Emily Skidmore is Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University.
"Skidmore offers a three-fold critique. First, she provides
well-drawn and sympathetic profiles of the compelling trans men
considered; second, she offers a critical assessment of the press
of the day and how it helped foster a new morality . . .and third,
she engages in an ongoing critique of her field of study, LGBT
scholarship."
*New York Journal of Books*
"In True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the 20th
Century, Emily Skidmore describes how manhood in that day was as
much a moral status as a sexual category. . .an especially
intriguing . . . analysis."
*Inside Higher Education*
"Dynamic, compelling, and wholly original,True Sexis an invaluable
addition to LGBTQ studies."
*Foreword Reviews*
"Afascinating, humanizing look into the lives of trans men at the
turn of the 20th century."
*Library Journal*
"Though an influx of bathroom bills would have us believe that
disrupting the gender binary is a new phenomenon, trans people have
been hereliving, assimilating, and creating families that protected
them . . . Youll be engrossed by their lives, and how Skidmore
interweaves American history with their decisions."
*Bitch Magazine*
"True Sex is an important addition to queer and gender history and
an insightful study of trans men that . . . challenge[s] several
prevailing gender and queer theories. This brilliantly written and
meticulously researched book should be part of all university
gender curriculums."
*The Washington Bookreview*
"A lucid, compelling, and counterintuitive exploration of transmen
at the turn of the twentieth century. In showing that many transmen
were accepted by their communities, both in life and in death,
Skidmore complicates a number of the accepted tenets of queer
historiography: that queer people were persecuted, that sexology
informed that persecution, and that queer people necessarily
flocked to places where they might find community with people like
themselves."
*Nicholas Syrett, Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies, University of Kansas*
"Emily Skidmore's True Sex is an important addition to the
literature on transgender history, offering a fresh approach to
studying the subject and a wealth of new information that will help
to broaden our understanding of sex and gender roles."
*Popmatters*
"In this important account of the 'unexceptional queerness' of
transmasculine people living, loving, workingand dying in
non-metropolitian locations throughout the United States around the
turn of the last century, Emily Skidmore makes brilliant use of the
searchable online databases of historical newspapers that have
revolutionized our understanding of the past to tell us a newstory
about what the world was once like."
*Susan Stryker,founding co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly*
"The best sort of history surprising and delightful. Emily
Skidmores True Sex reveals ordinary American communities at the
turn of the twentieth century to have been much queerer than
commonly imagined. By reconstructing the lives of trans men whose
stories appeared in newspapers between 1870 and 1930, Skidmore
makes a major contribution to our knowledge of queer history."
*Rachel Hope Cleves,University of Victoria*
"Tracking revelations of true sex in the decades around the turn of
the twentieth-century U.S., Emily Skidmore recovers a history full
of surprises: one in which people assigned female at birth lived
ordinary lives as men, often in small towns and rural outposts.
Newspaper revelations about trans men, Skidmore proposes, invited
debate about queer embodiment and the porous boundaries of the
gender binary. True Sex contains provocations and insights for
queer history, for trans history, and for American history."
*Regina Kunzel,author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven
History of Modern American Sexuality*
"True Sex is a truly phenomenal book. Expansive in scope and
implication, Emily Skidmores meticulously researched study of
gender non-conformity in the late-nineteenth and early
twentieth-century United States is all the more impressive for its
dogged insistence that local entanglements often mattered more than
expert opinion where Americans shifting beliefs about gender and
sexual difference were concerned. A major contribution to the study
of rural and small-town Americas little explored queer history, and
an equally significant contribution to our understanding of rural
and small-town Americas crucially important place in the history of
queer life in the United States."
*Colin R. Johnson,author of Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality
in Rural America*
"The personal accounts are presented in compelling detail and with
compassion, living up to the promise of intimacy suggested by the
cover photo of trans man Kenneth Lisonbee and his wife Stella
Harper from the unlikely year of 1929."
*The Gay & Lesbian Review*
"True Sex explores the varied histories of American trans men long
before that designation even existed. Reviewing newspapers and the
literature of the field then known as sexology, as well as census
data, court records, and trial transcripts, Skidmore weaves a tale
of American gender that is far more complex than many might think,
one that reveals that [gender]has never been a fixed reality."
*Timeline.com*
"This book is not just lucid and easy to follow but also compelling
and eye opening because it shows that our past generations were not
only tolerant to non-normative sexual practices but also celebrated
sexual inversions and differences."
*Sexuality and Culture*
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