What do you do when the other woman is your husband? Christine Benvenuto and her husband had been married for more than twenty years and were raising their three young children in a beautiful New England town. One night in bed he turned to her and said, "I’m thinking constantly about my gender," adding that he was unhappy in his body and wanted to become a woman. Part memoir, part voyeur’s glimpse into a relationship, Sex Changes is a journey through the end of a marriage and out the other side. Christine, desperate to save her family and shelter her children, discovers a well of strength and resilience she never knew she had. She learns what to tell the neighbors when your transgender husband starts accenting his shirts and ties with heels. She discovers how to manage as a single mother. And she opens herself up to a group of friends who travel with her through her darkest times - and who show her the love and support of true friendship. Fiercely funny, self-lacerating, and not entirely politically correct, Sex Changes is a journey of love and anguish told with hilarity, heartbreak and a lot of soul-searching. It is about the mysteries in every marriage, the secrets we choose to keep, and the freedom that the truth can bring.

How Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, transsexuals questioned biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all. From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today’s growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists, as they debated the big questions of medical ethics, nature versus nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights. In this story of transsexuality, Meyerowitz shows how new definitions of sex circulated in popular culture, science, medicine, and the law, and she elucidates the tidal shifts in our social, moral, and medical beliefs over the twentieth century, away from sex as an evident biological certainty and toward an understanding of sex as something malleable and complex. How Sex Changed is an intimate history that illuminates the very changes that shape our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality today.

Sex Changes with Kleist analyzes how the dramatist and poet Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) responded to the change in the conception of sex and gender that occurred in the eighteenth century. Specifically, Katrin Pahl shows that Kleist resisted the shift from a one-sex to the two-sex and complementary gender system that is still prevalent today. With creative close readings engaging all eight of his plays, Pahl probes Kleist’s appreciation for incoherence, his experimentation with alternative symbolic orders, his provocative understanding of emotion, and his camp humor. Pahl demonstrates that rather than preparing modern homosexuality, Kleist puts an end to modern gender norms even before they take hold and refuses the oppositional organization of sexual desire into homosexual and heterosexual that sprouts from these norms. Focusing on the theatricality of Kleist’s interventions in the performance of gender, sexuality, and emotion and examining how his dramatic texts unhinge major tenets of classical European theater, Sex Changes with Kleist is vital reading for anyone interested in queer studies, feminist studies, performance studies, literary studies, or emotion studies. This book changes our understanding of Kleist and breathes new life into queer thought.

"Sex change" is a very broad term that refers to the process of a person or animal changing sex. This occurs naturally in some species of animals, but more often the term is used to mean sex reassignment surgery. The term can refer to either male sexual characteristics being substituted for female ones, or vice versa. The male to female substitution is much more common because it is by far the simpler of the two. Intersexual individuals may undergo some form of sex change, most often as children, to take on a clearly defined gender identity. In adults, the process is usually taken by transsexual individuals. Transsexuality occurs when a person's brain identifies with one gender (either male or female) but his or her body's anatomy displays the sexual characteristics of the opposite role. This is called Gender Identity Disorder and undergoing the sex change process is one way to correct this condition. This is a very large and complex topic that has been broken down into five subtopics for this e-book. In the following e-book we will survey the various procedures, not all of them medical, that can come under the heading of "sex change;" take a more in depth look at the sex change operation; cover the differences in making the transition from male to female versus female to male; and look at the topic of forced sex changes that still go on in some countries. While this is still a very controversial subject, it is becoming more and more accepted that Gender Identity Disorder is a medical birth condition that leads to confusion, depression, and frustration in individuals who are born with it. Using therapy or medical procedures to bring the body and brain back into agreement with each other often allows these individuals to lead fuller, happier lives. It is our hope that at the end of this short e-book you have a fuller understanding of this topic, and a broader knowledge base on which to build your own opinions.

A wife's memoir of her husband's sex change describes how she endeavored to salvage their family life and protect her children, the difficult responses of their neighbors, and the support she received from friends.

Lannie Rose changed her sex and now she explains how you can too! How To Change Your Sex: A Lighthearted Look at the Hardest Thing You'll Ever Do is an amusing and practical guide to everything you need to know for your sex change, from how to tell if you are transsexual, through venturing out in public in your new gender presentation (including which restroom to use!), to hormones and surgeries, to what to expect afterwards. Whether you are seriously considering changing your own sex, or if you have a friend or loved one who is going through the process, or even if you are just curious, you are bound to be entertained and informed by this handy little manual. Also, catch the free annotated audiobook PODCAST at www.lannnierose.com/podcast.

The last half-century has seen enormous changes in society’s attitude toward sexuality. In the 1950s, homosexuals in the United States were routinely arrested; today, homosexual activity between consenting adults is legal in every state, with same-sex marriage legal in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In the 1950s, ambitious women were often seen as psychopathological and were told by psychoanalysts that they had penis envy that needed treatment; today, a woman has campaigned for President of the United States. Mark Blechner has lived and worked through these startling changes in society, and Sex Changes collects papers he has written over the last 45 years on sex, gender, and sexuality. Interspersed with these papers are reflections on the changes that have occurred during that time period, both within the scope of society at large as well as in his personal experiences inside and outside of the therapeutic setting. He shows how changes in society, changes in his life, and changes in his writing on sexuality - as well as changes within psychoanalysis itself - have affected one another. One hundred years ago, psychoanalysis was at the cutting edge of new ideas about sex and gender, but in the latter half of the 20th Century, psychoanalysts were often seen as reactionary upholders of society’s prejudices. Sex Changes seeks to restore the place of psychoanalysis as the "once and future queer science," and aims for a radical shift in psychoanalytic thinking about sexuality, gender, normalcy, prejudice, and the relationship of therapeutic aims and values.