Word: gender
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...what is perhaps most striking about Paley's earlier book of stories--it would be hard to find another writer who was more of a feminist writer, earlier, than Grace Paley, or one who is more feminine, in a sense beyond gender. Henry James's sensitivity, for instance, has something clearly feminine about it. Paley brilliantly explores an important set of attitudes toward love, friendship, sex. The paperback of The Little Disturbances of Man is subtitled "stories of men and women at love." The "at" touches the heart of these attitudes: a reflecting distance, a refusal to be swallowed...
Kamin said that studies of identical twins and of adopted children isolating gender from environmental intelligence factors were so faulted and biased that they were "unworthy of scientific consideration...
...Stanford's Gender Dysphoria Program, headed by Psychiatrist Norman Fisk and Plastic Surgeon Donald Laub, applicants for surgery are carefully screened. For those who doctors feel could benefit from an operation, at least a full year of hormonal therapy is prescribed: estrogens and progestins to enlarge the breasts and soften the skin on men, and androgens to deepen the voices and stimulate beards on women...
During their hormone therapy, patients are asked to adopt the characteristics of their new gender. Transexual men don dresses, wear makeup, live and work as women. Transexual women wear men's clothes and live as men. After a year, if doctors judge the adjustment to new life-styles a success, surgery is performed...
Their own sexual satisfaction, however, is often less important to transexuals than the desire to match their bodies to the gender with which they identify. The major psychological problem after surgery, according to Dr. Fisk, is that in spite of careful counseling, "expectations are often way out of line with reality." For those who want to keep their operation a secret, there is also the chronic tension that goes along with the fear of discovery and exposure...