About the Book

The book’s editor, Laura Erickson-Schroth, MD, MA is a recent graduate of Dartmouth Medical School. Growing up in Brooklyn, NY, a child of feminist and environmental lawyers, she was guided by their love of activism and service. Laura attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan and then Middlebury College in Vermont, where she became involved in feminist and LGBT student groups. During medical school, she returned home to New York City for a year to earn a master’s in Women and Gender Studies at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. During her last year in medical school, Laura chose electives in transgender medicine, transgender surgery and gender variant pediatrics. These clinical rotations complemented the relationships she had with friends who are transgender. They made her acutely aware of the lack of comprehensive resources that exist for gender-variant people as they make important decisions in their lives and compelled her to begin working on a book that would attempt to provide these resources. Laura has finished a one year fellowship as the Director of Student Programming for the American Medical Student Association, and has started a residency in Psychiatry.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor at Colby College and the author of eleven books. Her memoir, She’s Not There, was published in 2003 and is currently in its eighth printing. She’s Not There won an award from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2004 and has been published in many foreign additions. Boylan has been a frequent guest on a number of national television and radio programs, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King, The Today Show, Barbara Walters Special, NPR’s Marketplace, and the Diane Rehm Show. She has given plenary and keynote speeches at colleges and universities across the country, including Amherst, Yale, Wesleyan, Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Bucknell, Johns Hopkins, Dickinson, Bates, Skidmore, Bowdoin,  Ohio State, Middlebury, Gettysburg, the University of Maine, Georgia State, the University of Puget Sound, and Westminster College in Salt Lake City. Boylan’s nonfiction has appeared on the op/ed pages of the New York Times, in GQ magazine, Allure, and Glamour.

 Holiday Simmons is a genderqueer,

Fresh! White is a Certified Co-Active Life Coach, writer, speaker and presenter. Fresh!, born female, began identifying as a boy before the age of 6. Today Fresh! identifies as a TransGender, Butch, Dyke, African American guy. After coming out as gay at age 14, Fresh! began and continues to be an advocate for equality and freedom of expression for all. As Principal of Affirmative Acts Co-Active Life Coaching and currently a speaker with both The San Francisco and Marin Spectrum Speaker's Bureaus (and a certified speaker for Out & Equal), Fresh! facilitates and participates in discussions which help to provide real-life experiences and information to the general population regarding the LBGTQQI communities. Fresh! also has the honor of being a Life-Coach for members of the Brown Boi Project as well as a member of Prism Coaching. Fresh!'s history includes sitting on the board of CUAV, the SF Dyke March, the San Francisco TransMarch, and raising money for such groups as NGLTF and Pride at Work from 1987-2007 through his work as a Drag King and Events Manager. Fresh! and his wife, writer, Jen Cross, share a home together in Northern California.

Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, Ph.D. aka Michael A. Gilbert is Full Professor of Philosophy at York University, Toronto, Canada. S/he has published two novels, a monograph entitled Coalescent Argumentation, as well a popular book on argument, How to Win an Argument, now in a third edition. More recently s/he has been publishing scholarly articles in Gender Theory including an essay in Hypatia in 2009. Miqqi Alicia is a life-long cross dresser and an activist in the international transgender community. S/he is the book review editor and regular columnist for Transgender Tapestry, the magazine of the International Foundation for Gender Education, a recipient, in 2007, of an IFGE Trinity Award, and Director of Fantasia Fair. S/he has presented workshops at numerous trans events including Fantasia Fair, Southern Comfort, and First Event. See her website for more information.

T. Evan Smith, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of psychology at Elizabethtown College whose research interests include gender development during adolescence and emerging adulthood, the experiences of LGBTQ youth, and essentialist and constructionist understandings of gender and sexuality.  He is co-editing a special issue of the journal Feminism & Psychology on “Trans(cending) Psychology: Advancing Feminist Scholarship on Gender and Transgender Experience.”  Evan also works with Common Roads, an organization designed to support and empower LGBTQ youth in central Pennsylvania. 

Jamie Roberts was born and raised as a male in Griffin, Georgia.  Graduated from Georgia College and State University in 1994 with a B.S. in Psychology.  Graduated 1999 from the University of Georgia School of Law with a Juris Doctor.  Transitioned to female in the late nineties.  Currently employed as a Public Defender in the Coweta Judicial Circuit of Georgia.  Board Member, Georgia Equality, a statewide organization advancing fairness for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Georgians.  Interests include history, videography, acting, and exploring sacred traditions, particularly as they relate to gender nonconformity.

Heath Mackenzie Reynolds is

Zil Garner Goldstein works as a nurse at a primary care and infectious disease clinic in New York City called Village Care.  She helps to care for predominantly low-income folks, many of whom are HIV positive and/or transgender and gender non-conforming.  She has filled a similar position in the past at Housing Works, Inc and also worked as a transgender rights organizer in Hartford, CT at the Connecticut TransAdvocacy Coalition.  She is currently getting her Master's degree, and will soon be a Family Nurse Practitioner.  For play, she fancies herself an acrobat, and can often be found swinging from a trapeze.  She is incredibly excited to be working on Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, remembering the awkward feelings in her 13 year-old stomach when her mother lovingly bought her a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves for Boys.

Helen Boyd is the author of My Husband Betty which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and is now in its 7th printing. Her second book, She’s Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband has been called “the (im)perfect modern love story” and a postmodern reflection on transness. Her blog (en)gender can be found online at www.myhusbandbetty.com. Boyd has been running an online group for couples since 2000, and has spoken at many trans conferences, including the IFGE, First Event, Fantasia Fair, Southern Comfort, the Chicago Be-All, and also at special events, like Trans Issues Week at Yale University. Helen and Betty have appeared on The Dr. Keith Ablow Show and spoke about GLBT marriage on PBS In the Life. Her writing has also appeared in anthologies edited by Matt Bernstein Sycamore and Vern Bullough. Helen Boyd is a nom de plume for the otherwise bookish Gail Kramer. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from The City College of New York with a degree in literature and a few other awards in tow. Her other interests – a love for the films of Buster Keaton, punk rock, writing fiction, and the history of anthracite coal mining in the U.S. – have taken a backseat to her study of gender. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Betty and their three cats.