This is an exploration of the cultural representations of transvestism and transsexuality in modern screen media against a historical background. Focussing on a dozen mainstream films and on shemale Internet pornography, this fascinating study demonstrates the interdependency of our perceptions of transgender and its culturally constructed images.

Transgender Cinema reveals the scope of how trans people have been depicted on screen, starting with Charlie Chaplin's comic drag scenes and culminating in current hits like Transparent and A Fantastic Woman. It analyzes classic Hollywood movies, indie films, documentaries, world cinema, television, and trans filmmakers and actors.

NAMED A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE TIMES AND THE SUNDAY TIMES "Irreversible Damage . . . has caused a storm. Abigail Shrier, a Wall Street Journal writer, does something simple yet devastating: she rigorously lays out the facts." —Janice Turner, The Times of London Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively. But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as “transgender.” These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers.” Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and “gender-affirming” educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility. Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to “detransitioners”—young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves. Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back. She offers urgently needed advice about how parents can protect their daughters. A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.

Transgender studies is the latest area of academic inquiry to grow out of the exciting nexus of queer theory, feminist studies, and the history of sexuality. Because transpeople challenge our most fundamental assumptions about the relationship between bodies, desire, and identity, the field is both fascinating and contentious. The Transgender Studies Reader puts between two covers fifty influential texts with new introductions by the editors that, taken together, document the evolution of transgender studies in the English-speaking world. By bringing together the voices and experience of transgender individuals, doctors, psychologists and academically-based theorists, this volume will be a foundational text for the transgender community, transgender studies, and related queer theory.

What does it mean to be a husband? What does it mean to be a trans man? What does it mean to be an American man, speaking up and speaking out in today's divisive climate? Ryan Sallans, transgender educator and lecturer, follows up his successful Second Son autobiography with this thought-provoking look at life in contemporary America. While the term "trans" has become much more visible, the undercurrents of what it actually means still rumbles beneath the surface. In this second searing memoir, Sallans leads his readers on a trip through domestic bliss and family fractures, speaking successes and online harassment, personal heights and dizzying falls. In Transforming Manhood, the author confides what it means to be a public personality, showcasing how his profile has earned him adulation, as well as accusations. This follow-up to Second Son will inspire anyone who has ever fought personal demons to become the best possible person they had imagined. Through eye-opening discussions on college campuses, heart-to-heart talks with worried parents in America's heartland, and scary real-life stalking experiences, Sallans has overcome much and has grown from these encounters. Transforming Manhood is a book that chronicles Sallans's everyday struggles to transition into being a better husband, son, and man. It's a book that pleads for the LGBTQ community to come together and place their differences aside. In today's political climate, it's a call for mutual understanding and for standing up for what you believe in. Transforming Manhood continues the story of Ryan Sallans's life, but more than that: it spotlights his hope and encouragement for a better, optimistic, unified future for everyone.

A groundbreaking twentieth-century history of transgender children With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender. Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous” sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ’70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies. Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.

Distancing Representations in Transgender Film explores the representation of transgender identity in several important cinema genres: comedies, horror films, suspense thrillers, and dramas. In a critique that is both deeply personal and theoretically sophisticated, Lucy J. Miller examines how these representations are often narratively and visually constructed to prompt emotions of ridicule, fear, disgust, and sympathy from a cisgender audience. Created by and for cisgender people, these films do not accurately represent transgender people's experiences, and the emotions they inspire serve to distance cisgender audience members from the transgender people they encounter in their day-to-day lives. By helping to increase the distance between cisgender and transgender people, Miller argues, these films make it more difficult for cisgender people to understand the experiences of transgender people and for transgender people to fully participate in public life. The book concludes with suggestions for improving transgender representation in film.