Male Femaling: A grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing

Ekins vividly details the innermost desires and the varied practices of males who wear the clothes of women for the pleasure it gives them (cross-dressers), or who wish to change sex and are actively going about it (sex-changers). This unique and fascinating book transforms an area of study previously dominated by clinical models to look instead at cross-dressing and sex-changing as a highly variable social process, tracing the path of the 'male femaler' from 'beginning' to 'consolidating' femaling. Based upon seventeen years of fieldwork, life history work, qualitative analysis, archival work and contact with several thousand cross-dressers and sex-changers, the book develops a theory of 'male femaling' which has major ramifications for both the field of 'transvestism' and 'transexualism', and for the analysis of sex and gender more generally.

Richard Ekins is Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.