This book is, ostensibly, about the history of transsexuality in the US. But it is, as its title implies, more generally about how the concept of "sex" itself has changed in the US in the past hundred years. Meyerowitz has done an amazing job of putting together activist, scientific, and popular cultural sources to produce a scholarly -- but very readable -- history. Meyerowitz's main point is that it is through a "taxonomic revolution" -- initiated by the possibilities of transsexuality -- that scientists, sexual minorities, and broader US society have come to distinguish between sex, gender, and sexuality, and the kinds of identities that are attached to these concepts. She argues most persuasively that the distinction between these arenas of lived experience were worked out through the debates over transsexuality in the US, drawing on earlier European sexological discourses.
Meyerowitz uses Christine Jorgensen as the central figure in this book, and has gone part of the way to producing something of a biography of CJ. This works really well. Another notable feature of this book is that Meyerowitz is careful to follow the different experiences of transexual men and women, which adds further depth to this book.
This book is very readable -- I intend to teach it in an undergraduate course this year -- while at the same time theoretically sound and clearly very well-researched. It answered many questions that I had, and brought together much of what I have wanted to understand about this field.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in gender and sexuality, both specialists and the general reader.
