She Is My Son
by Beverly Holland
Told with compassion and understanding by a mother who came to terms with the fact that her son was 'different'. An account of how her son - who has an identity crisis from early childhood - finally underwent a successful sex change operation was transformed from an eye-catching transsexual to a truly beautiful woman. Alan as 'she' was then, has a traumatic and troubled childhood. Partly ostracised by boys of his own generation because of is seemingly unnatural behaviour - and not understanding the cause of this behaviour  - his only true friend was his affectionate and loyal brother, Steven. As Beverly Holland says, 'it's not what you are, but who you are'.

Update: Adrienne returned to New Zealand from the UK in 1992. After breaking up with her 'husband' Andrew, Adrienne became Joanne in 1994 and started a new life in Christchurch where she went on to write 'Never Trust A Skinny Cook!' on 2000 and became a well known personality around New Zealand performing with The Playgirls cabaret show, retraining to become a Patternmaker, a Civil Union Celebrant and radio host among other things. In 2007 Joanne became Chair of the Agender Christchurch Committee.

Never Trust a Skinny Cook!
by Joanne Clarke
Never Trust A Skinny Cook is the first cook book by Christchurch celebrity chef Joanne Clarke. Over 50 mouth watering low fat desserts and baking makes this a must have for anyone interested in good food but who is concerned about their fat intake. Joanne was New Zealand’s first professional low fat chef creating delicious meals at her family's Hearts Restaurant, Christchurch

Joanne re-created a number of delicious desserts that are already family favourites that are now low fat and the taste is amazing! One of Joanne’s goals was to create real food that tasted like food and not processed or plastic. All the dishes have been created in Joanne’s kitchen at home using everyday kitchen utensils with food available at her local supermarket. There are no fancy products to buy and Joanne has included tips and alternative ingredients to help you create your own unique dishes.

Katherine's Diary
by Katherine Cummings
In 1986 John Cummings became Katherine Cummings, and a whole life changed.
In this painfully honest account of John’s transformation into a woman, Katherine tells of years of fantasising and cross-dressing behind locked doors, of the betrayal felt by her family and the final relief of surgery. Katherine’s Diary covers a lifetime of self-discovery and self-destruction told with acerbic wit and crisp observation.

 ‘….it is impossible to read this book and remain unsympathetic to the pressures faced by transsexuals – or unadmiring of the courage with which Cummings has confronted them.’                            Dennis Altman, Australian Weekend Review

Winner of the 1992 Australian Human Rights Award for Non Fiction
 

Trans-sister Radio
Chris Bohjalian
The bestselling author of Midwives and The Law of Similars continues his tradition of incorporating social issues into his moving narratives. Transsexuality goes mainstream in this Scarlet Letter for a softer, gentler but more complicated age. Allison Banks--42 years old, heterosexual, long divorced, mother of a college student and a grade school teacher in a picturesque Vermont village--meets single, attractive, attentive, 35-year-old Dana Stevens when she takes his film class at a nearby college. Early on in the relationship, Dana confesses that he has always believed he was female, though he desires women, too--and he is soon to undergo a long-planned sex change operation. Despite this revelation, and despite her reservations, Allison invites Dana to move in with her, and they have great sex right up until the night before the operation in Colorado, where Allison has loyally accompanied Dana for post-op and moral support. On their return to Vermont, he--now physically and emphatically "she"--continues to share Allison's bed and her house, though nothing can be the same as it was. Allison's ex-husband, Vermont Public Radio president Will, now her good friend, and their daughter, Carly, cope well with the situation, but the close-knit community is less understanding. Questions of what constitutes community tolerance are explored here, but the novel's central focus is on the definition of sex and gender in the characters' personal lives. Allison, Dana, Carly and Will express their views in alternating first person chapters, and transcripts from a fictional NPR All Things Considered series on Dana and her operation provide additional narrative background. Gender is central to who we are, Bohjalian concludes, but not perhaps to who we love. Sex, on the other hand, expresses who we are. Bohjalian's sometimes simplistic characterizations diminish the emotional impact of the novel, and his abundant research on gender dysfunction often gives the book a curiously flat, documentary quality. Nevertheless, Bohjalian humanizes the transsexual community and explains the complexities of sex and gender in an accessible, evenhanded fashion, making a valuable contribution to a dialogue of social and political import.

Whipping Girl
Julia Serano
A provocative manifesto, Whipping Girl is a gripping, no holds barred account that debunks popular misconceptions about transsexuality, while exposing the depth of the cultural belief that femininity is frivolous, weak, and passive. Julia Serano, a transsexual woman, shares her experiences pre- and post-transition, revealing at every turn the ways in which fear, contempt, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our societal attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole.

“Whipping Girl is a delight to read. Julia Serano is a careful and astute critic of the ways that trans women have been stereotyped and dismissed in popular culture, feminism, and psychology, and she repeatedly surprised me with her razor-sharp observations of the pervasive hatred of trans women and all differently gendered people. This is an important text for gender studies classes, as well as for therapists, journalists, and anybody who’d like to keep updated as a sex radical.”
--Patrick Califia, author of Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism
 

Change for the Better
Georgina Beyer
George Bertrand was born in 1957, an ordinary boy who was to become an extraordinary woman. As he grew up, George realized he was a woman trapped inside a male body. Once he discovered that men could live as women, Georgina Beyer was born. This volume follows that difficult rebirth, Georgina's time working in the sex industry in the 1970s and 1980s, a brutal rape in Sydney and her liberation by a sex change operation in 1984.

