Although the term transgender itself has achieved familiarity only within the past decade, this authoritative collection of articles demonstrates that the study of behaviors, bodies, and subjective identities which contest common Eurocentric notions of gender has a history stretching back at least to the early 20th century.Before the First World War, European sexologists began to devise new terminology to describe gender-atypical individuals. By mid-century, feminist scholars had appropriated scientific paradigms that posited a distinction between bodily sex and psychosocial gender, and deployed them in politically radical ways that envisioned greater equality between genders. In the closing years of the last century, an upstart generation of queer theorists further disarticulated the presumed coherence of heteronormative personhood to create a broader awareness of just how diverse gendered identity can be.The Transgender Reader encompasses all these critical and conceptual developments, gathering roughly fifty influential texts that, taken together, document the evolution of transgender studies in the English-speaking world. By bringing together the voices and experiences of transgender individuals, doctors, psychologists and academic theorists, this volume will be a seminal text for transgender studies and related queer theory. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.