"Standardizing Sex" is the history of transgender medicine from the 1920s through 2000 in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Slagstad argues that trans medicine in Scandinavia can only be interpreted through the lens of the history of the welfare state. Teams of specialized physicians decided whether or not a person qualified for hormones, surgery, or mental health care until the early 1990s, when bureaucratic changes necessitated the shift to a model that made psychiatrists into gatekeepers and others into functionaries. Along the way, the reader learns more about the medical journey of Christine Jorgensen in the early 1950s and meets trans people who shaped Scandinavian medicine as much as that medicine shaped them. In the conclusion, Slagstad notes that present-day trans medicine is still based on a sexual binary and asks, "what would a trans medicine not based in a binary of sex look like?" That's a good question for the hopefully many readers of this book to ponder.
A history of trans medicine that uses Scandinavian sources to tell a global story.
Standardizing Sex traces the emergence of trans medicine in Scandinavia in the twentieth century, exploring the construction and negotiation of medical expertise among medical professionals, patients, and activists in the media and government bureaucracy. The book combines the author's analysis of medical records and other archival sources with oral history interviews with former patients, activists, doctors, psychologists, and civil servants. Physician-historian Ketil Slagstad uses the Scandinavian story of sex reassignment to anchor not only the role of the state but also bureaucracy and social rights. Scandinavian…
"Passing Strange" is the true story of Clarence King, a nineteenth-century American explorer and surveyor and his Black common-law wife, Ada Copeland, who knew him as James Todd. King persuaded Copeland that he was a Black man who passed as white, when in fact the reverse was true, and lived a double life until telling her the truth on his deathbed when he passed in 1901. Copeland outlived King for more than 62 years, dying at age 103 in 1964. Though Copeland left few records behind of her thoughts during her long life and the betrayal that shaped it, Sandweiss used archival materials to draw a convincing picture of how a Black woman in Copeland's situation might have felt and perceived her situation. Sandweiss's extensive research and sense of narrative drama keeps the reader engaged in the story and King and Copeland in their memory, long after finishing the book.
Read Martha A. Sandweiss's posts on the Penguin Blog
The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West, and the woman he loved
Clarence King was a late nineteenth-century celebrity, a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as "the best and brightest of his generation." But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life-the first as the prominent white geologist and writer Clarence King, and a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd.…
"Beyond Limits" is a memoir by one of the few third-trimester abortion providers in the United States, who is now retired. Sella organizes this memoir, which is largely about her professional life, by creating composite abortion-seekers from the thousands of patients she saw throughout the years. Her composites are further grouped into two categories: those seeking care because there is a fetal problem, and those seeking care because there is a maternal problem. The composite patients serve two purposes: they maintain the anonymity of past patients and show that seemingly individual problems have universal components. Sella provides unique insight into the world of abortion care and the patients who seek that care, and she is clear-eyed about how the procedure affects lives.
"Beyond Limits is moving, personal, insightful, and powerfully written. This book helps us to see people who seek abortions with clarity and compassion, as people in the real world, rather than as the objects of an abstract moral or political debate."—Diana Greene Foster, author of The Turnaway Study
A compassionate perspective on late-term abortion that challenges preconceived notions of who gets abortions and why
Within both the anti-abortion and pro-choice movements, third-trimester abortion is often stigmatized and misunderstood. For 20 years, Dr. Shelley Sella saw patients whose diverse backgrounds and circumstances led them to the same difficult decision: to end…
A concise overview of fertility technology—its history, practical applications, and ethical and social implications around the world.
In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman’s uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world.
Donna J. Drucker’s concise and eminently readable account introduces the five principal types of fertility technologies used in human reproduction—artificial insemination; ovulation timing; sperm, egg, and embryo freezing; in vitro fertilization; and IVF in uterine transplants—discussing the development, manufacture, dispersion, and use of each. Geographically, it focuses on countries where innovations have emerged and countries where these technologies most profoundly affect individuals and population policies. Drucker’s wide-ranging perspective reveals how these technologies, used for birth control as well as conception in many cases, have been critical in shaping the moral, practical, and political meaning of human life, kinship, and family in different nations and cultures since the mid-nineteenth century.
