OVER THE SEX BORDER

London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1963. First printing. Near fine in near fine jacket.. First edition, publisher's file copy, of one of the earliest serious studies of transgender experience, by a pioneering trans woman, one of the first to be married in a church under English law. This comprehensive survey preceded Harry Benjamin's famous THE TRANSSEXUAL PHENOMENON (which does not cite it) by three years, and was published after the author's own widely-reported transition. While Turtle's prior training as a dentist and experience as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy provide some background for her chapters on biology and medicine, her careful distinctions between transvestism, homosexuality, and transsexualism owe much to the conservative theories of sexuality and sex roles current among even the more forward-thinking psychologists and psychiatrists of the day. Turtle argues extensively for "patience, understanding, and kindness" and against sensationalism and cruelty from the public and from the medical profession, even as she considered intersex women mistakenly assigned male at birth, like herself, as fundamentally different from other trans women. Following invasive newspaper reporting on her own transition, Tuttle received a huge influx of letters from "basically sincere, nice" trans people whose many stories informed her case-classifications and psychological theories, as did her discussions with consultants Alexander Cawadias, John Randell, and Kenneth Walker, who provided the foreword. Tuttle's determinedly anti-sensational viewpoint perhaps accounts for her book's relative lack of fame or notoriety; she writes with firsthand knowledge but without without the desire to capitalize on her life story (her autobiography would not appear for another 30 years). A scarce and important text in trans history, rare in jacket. 8.25'' x 5.25''. Original blue cloth with gilt-lettered spine. In original unclipped (30/-) yellow printed dust jacket. 319, [1] pages. Publisher's "File Copy" stamp to jacket flap and rear panel. Light edgewear to boards and jacket, very faint traces of soil to jacket. (Inventory #: 52842)