the reader to an insider’s perspective, on the practicalities and frustrations of changing role. Transitioning in the workplace has a section to itself and this leads, neatly, to the subject of dealing with families and friends … with very sensitive and practical advice for those on the receiving end of the experience.
… Those, that is, with the humanity to want to stay and cope.
Those who don’t slam the door in their friend or child’s face.
Most of all, I guess, the book impresses me because of its’ humanity. It manages to get under the skin and into the shoes of a transsexual person, enabling the reader to begin to experience the imperatives … and the consequent choices .. which face the child, friend or client they’re trying to understand. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another professional text really do that … too many psychologists write as though to impress their peers and to say, between every line, that they’re keeping a healthy distance from their subjects. Reading her book I can imagine Mildred quietly and matter-of-factly explaining what’s happened to a close friend over a cream tea in the garden. Moreover, I’m relieved to see that she’s managed to achieve the precarious trick of balancing up the interests of the people she’s describing with plenty of appreciation for the feelings and sensitivities of parents, partners, colleagues and friends trying to cope with something new and bewildering in their own lives. And if transsexuals themselves suffer from a lack of quality care it is nothing, normally, to the almost total vacuum facing those around them.
Humanity cries out from the pages of this book and if there is one word of warning that I’d utter then it’s to make sure you have a good supply of tissues available when you read it. Mildred touches areas of grief and sadness that every transsexual person will know … and which few will ever have had the opportunity to satisfactorily resolve. She does it so well, in fact, that you’re left reflecting on the shallow and dismissive presumptions of those professionals who have gone before her. If you’re a sensitive and compassionate person, however, then Mildred proves very ably that you don’t have to be transsexual to understand how what a transsexual has experienced before you knew anything was amiss. The paper tissue warning applies to all readers.
If there was ever a question as to why a non-transsexual person should concern themselves then, towards the end of the book, the authors provide as good a reason as any too …
In times of personal crisis, we all look to important people in our lives for support. During the emotional upheaval that can occur after coming out, transsexuals need the help of family and friends. They look to the people closest to them to understand the changes that are going on and ultimately to accept and love the new emerging opposite-gender person..
It’s not always easy, but friends, family members and coworkers can make the journey upon which the transsexual has embarked immeasurably more comfortable with their empathy and support. If you can reach out [..] then there is a good chance that you will maintain and strengthen an important relationship.
And was there ever a better reason for learning to understand somebody else?