The City of Lakes CrossGender Community in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota publishes the CLCC News. The September issue of the News carried an article by member Linda 0. titled "Who is Amy Bloom and Why is She Saying Such Awful Things About Us?" Amy Bloom is a novelist and non-fiction writer with a new book titled Normal: Transsexual CEO’s, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitude. The book is an extension of her earlier article in Atlantic Monthly that was titled "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses."

I wrote about that article in this column several months ago. As you might surmise from the title, the article was not all too flattering towards crossdressers. And that, of course, ran afoul of some in the crossdressing community. I saw nothing very derogatory about the article. In fact, it all seemed like very old news to me: the idea that crossdressers are generally affluent white men with basically conservative lifestyles and opinions only marginally affected by the fact that they like to dress in women’s clothing

In her research for that article, Ms. Bloom came across other aspects of transgenderism such as female-to-male transsexuals and hermaphrodites, and expanded the material into book length, which her publisher scooped up immediately. But having once insulted some members of the transgender community (in their eyes, at least), the long knives are out to get her again.

Although I did read her Atlantic Monthly article in its entirety and found it less than spectacular, I haven’t seen the new book, nor even read excerpts of it. The title, however,

leads me to believe that the book is not exactly treading new ground either. One wonders about the use of the phrase "Transsexual CEO’s." It sounds suspiciously conjured up to further scandalize CEO’s who are now everyone’s favorite whipping boys. I’ll lay odds the publisher insisted on that title. Likewise the use of "Crossdressing Cops" and "Hermaphrodites with Attitude." It all sounds very tired to anyone who is abreast of transgender topics.

In fact, University of Illinois English professor Stephanie Foote reviewed the book thusly: "Bloom seems to believe that she is humanizing people who suffer from invisibility and social exclusion but her prose is often insulting and judgmental. Bloom sometimes writes about her subjects as though their choices and lives are incomprehensible. Despite the author’s avowed liberal agenda, this book is only a more upscale version of the Jerry Springer Show."

That is the crux of most of the TG criticism of her writings as well. She has a manner of seeming to insult the very subjects she ostensibly is trying to illuminate for her readers. The sad part is that so many TO critics will simply brook no criticism — whether real or imagined — about our lifestyle. And that is troubling in a different way than anything Bloom could say about us.

Bloom herself is a divorced mother of three children who now lives in a lesbian relationship in Connecticut. When an interviewer asked her how she made the transition from marriage to divorce to lesbianism, she laughed and said, "That’s so funny. It’s not really like changing from one gender to another." That’s the sort of glib response that belies what seems to be a pretty shallow view of her own situation and of course the transgender people she potshots along the way.

Transcribed with Permission from the December 2002 Issue of Transgender Community News.