If you are transgendered, the feeling of wanting your body to match the sex you feel you are never goes away. For some, though, especially those who grew up before trans people were widely out and advocating for equality, these feelings were often compartmentalized and rarely acted upon. Now that gender reassignment has become much more commonplace, many of these people may feel increasing pressure to finally undergo the procedures they have always secretly wanted.
 
Ken Koch was one of those people. Married twice, a veteran, and a world traveler, a health scare when he was sixty-three prompted him to acknowledge the feelings that had plagued him since he was a small child. By undergoing a host of procedures, he radically changed his appearance and became Anne Koch. In the process though, Anne lost everything that Ken had accomplished. She had to remake herself from the ground up. Hoping to help other people in her age bracket who may be considering transitioning, Anne describes the step by step procedures that she underwent, and shares the cost to her personal life, in order to show seniors that although it is never too late to become the person you always knew you were, it is better to go into that new life prepared for some serious challenges.  Both a fascinating memoir of a well-educated man growing up trans yet repressed in the mid-twentieth century, and a guidebook to navigating the tricky waters of gender reassignment as a senior, It Never Goes Away shows how what we see in the television world of Transparent translates in real life.   

The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory traces the use of the trans feminine as an allegorical figure, from the practice's origins in nineteenth-century sexology through writings in the fields of psychoanalysis, Modernist fiction, and contemporary Queer Theory.
 
The book is the first to identify the process by which medical sources simplified the diversity of trans feminine experience into a single diagnostic narrative. It then demonstrates that this medical figure became an archetype for the "sexual anarchy" of the Modernist period in works by  Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot, and Jean Genet.
 
Thus illuminating the trans feminine's Modernist provenance, the book examines foundational works of Queer Theory that resuscitated the trans feminine allegory at the end of the twentieth century. Insightful and seminal, The New Woman debunks the pervasive reflex beginning in the 1990s to connect trans experience to a late twentieth-century collapse of sexual differences by revealing the Modernist roots of that very formulation.