To the Editor:
I know it is in a newspaper's interest to have attention-grabbing headlines, but must they completely miss the point for the sake of sensationalism ("Boylan speaks on personal impact of sex change," Oct. 10)? "Sex change" certainly sounds provocative and cutting-edge, but it fails to reflect what Jennifer Finney Boylan actually came to Dartmouth to talk about: transsexuality and gender identity. It treats the sex change surgery as the core of transsexuality, when really it is, if not a peripheral, then only one of many steps (both physical and psychological) in the journey a transsexual person may face. Transsexuals are people who consider themselves to be a different gender from the one their genitals would indicate, and as a male-to-female transsexual, Boylan informed us all about the struggle to reconcile what's between the legs with what's between the ears. Surely that should have been the subject of the article too.
