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Title: Ethel Person, Who Studied Sexual Fantasies, Dies at 77
Post by: Shana A on December 29, 2012, 09:11:52 AM
Post by: Shana A on December 29, 2012, 09:11:52 AM
Ethel Person, Who Studied Sexual Fantasies, Dies at 77
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: October 20, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/nyregion/ethel-person-who-studied-sexual-fantasies-dies-at-77.html?_r=0 (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/nyregion/ethel-person-who-studied-sexual-fantasies-dies-at-77.html?_r=0)
Ethel Person, a Columbia University psychiatrist who did pioneering research on sexuality, visiting sex shops and drag dance clubs to help herself understand what motivates transsexuals and transvestites, and conducting broad-based clinical studies on the role of sexual fantasy in people's lives, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 77.
[...]
"I remember the first time a guy dressed as a woman asked me to dance," she recalled in a 2003 interview with The New York Times. "I felt his breasts poking me through his dress. That was a moment of truth for me. I wasn't put off or frightened. That's not ever something you know ahead of time — you can only find out when you do it."
Her work, upsetting the conventional thinking, found that many transsexuals and transvestites did not perceive themselves as homosexuals but rather saw themselves in many different lights — sometimes, for example, as a woman trapped in a man's body, and sometimes as a heterosexual who preferred a feminine demeanor.
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Ethel Person
B. 1934 | By STEPHEN BURT
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/30/magazine/the-lives-they-lived-2012.html?view=Ethel_Person (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/30/magazine/the-lives-they-lived-2012.html?view=Ethel_Person)
At least she looked; at least she listened. The psychiatrist Ethel Spector Person became in the 1970s one of the first mental-health researchers who tried to meet cross-dressers, transsexuals and (as we now say) transgender people on our own turf, or on our own terms. She visited cross-dressing societies and drag-queen balls; she interviewed all the transsexual patients of the celebrated Dr. Harry Benjamin, and she drew on those visits, those interviews and on hard-to-find publications, including porn. At once a sexologist in the tradition of Alfred C. Kinsey, a psychoanalyst in the tradition of Freud and a writer sympathetic to feminist critique who knew a sexist culture could change, Person asked how we come to see ourselves as men or women, gay or straight or neither, and how to help people whose sense of self causes them pain.
The results make unsettling reading. In papers like "The Transsexual Syndrome in Males" (1974) and "Homosexual Cross-Dressers" (1984), Person and her collaborator, Dr. Lionel Ovesey, distinguished "core gender identity" (whether we think we are truly men or women) from "gender-role identity" (whether we act macho or demure, no-nonsense or girlie-girl) and both from sexual-object choice. Those distinctions can seem obvious now, but they had to be explained at length back then, when those explanations — for psychoanalytic thinkers like Person — often led to broad claims about unconscious origins. Person wrote that the "point of transvestitic life is to live in a society of women," that male transsexualism derived "from the unconscious wish to merge with the mother" and concluded, albeit cautiously, that "extreme childhood effeminacy" involved "a pervasive disorder" often linked to "separation anxiety." That's not something parents of girlish boys today, or even adult cross-dressers like me, want to hear; nor, the weight of evidence now suggests, is it something that we should believe.
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: October 20, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/nyregion/ethel-person-who-studied-sexual-fantasies-dies-at-77.html?_r=0 (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/nyregion/ethel-person-who-studied-sexual-fantasies-dies-at-77.html?_r=0)
Ethel Person, a Columbia University psychiatrist who did pioneering research on sexuality, visiting sex shops and drag dance clubs to help herself understand what motivates transsexuals and transvestites, and conducting broad-based clinical studies on the role of sexual fantasy in people's lives, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 77.
[...]
"I remember the first time a guy dressed as a woman asked me to dance," she recalled in a 2003 interview with The New York Times. "I felt his breasts poking me through his dress. That was a moment of truth for me. I wasn't put off or frightened. That's not ever something you know ahead of time — you can only find out when you do it."
Her work, upsetting the conventional thinking, found that many transsexuals and transvestites did not perceive themselves as homosexuals but rather saw themselves in many different lights — sometimes, for example, as a woman trapped in a man's body, and sometimes as a heterosexual who preferred a feminine demeanor.
--------
Ethel Person
B. 1934 | By STEPHEN BURT
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/30/magazine/the-lives-they-lived-2012.html?view=Ethel_Person (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/30/magazine/the-lives-they-lived-2012.html?view=Ethel_Person)
At least she looked; at least she listened. The psychiatrist Ethel Spector Person became in the 1970s one of the first mental-health researchers who tried to meet cross-dressers, transsexuals and (as we now say) transgender people on our own turf, or on our own terms. She visited cross-dressing societies and drag-queen balls; she interviewed all the transsexual patients of the celebrated Dr. Harry Benjamin, and she drew on those visits, those interviews and on hard-to-find publications, including porn. At once a sexologist in the tradition of Alfred C. Kinsey, a psychoanalyst in the tradition of Freud and a writer sympathetic to feminist critique who knew a sexist culture could change, Person asked how we come to see ourselves as men or women, gay or straight or neither, and how to help people whose sense of self causes them pain.
The results make unsettling reading. In papers like "The Transsexual Syndrome in Males" (1974) and "Homosexual Cross-Dressers" (1984), Person and her collaborator, Dr. Lionel Ovesey, distinguished "core gender identity" (whether we think we are truly men or women) from "gender-role identity" (whether we act macho or demure, no-nonsense or girlie-girl) and both from sexual-object choice. Those distinctions can seem obvious now, but they had to be explained at length back then, when those explanations — for psychoanalytic thinkers like Person — often led to broad claims about unconscious origins. Person wrote that the "point of transvestitic life is to live in a society of women," that male transsexualism derived "from the unconscious wish to merge with the mother" and concluded, albeit cautiously, that "extreme childhood effeminacy" involved "a pervasive disorder" often linked to "separation anxiety." That's not something parents of girlish boys today, or even adult cross-dressers like me, want to hear; nor, the weight of evidence now suggests, is it something that we should believe.