Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

I love how ethnographic and well-crafted this description from Amy Bloom’s Normal is:

During the Harry Benjamin symposium, I talk to other doctors besides Laub, and to psychologists, psychiatrists, even psychoanalysts, people who collectively have worked with a thousand transsexuals and their families, in the United States and in northern Europe. Among them is Dr. Leah Schaefer, who is a psychologist, a genetic female, and a past president of the Harry Benjamin Association, and has treated hundreds of people like Loren, James, Luis, and Lyle. She is small and rounded, the right kind of Mitteleuropa figure for full skirts, big belts, and a lace fichu at the neck. We meet at her Manhattan office, which is in her home and is itself homey, haimish — dried flowers, ceramic birds, carved boxes, family photographs, and a little sculpture of an Orthodox Jewish man studying Torah. I didn’t expect the mezuzah on the doorway, or that she would have spent twelve years singing professionally, or that we would end up talking about her closetful of shoes, talking with the same shared enthusiasm and tenderness you hear in the voices of boat enthusiasts, golfers, and transsexuals comparing surgical work