Transgender Book Reviews

Confessions of a Gender Defender
Nonfiction by Randi Ettner, Ph.D.
Copyright 1996, 160 pages
Chicago Spectrum Press
ISBN 1-886094-51-9

Capsule: Psychologist Ettner writes about her extensive front-line experiences in counseling mostly male-to-female transsexuals. Also included are writings from the transsexuals themselves. This is a collage of stories about the search for gender fulfillment.

Full review

At one point in her book, Dr. Ettner comments "For a brief moment I considered a career change. Why aren't I selling cosmetics at the new Bloomingdale's?" Instead, Ettner is on the front lines of the movement to allow complete gender change (usually surgically) for those men who feel they are women within. Her job ain't easy.

There's a demand out there, in towns and cities around America, by gender-conflicted men, for professional counseling by experts such as Ettner (she sometimes works in tandem with her husband, a medical doctor). These are often desperate men who have met with misunderstanding or disdain by spouses, families, and especially by the medical profession. Attempted suicides are not uncommon.

Ettner knows how much a battleground many of these men's lives have become. She tells how an 84-year-old man finally feels comfortable spending his remaining years as a woman. Another man attempts to remove his genitals himself.

These are truly men who want to live permanently as women, who want to have their maleness surgically removed. As children, they hoped they would wake up from sleep magically transformed into girls.

Dr. Ettner believes that the perception of one's gender is determined in the embryo before birth.

Side note: the author notes in a "Non Credo" at the beginning of her book: "To those who did not think this book would succeed, and especially to the literary 'giant' of an editor who referred to the transgendered as 'yucky,' thank you for giving me the drive to prove you wrong."

The book has an extensive bibliography.

(Reviewer: Valory Gravois) (Copyright ©1999 by Alchemist/Light Publishing)

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