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Sunday, December 22, 2002

By Timothy Haggerty

Leaving 'normal': A study of sexual identity in America

A number of years ago, Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, asked Amy Bloom to undertake research that would ultimately result in this brief collection of essays that describe the frontiers of sexual identity in America.

	The Normal Heart: Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites With Attitude By Amy Bloom Random House ($23.95)

Bloom, a practicing psychotherapist as well as a fiction writer, investigated the experiences of three sexual minorities: Female-to-male transsexuals (FTM), heterosexual cross-dressers and the intersexed or hermaphrodites.

Each of these three essays describes the people who live as sexual outliers and the communities that have sprung up to support them, including plastic surgeons who devise ways by which transsexuals can engage in intercourse, the wives of cross-dressers who keep their husbands' secrets and the political activists who attempt to stop the mutilation of those born with indeterminate genitalia.

While this research may have helped Bloom produce some extraordinary fiction -- the narrator in the title story in her collection "A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You" is the fiercely protective mother of a child undergoing gender reassignment -- these pieces are curiously flat.

It is as if Bloom confused clinical detachment with journalistic objectivity: By respecting her subjects' privacy -- normally a laudable goal -- she has also avoided a feeling of intimacy with their stories.

Yet Bloom is still a keen social observer who doesn't let sympathy get in the way of savvy interpretation. She is skeptical, for example, as to the prevailing rhetoric of asexual transvestitism.

With a long tradition of female impersonation, drag queens may be the best-known of Bloom's sexual minorities; with their embrace of traditional sex roles, they are also the least threatening to existing standards of normality.

While most of us now understand that cross-dressing can occur in straight, gay or bisexual men, Bloom still detects the siren call of sexual arousal behind the wigs and makeup despite protests that the practice stems from an innate femininity.

Rather than being exotic or liberating, Bloom shows that transsexuals are beset with the same problems that most of us encounter every day, and some that don't. For example, there's the cost of ongoing medical treatment that is compounded by institutionalized misogyny, even for those who cross the sexual Rubicon: Medical insurance companies that reimburse for Viagra routinely consider gender reassignment a cosmetic procedure.

Most FTM transsexuals thereby opt out of phalloplasties not through some postmodern conceptualization of sexuality, but because they would rather spend the money elsewhere.

Finally, Bloom examines the world of the intersexed. Usually subjected to a series of surgical procedures meant to assign them to one or another category as infants, adult hermaphrodites have begun questioning the medical wisdom that consigns them to hormonal manipulation, castration and psychological trauma.

She also investigates the history of hermaphroditism, tracing its cultural roots back to the ancient Greeks -- no surprise there -- and its evolving medical etiology, showing that our rush to judgment is hardly the only course of action available.

Like "regular" or "natural," "normal" is a word filled with hidden meaning. Instead of existing "abnormally," we meet social expectations and build our communities by eventually accepting our own flaws and desires.

Bloom argues that for those of us who are different, "normal' can become a kind of tyranny, making deviance the final price of self-acceptance. With these essays, Bloom introduces us to those who live on the boundaries of our current understanding of sex, gender and sexuality.

In the same manner that historians argued that the frontier shaped American culture or that economists posit that change occurs at the margin, Bloom suggests that our own sexualities will be altered, ultimately, by the explorations of those who live in uncharted territory.

Tim Haggerty is associate director of the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University.