Dixie mystery: a best-selling author tells the true story of Charleston socialite Dawn Simmons, whose transition from male to female was just one of her adventures.Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love * Edward Ball Edward Ball is the name of:
Dawn Simmons had it all, starting with a childhood at England's Sissinghurst Castle, home of Vista Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson Noun 1. Harold Nicolson - English diplomat and author (1886-1968) Nicolson, Sir Harold George Nicolson . As an adult, Simmons inherited money from a New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Whitney; was accepted by the upper crust in her adopted home of Charleston, S.C.; married a sexy husband and had a beautiful daughter. Simmons also had one of the first sex-reassignment surgeries in the United States. The story of her journey between continents, sexes, and social classes animates Edward Ball's fascinating investigation. Ball--who won the 1998 National Book Award with Slaves in, the Family, a look into his own Southern family's slaveholding slave·hold·er n. One who owns or holds slaves. slave  hold ing adj. past--took an interest in Simmons when she wrote him shortly before her death in 2000. (She claimed to have once owned the Balls' Chippendale commode commodePiece of furniture resembling the English chest of drawers, used in France from the late 17th century. Most had marble tops, and some were fitted with pairs of doors. chair.) Along with the rest of Charleston, Ball already knew her by reputation. In the early 1960s she had made a flashy entrance as Gordon Hall, a wealthy antiques dealer originally from England. In 1968, Ball writes, "Gordon Hall surprised everyone when he began living as a woman, and took the name Dawn Hall. To change to the other sex was not a very Southern thing to do, and it was particularly out of line in Charleston, the queen city of the old Confederacy Confederacy, name commonly given to the Confederate States of America (1861–65), the government established by the Southern states of the United States after their secession from the Union. . Doubling the shock, Dawn Hall claimed she already was a woman. She said she'd actually been born a girl but, due to a genital anomaly, misidentified as a boy. Therefore, the surgery she'd decided to obtain had merely corrected her sex, hot changed it." Hall went on to triple the shock--and ensure her ostracism--by marrying a much younger black man, John-Paul Simmons, who allegedly fathered her child and unequivocally spent her money. The story wouldn't let Ball go. He asked questions, traveled, studied the medical literature. In England he interviewed Nigel Nicolson, elderly son of the lesbian Vita and the gay Harold, whose marriage had been unorthodox but happy. Nicholson remembered Hall as the son of a castle servant, but the old man could shed no light on Ball's overriding concern: Was Gordon Hall's anatomy such that, as she claimed, she could be the same only male-to-female transsexual trans·sex·u·al n. A person who strongly identifies with the opposite gender and who chooses to live as a member of the opposite gender or to become one by surgery. adj. 1. Of or relating to such a person. 2. ever to have given birth? In the end Ball ferrets out the truth, but not before artfully briefing the reader on sexual dimorphism Sexual dimorphism Any difference, morphological or behavioral, between males and females of the same species. In many animals, the sex of an individual can be determined at a glance. , sex-change operations, transsexual psychology, and Charleston mores, He has written a polymorphously entertaining exopse. Drabelle is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World. |
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