Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude

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According to author Amy Bloom, most of the transsexuals, cross-dressers, and hermaphrodites regarded as "abnormal" by mainstream society are decent, kind, articulate people. In Normal, she interviews female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual cross-dressers, and people born with "confusing" genitals, as well as examining society's strange discomfort with sexual variation.

Publishers Weekly

Taking in an amazing range and diversity of the human experience of gender and sexuality, novelist Bloom (Love Invents Us) devotes an essay each to three phenomena: female to male transsexualism, heterosexual cross-dressing and the intersexed, or those with ambiguous genitalia or confusing chromosomal balance. But she is most interested in examining "why the rest of us struggle" with gender and sexual experiences we do not share. Bloom interviews people from each of the above groups (as well as doctors, social scientists and gender activists) and brings together, in graceful, readable prose, a plethora of facts, ideas, arguments and personal responses to help us reconsider received ideas about gender. While some of her information is surprising (babies born with "confusing" gentials are more common than babies born with cystic fibrosis), she never uses the lives of her subjects to titillate. Bloom is happy to confess her own, and others', confusions and lack of information, pointing out that there is no reliable information on the number of heterosexual cross-dressers, for instance. And she allows her subjects like the female-to-male-transsexual who has not undergone phalloplasty and claims, "I can live this way, as a man with a vagina" their complicated lives. Fascinating without being prurient, detailed without being overly scientific, the book opens new ways of viewing not only gender but our own inability to accept difference. (Oct.) Forecast: Bloom's original piece in the New Yorker generated a lot of attention, and readers of her fiction will tune in to see what she's up to. If media bandwidth is available, this accessible book could be high-profile enough to initiate copycat articles and think-piece reviews and thus sales. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Exploring territory that lies beyond the dichotomies of female and male, gay and straight, Bloom, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for her story collection, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, introduces members of three very different groups who challenge common definitions of gender and sexuality. For her first nonfiction book, she interviewed women who have surgery in order to conform physically with the male gender they have always seen themselves as having; heterosexual men who satisfy a sexual fetish (they prefer to call it a hobby) by dressing in women's clothing; and the intersexed, whose prime political objective is to do away with the unquestioned cosmetic surgery on children born with ambiguous genitalia. A practicing psychotherapist, fiction writer, feminist, and lesbian, Bloom dares the reader to be willingly confounded by her always engaging, frequently humorous interviewees while also airing her own reactions, particularly her outrage at the brutal surgeries whose benefits have yet to be proven performed on unwitting infants. As an accessible, nonsensationalistic introduction to a fascinating and controversial subject, this volume is recommended for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/02.] Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., NJ Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Psychoanalyst and story-writer Bloom (A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, 2000, etc.) aims to expand our notion of what is normal by showing up-close the lives of people widely considered to be abnormal: female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual cross-dressers, and the intersexed. Individuals who have altered female bodies to match their male self-concept, plastic surgeons who perform female-to-male sex change surgery, and psychiatric researchers into transsexual transition all share their thoughts with the author, and the surgeons also provide graphic images of their handiwork. Bloom takes the reader to a conference of transsexuals and cross-dressers at a southern motel, on a Carnival cruise hosting heterosexual cross-dressers and their wives, and to a Missouri convention of cross-dressers featuring a beauty pageant. She describes these men with a fetish for women’s clothes as "Presbyterian accountants from Cedar Rapids and Lutheran ministers from Omaha . . . decent, kind, intelligent, and willing to talk openly." (Their wives seem resigned yet supportive.) Perhaps the saddest chapter of Bloom’s report on gender variability is the one on hermaphrodites, as intersexed individuals are often called. The assumption that a baby born with a minuscule, malformed penis or a greatly enlarged clitoris would be better off "normalized" has led physicians to perform reconstructive surgery on newborns, an approach that is now challenged by the Intersex Society of America, which urges doctors to proceed with caution and provides counsel and support to parents. The angry voice of someone subjected to childhood surgery, declared first a girl, then a boy, then a girl, makes for painful reading. Yetthe intersexed are the least convincing cases in Bloom’s contention that nature is infinite in its variety and has not made mistakes with these people; she makes her strongest argument with the examples of heterosexual cross-dressers. A moving examination of the variety of gender and erotic preferences, presented with varying degrees of persuasiveness as examples of nature’s vast spectrum of possibilities.