Gender Blenders.(SHE'S NOT THERE: A LIFE IN TWO GENDERS)(DRESS CODES: OF THREE GIRLHOODS--MY MOTHER'S, MY FATHER'S, AND MINE)(Book Review)

James Boylan grew up feeling that he was a woman trapped inside a man's body; in his early forties, he chose to risk everything, including his marriage, to pursue another identity. This journey is the subject of Jennifer Finney Boylan's memoir SHE'S NOT THERE: A LIFE IN TWO GENDERS (Broadway). How could James--who renamed himself Jennifer--explain to his wife, Grace, and his best friend, the novelist Richard Russo, that he hadn't felt at home in his own skin? The most moving parts of the book are the e-mail exchanges with Russo that Boylan reproduces verbatim. As much as Russo wants to believe his friend's account of himself, he doesn't find the character of Jenny credible: "Here, you insist, is THE REAL ME, the me I've kept a secret all these years. And yet [it] seems mannered, studied, implausible," Russo writes. Russo misses the old ...