When the New York Daily News announced “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty” in 1952, more column inches were dedicated to Christine Jorgensen than to the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Jorgensen would become the first celebrity famous for her transsexuality, and the public was hungry to learn more. Midcentury readers in the United States—many encountering the idea of trans for the first time—wanted to know: What, or who, is a transsexual? How did this category fit into sexological taxonomies inherited from the nineteenth century? And if medical science could offer no clear physical or psychological etiology, what language best expressed the reality of recognizing oneself as trans?

I Changed My Sex! traces these foundational questions back to their midcentury roots. Ranging from mainstream autobiography and university gender clinics to sleaze, pornography, and fiction, rl Goldberg reveals how literature, genre, and institutionalization forged a working language of transness and a durable narrative of trans self-knowing. Grounded in the conflation of feeling, knowing, certainty, and desire, this framework made trans narrative and language portable—yet easily mistaken for pedagogical. Today, trans identity has become so thoroughly entangled with the language of teaching that transphobic anxieties revolve around communicability, or the fear that people might learn to become trans.

Ambitious and rigorously argued, this book demonstrates how transness challenges the boundaries of not only who we are but also what we are capable of learning.