Since then, Georgina has achieved acclaim as an actress, including a nomination for a GOFTA award for best actress in 1987, has tutored unemployed youth in drama, was elected to the Carterton District Council in 1993 and became the first transsexual mayor in the world in 1995. This account of Georgina's life gives an insight into New Zealand's intolerance of sexual difference. It is a story of a struggle for acceptance as a transsexual and of extraordinary determination to change life for the better.
 

He's My Daughter
Lynda Langley
A shocking phone call from their distraught daughter-in-law was how Lynda and Richard Langley learnt that their son had started his transition from a man to a woman. The mad rush to their son's hospital bedside, anguish and fear for his physical health, shock from the nature of his injury, and the dread of the challenges to be faced in the coming months and years...Lynda's account of how she adjusted to the reality that her eldest son had decided to physically become a woman is the story of a family. Tears and laughter, support and withdrawal, accompany Toni -- now the eldest daughter -- as she maps out her new life.

And with her all the time is Lynda, her mother. Helping to select her wardrobe, guiding her in the subtleties of speech and behaviour, and supporting her, especially in the early stages of her new life as a woman. A mother's story of losing a son and gaining a daughter -- a transsexual transition and a mother's love.

A Change for Good
John Thorp
Research scientist John Thorp began life with the outward appearance of a female but with the mind and spirit of a male. With puberty came increasing confusion and distress. Although graduating MSc and then PhD and lecturing in chemistry at Guy's Hospital Medical School, the young Josephine (Jo) Thorp faced derision and isolation from society. The story, candid and often funny as well as piercingly sad, overwhelmingly shows that what is not understood is so often feared and mocked. The only escape from a lonely non-life seemed to be suicide. Rejection brought Jo Thorp right to the brink.

In one of the rarest of love stories a woman named Joan - much older, married and with children - saw through the outward Jo to the inner John. They fell in love. With her steadfast support, Jo was inspired to endure the operations and treatments to turn him into John. Hounding by reporters out to titillate their readers sent John and Jo to New Zealand. She became a much sought-after teacher, he a lecturer at Auckland University and a researcher at the former DSIR, making a name in his field. But even in New Zealand the hounding wasn't over...

A Change for Good is an extraordinary love story. Two love stories, for after Joan's eventual death John was to marry again, another remarkable woman who has also looked clear-eyed at a remarkable man, and worked with him to make a strong and loving marriage.

Christine Jorgensen
A Personal Autobiography
When ex-G.I. George Jorgensen went to Copenhagen in the early 1950s to consult experts in sexual deviance, he was afraid they'd simply proclaim him a fairy. A full battery of hormonal and psychological tests revealed that, while he was drawn to men, he was no garden-variety homophile; he was a lady. Keeping the secret from his family, Jorgensen endured a groundbreaking series of operations, finally emerging in November 1952 as a delicately beautiful young woman. "I merely wanted to correct what I considered a misjudgment of Nature," wrote Jorgensen, who died in 1989.

No one seeing the photographs included here can doubt the success of Jorgensen's transformation or wonder too long at the fascination she engendered back home, where a newspaper bought her story for $20,000 and she was proclaimed New York City's Woman of the Year. A stage and screen career soon followed. Jorgensen offers a somewhat flattering and selectively abridged account of herself in the autobiography, but no more so than any plucky girl smiling her way through what must have been, at times, a harrowing and lonely journey, but one that she conducted with remarkable dignity.

How Sex Changed
Joanne Meyerowitz
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.

True Selves: Understanding Transsexualism-For Families, Friends, Coworkers, and Helping Professionals
by Mildred L. Brown (Author), Chloe Ann Rounsley
Brown and Rounsley's solidly based introduction to many aspects of living as a transsexual provides general information about the dilemma of feeling trapped in the wrong physical gender, about such a person's development, and about locating a gender therapist. Brown and Rounsley also detail the process of transition between genders, starting with legal and identity changes and proceeding to changing outward modes of self-presentation (they include sample "coming-out" letters to employers, coworkers, friends, and family members) and dealing with bathroom issues, hormone treatments, surgical options, and guidelines for finding social support. First-person accounts from transsexuals augment general readability and put human faces on the issues discussed.

Filled with wisdom and understanding, this groundbreaking book paints a vivid portrait of conflicts transsexuals face on a daily basis--and the courage they must summon as they struggle to reveal their true being to themselves and others. True Selves offers valuable guidance for those who are struggling to understand these people and their situations.

Using real life stories, actual letters, and other compelling examples, the authors give a clear understanding of what it means to be transsexual. They also give other useful advice, including how to deal compassionately with these commonly misunderstood individuals--by keeping an open heart, communicating fears, pain and support, respecting choices.