Art, gender, and sex research.

The Gender Frontier, by Mariette Pathy Allen. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag. 2003, 145 pp. Cloth, $36.00.

Human gender and sexuality is a large subject area for research and investigation. It is a subject to which almost every discipline, from anthropology to zoology, can make significant contributions. Art can make its own unique contribution, and this is what Mariette Pathy Allen has done through her photographic studies of transgender people. She has been a fixture at many of the meetings of "trans" people, and this is the second volume of her photographs.

Pathy Allen's first volume, Transformations: Cross-dressers and Those Who Love Them (New York: E.P. Dutton), was published in 1989 and demonstrated the tremendous differences among what she then called "cross dressers." Photos in the first volume were accompanied by brief biographical sketches, emphasizing something that no research monograph on trans people can do: the diversity among the individuals involved. Some of these photos were family scenes; others were photographs of the transition from one sex to the other. Regardless of the setting, the photos portrayed lifestyles that gave insights even to the casual reader.

Pathy Allen's most recent book is published in both English and German, and is both decisive and diverse. She includes female-to-male and male-to-female transsexuals and a wide variety of trans individuals in formal and informal settings, both comic and serious. Pathy Allen photographed trans people parachuting from a plane, working in a laboratory, playing with children, attending church, bathing with their mate, dancing, operating a lathe, picketing, and performing everyday tasks. The collection also includes non-trans people who are hostile, one bearing a sign that reads, "God Does not Make Mistakes." This photo is countered on the next page by trans people carrying signs with slogans such as "Transsexuals Are Not Disposable People" and "End the Hate. Stop the Crime Against Transgenders." Other signs protest against genital mutilation to young children. Issues that were in the closet in Pathy Allen's first book are now out in the open.

It becomes evident in the photos that transgendered people face great odds in making a gender shift. They often sacrifice family, social, financial, and professional status, but it is also apparent that some such individuals manage to keep their family and survive in their new life without loss of professional status. It is clear, too, that they certainly gain social support from a growing group that is out front about its trans status, including those who participate in annual lobbying day in Washington D.C. Pathy Allen emphasizes that they are far more political in the past few years than they were earlier.

Pathy Allen explains that in her earlier book, many transgender people were asking why they were that way, while today, they are far more confident. Many of her photographic subjects described feeling as though they are leading the way out of narrow gender confinement. Trans people are more united as a movement, including individuals who were regarded as intersex individuals at birth, to part-time cross dressers, to the surgically altered, to those who without surgery live in a different gender role than their genitals would indicate. In short, she puts a human face on the diverse group who are trans people.

Reviewed by Vern L. Bullough, Ph.D., D.Sci, R.N., 3304 West Sierra Drive, Westlake Village, CA, 91362; e-mail: [e-mail].