But Feinberg ultimately leaves too many gaps, both in history and in reasoning, to make her theories about gender expression and gender oppression solid.

The book does offer an enlightening album of singular people: a female transvestite who is sexually attracted to gay men a couple consisting of a female cross-dresser and a male-cross-dresser. Though she draws many conclusions from this and other examples of cross-dressing rebellion through the ages, she fails to consider that the readiest disguise for a married man is his wife's clothing. Feinberg, for example, expends little effort in looking into why a notorious band of male Welsh revolutionaries calling themselves Rebecca and Her Daughters dressed as women to destroy tollbooths in the mid-19th century. But her historical perspective can be sketchy. She also shows the often frantic and neurotic ways Western society clings to rigid notions of gender, while at the same time she describes (though not fully enough) how these notions shift radically from age to age. 'Nobody will remain unaffected by this book.' -Heather Findlay, Girlfriendsįeinberg, a surgically and hormonally transgendered female-to-male and the author of the novel Stone Butch Blues, here effectively pummels several old saws about gender, such as that there were two or three centuries in ancient Greece that constituted the golden age of gayness ('How happy were the gay slaves?' she asks).

'A well-written, well-researched compendium of transgender history.'-Harriet L. 'A ground-breaking gift to both the transgender community and the world at large.'-Rachel Reed, Synapse 'The challenge Feinberg sets forth-a complex, multisided one-is to take up the banner of feminism and extend it, stretch it, until it has room for all women.'-Rosemarie C. History becomes art, the political becomes transformative, the personal becomes universal.' -Craig Hickman, Gay Community News 'No book since Toni Morrison's Beloved gives so much and holds itself so well. It delves into the transgender experience, inviting the reader to consider a spectrum of gender possibilities.' -Linda Gebroe, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review ' does far more than document the history of transgenders. A brief review cannot do justice to this amazing resource, not only for our communities, but for the world.'-Patricia Roth Schwartz, Lambda Book Report ' leaves us with a sense that a transgendered concept of what it is to be fully human and psychologically whole is both valid and nothing new. This is the history book for the rest of us.-Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw

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