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For when you, or those close to you, have gender-identity issues
In the 1970s, the novelist John Irving anticipated today's Caitlyn Jenner-led apotheosis of gender-identity awareness with The World According to Garp (1978), in which the football player Robert Muldoon becomes Roberta through surgery. Roberta tells Garp, "I always knew I should have been a girl." Her friends had tried to persuade her not to change her sex, she explains, but she fiercely defended her decision. Irving presciently understood that a person's sexual self-definition resides not in the mirror, but in the mind.
Published 04/25/2016
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