Body Alcehemy: Transsexual Portraits
By Loren Cameron
Paperback (November 1996)
Cleis Press; ISBN: 1573440620

The amount of information laden in the stirring, inspiring images of Loren Cameron's book is astounding. It is a book you'll come back to over and over again. Each viewing will reveal new facets of the subjects photographed and interviewed for this book. It is the best of its type ever published. Read more...

Review written by JoeBlowTX@hotmail.com

Jan Morris
By Paul Clements
Paperback - 125 pages (September 1998)
University of Wales Press; ISBN: 0708314708

This is a full-length study of the life and work of Jan Morris, one of Britain's foremost travel essayists and historians. It takes a critical look at the writer who after spending more than 40 years as a man, underwent a sex change in the 1970s and became a woman. Read more...

My Story
By Caroline Cossey
Paperback- 192 pages (July 1992)
Faber Paperbacks; ISBN: 0571129099

In 1989 Caroline Cossey, who was born male, made an appeal to the European Commission of Human Rights. She was fighting for the legal right to marry as a woman. The author tells of her childhood in Norfolk, the operations that liberated her sexually and her persecution by the tabloid press. Read more...

Man enough to be a woman
By Jayne County
Paperback - 196 pages (15 June, 1995)
Serpent's Tail; ISBN: 1852423382

The original rock 'n' roll drag queen, Jayne County has worked with Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Derek Jarman and others. This free-wheeling autobiography is a shameless account of Jayne's gender-bending career, from her early days in Georgia to her current 1990s renaissance. Read more...

Dawn: A Charleston Legend
By Dawn Langley Simmons
Hardcover - 191 pages (March 1995)
Wyrick & Company; ISBN: 0941711161

A Self-made Man
By Paul Hewitt, Jane Warren
Paperback - (May 1996)
Headline; ISBN: 0747249989

Paul Hewitt was born female. This book presents the sometimes painful, often funny diary of his sex change. Paul's diary takes the reader through his roller-coaster of emotions as he embarks on a new life - his elation as he starts hormone treatment, his first shave and a double mastectomy. Read more...

Christine Jorgensen: a personal autobiography
By Christine Jorgensen
Paperback - 340 pages (30 June, 2000)
Cleis Press; ISBN: 1573441007

Crossing: A Memoir
By Deirdre McCloskey
Hardcover 288 pages (November 1999)
University of Chicago Press; ISBN: 0226556689

Deirdre McCloskey, the former Donald, tells the story of her crossing the gender line in this memoir. An economist and historian, a husband and father, Donald McCloskey had cross-dressed for years without wanting more. But rather suddenly, at age 52, a sense that he was denying his real identity. Read more...

Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton
by Diane Wood Middlebrook
Paperback - 352 pages (October 1999)
Virago Press; ISBN: 1860497632

Conundrum
By Jan Morris
Paperback - 160 pages (August 1997)
Penguin Books; ISBN: 0140264299

Revised and updated, this is an honest and moving account of the author's transexuality and change of sex. Read more...

Fixed for Life : The True Saga of How Tom Became Sally
by Irene Preiss
Paperback - 287 pages (December 1999)
iUniverse.Com, Inc.; ISBN: 158348728X

Dear Sir or Madam : The Autobiography of a Female-To-Male Transsexual
By Mark Rees
Paperback (March 1996)
Cassell; ISBN: 0304333948

This is the true story of Mark, formerly Brenda, who decided to have major surgery, mastectomy, hysterectomy and phalloplasty, to become a man. It describes his early wishes to change sex, and his struggles, both personal, social and legal, to gain acceptance. Read more...

Perfidious Man
By Will Self, David Gamble (Photographer)
Paperback - 160 pages (2 November, 2000)
Viking; ISBN: 0670889814

Through text and pictures, this book will explores what it is to be a man at the turn of the century, whether masculinity can be said to have any currency any more, and asks "where have all the real men gone?" Read more...

From Female to Male
By Louis Sullivan
Paperback (21 July, 1990)
Alyson Publications; ISBN: 1555831508

What took you so long : a girls journey to manhood
By Raymond Thompson
Paperback 336 pages (June 1995)
Penguin; ISBN: 0140246452

Raymond Thomson tells the story of his life. He was born a girl into a close-knit family in a working-class community in South Wales. He realized by the age of five that he was "in the wrong body". A childhood lived in a state on misery was followed by an adolescence full of confusion and rage. He recounts his experiences from the painful battles with his family to his time in Borstal and then prison. His relationships with women are described, including his love for Loretta, the woman who he hoped would be there at the end of his journey. Read more...

I Am My Own Woman : The Outlaw Life of Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf, Berlin's Most Distinguished Transvestite
By Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf, Jean Hollander
Paperback (September 1995)
Cleis Press; ISBN: 1573440108

Hailed by DER SPIEGEL as speaking to "the fate of a whole generation of German homosexuals," I AM MY OWN WOMAN is the exquisitely written autobiography of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, whose lifelong pursuits of sexual liberty and antique furniture offer a unique perspective on European history. During World War II, von Mahlsdorf murdered his father, dubbed himself Charlotte (after his cross-dressing lesbian aunt's lover) and has lived openly as a transvestite since. Dressed in high-heeled sandals and a good suit, Charlotte has collected furnishings from the Grunderzeit for half a century: in the Third Reich, she "rescued" pieces from Jewish deportees; in the German Democratic Republic, she protected "bourgeois cultural assets" from the Stasi. Now well past sixty, a quietly passionate, steadfast and serene figure, Charlotte shuns makeup and wears the simplest frocks. The Grunderzeit Museum--which Charlotte and her friends have defended against assault from skinheads--has become a symbol for the German lesbian and gay community. ³Move over Quentin Crisp: A naked civil servant is nothing compared with the German boy in a dressŠ² ‹ Out. ³As a child, Lothar Berfelde loved to wear an apron and polish porcelain. Given his druthers, he would have chosen to live quietly in the 19th century, perhaps as a housekeeper in a well-appointed home near Berlin. Instead, his life took a bumpier courseŠ.² ‹ Time. "Like the late-1800s Grunderzeit bric-a-brac she privately collects and passionately dusts in her museum, Charlotte's been smacked and pawed for decades by a gallery of rogues and brutes. . .and she's resisted. In drag. . .It is not the transgendered soul that is perverse, but the situation in which it lives. . ." --The Village Voice. Read more...

Reviewed by the publisher Cleis Press, pghcleis@aol.com