[UPDATE] - The comments to this post are more interesting than the post itself. In one of those comments, I tried to link to a previous post, but couldn't do it. Here is that link.
The book, Self-Made Man, by Norah Vincent, has been getting a lot of press and air time lately. I've not read it. At this point, with all the reading I have to do for school, I don't know that I ever will. From the Amazon.com website:
From Publishers Weekly
The disguise that former Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist Vincent employed to trick dozens of people into believing her a man was carefully thought out: a new, shorter haircut; a pair of rectangular eyeglasses; a fake five o'clock shadow; a prosthetic penis; some preppy clothes. It was more than she needed. "[A]s I became more confident in my disguise... the props I had used... became less and less important, until sometimes I didn't need them at all," Vincent writes. Gender marking, she found, is more about attitude than appearance. Vincent's account of the year and a half she spent posing as a man is peppered with such predictable observations. To readers of gender studies literature, none of them will be especially illuminating, but Vincent's descriptions of how she learned, and tested, such chestnuts firsthand make them awfully fun to read. As "Ned," Vincent joined an all-male bowling league, dated women, worked for a door-to-door sales force, spent three weeks in a monastery, hung out in strip clubs and, most dangerous of all, went on a Robert Bly–style men's retreat. She creates rich portraits of the men she met in these places and the ways they behaved—as a lesbian, she's particularly good at separating the issues of sexuality from those of gender. But the most fascinating part of the story lies within Vincent herself—and the way that censoring her emotions to pass as a man provoked a psychological breakdown. For fans of Nickel and Dimed–style immersion reporting, this book is a sure bet. (Jan. 23)
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For those of you that do read the book, I urge caution. The author has not been known for her acceptance of trans-issues. From Jen's Transcending Gender (quoting Vincent from a piece in the Village Voice in 2001):
. . . it has taken the likes of Foucault, Derrida, and their imitators to kill something that is, arguably, far more precious. Namely, the self. And that, I submit, is what the rise of transsexuality indicates, or—to use the thoroughly fashionable term—”signifies.” It signifies the death of the self, the soul, that good old-fashioned indubitable “I” so beloved of Descartes, whose great adage “I think, therefore I am” has become an ontological joke on the order of “I tinker and there I am.”
All of this came to mind of late because the San Francisco Board of Supervisors just voted in favor of giving city employees health benefits that include coverage of up to $50,000 for sex change operations and procedures. This struck me as an astounding capitulation to postmodernism. Why? Because the city of San Francisco does not pay for its nontranssexual employees to undergo similar types of nonessential cosmetic surgeries like nose jobs, boob jobs, liposuction, follicular scalp implants, or penis enlargement. These are the kinds of plastic surgeries your average Jane and Joe undergo at their own expense, though, ostensibly, for the same reason that transsexuals do—because they are unhappy with the way they look.
What you are left with is a literally constructed self—a thoroughly superficial identity that someone has built with a scalpel.
It is this type of ignorance that keeps me being open about and out. This is from a lesbian woman. If she is this ignorant, how much more must the average straight person be?
What she is discussing, of course, is the insurance offered by San Francisco to its employees which covers "sex change operations." I blogged about that here and here, so I won't bother commenting on that again. But, I am just mortified that such a person now has a larger stage.
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