An Introduction

I Want What I Want is a very puzzling novel. Written in the mid-1960s by an established male author who seems to have never written anything similar, and seems to have always resisted speaking about it, the book was published by quite prestigious publishing houses in several countries, in hard-back and later soft-back editions, which went into reprints. The film rights were bought as a vehicle for actress Anne Heywood. The film script was written by a respected writer, Gillian Freeman, with whom, unusually, the original author refused to discuss any of the background to the novel.
    In many ways the novel expresses the condition of frustrated male-to-female "primary transsexuality", which usually seems impossible for those who have not suffered it to grasp, remarkably well. The frustration leads to immense mental stress, which is of course the effect of the situation, the lack of understanding and denial of help, not inherent in the condition.
    It is amazing that the author understands and captures all that so well without apparently basing it upon someone's personal experience, from imagination. But that is, we have to assume, how the book came about.
    The film is no indicator of the novel, which has now been out of print for more than 30 years and so is little known. The ending is different, and bad casting, very unfortunate costume design and ham-fisted direction make it quite unbelievable.

April Ashley at 21 in 1956, and at 14 (above) - a graphic example of those transsexual people who never "pass" convincingly as the gender of their birth sex - often paying a terrible price in violence and social exclusion (see April's account of bullying at school) - and can, given the chance, find it relatively easy to "pass" as the gender of their identity, just as does the protagonist in I Want What I Want.     Another example of the same period (1963) is shown in Dr Harry Benjamin's book.     It was long questioned, by those seeking to "cure", or "prevent" transsexuality, which was for that purpose defined as a condition only of adulthood, whether the physical characteristics that contribute to ease of "passing" "promoted" the transsexuality. So "Experimental" attempts have often been made to force physical masculinisation upon young victims, for example by denying pleaded-for medical intervention in the unwanted puberty until it had fully run it's hated course (as in denial of treatment until adulthood, or until at least 16 in the 1998 UK guidelines of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, their appalling consequnces illustrated by the story of Paula Greenall), or if victims survived that, by testosterone injections, as imposed on April at 17.     Evidence that physical brain gender, where it is a female brain in a male body, can sometimes limit or delay the masculinising hormones, and other evidence that transsexuality is sometimes associated with fine genetic variations that were impossible to distinguish until very recently, but which seriously change the body's sensitivity and reaction to vital hormones, now points the other way, explaining why those abuses, although they did (and still do) much harm, never achieved what was intended. Nina - age 11 - at a friend's birthday party     An alternative approach - based on science, on human rights, and awareness of the dangers of abuse of professional powers - by which parents and others facilitate the natural expression of a child's, or teenager's gender, is well represented by the story told in her own words by eleven-year-old transsexual girl in the short Dutch documentary (made for children's television in 2000) The Day I Decided to be Nina.

    The novel's author makes several references to facts from then quite recently serialised life story of April Ashley (retold as an autobiography, April Ashley's Odyssey, published in 1982, but now long out of print), who, whilst a fashion model in London, was exposed in 1961 as having been born a boy. April grew up in Liverpool, another English seaport a hundred miles to the west of Hull where this story is located (see map, below), but did not transition to live as a girl until she was in Paris. At that point there were no reassignment surgeons in the UK (Sir Harold Gillies, usually regarded as the founder of plastic surgery, who had performed the first male-to-female reassignment surgery using an inverted pedicled penile flap for Roberta Cowell in London on May 15th 1951, had by then retired, and died in 1960), and instead she became a patient of Dr Burou in Casablanca.
    I Want What I Want explores how it might be to transition without leaving one's home town, for an otherwise rather similar person. Whilst April learned of helpful doctors, and saved money through working as a female impersonator at Le Carrousel nightclub, at the same age as that of the protagonist in this novel, the character in the novel is lacking any such help. It would have been the same almost everywhere in the world.
    But in the year the novel was first published (1966), the first gender clinics in university hospitals (most famously at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, opened in 1963) were already operating in the USA (most were closed in a backlash in the the 1980s), and the first such clinic in the UK opened (quietly), and started providing reassignment surgery, the next year. So, only a handful of years after the time in which the novel is set, the reassignment surgery the character so much wants, and needs, was available, without charge, through the UK National Health Service, although it was controversial and difficult to access. Perhaps, if the story had continued she would have found that help, or perhaps it would have been too late.
    After 1967 the London specialists, led by Dr John Randall, would have found the character from this novel an entirely suitable patient. But her time living on a small inheritance without employment would not have been accepted as counting towards their required Real Life Experience period, and, after that was satisfied, there would still have been four or five difficult years on a waiting list for the surgery (now less than 12 months).
    In the 1960s there was no Internet, there were no help groups (support groups for "heterosexual cross-dressers" were founded in both the USA and the UK in 1966, but transsexual people were officially unwelcome, as the association would frighten the wives of members), newspapers and magazines never provided contact information in their sensational stories, and doctors were not at all used to being questioned, especially not by women. Male homosexuality, for which transsexuality was often mistaken, was still illegal in England when the novel was published, although a very active campaign was shortly to result in that law being reformed, but until it was there considerable cause to fear persecution, prosecution, even imprisonment.

By 1966, the year the novel was published, England was the coolest place in the world: The Beatles, the Stones, and a music scene that just ruled everywhere, James Bond and a whole slew of other iconic movies, The Avengers and other television of a range and quality unmatched anywhere, Mary Quant, Carnaby Street and the Kings Road fashion scene... The Avengers in 1965     It seems likely that the novel was written in 1962, after April Ashley's story became known, and delayed some time, because the world of the novel is not that of 1966. It is a young woman's world in which it is as if The Beatles have not, in 1963, taken off on the the very rapid path to being "more famous than Christ", in which the Mini Skirt has not arrived - together with jeans a fashion change of such impact that in 1966 the "New Look" and '50s fashion, and with it much of what had gone before (stockings, girdles) was swept aside and hemlines of even the middle-aged were being sliced above the knee.     In many ways the world belongs more to the late 1950s, connecting with 'A Taste of Honey' (1958), 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' (a 1958 novel and 1961 film) than that of the much more optimistic times that followed.     But the writer knew the city of the story. And perhaps the story reflect that such optimism was not yet justified - and would not be for many years - for such as his prime character.

    Even the term "transsexual", commonly used today, was virtually unknown at the time. Dr. Harry Benjamin, the endocrinologist and sexologist who helped transsexual patients in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s, '60s and early '70s, first used the term in professional lectures in 1952, but only published his major work, The Transsexual Phenomenon, the first dealing sympathetically with the subject, in the same year as this novel appeared. The term did not become really current in England until after Harry Benjamin visited the country in 1969. This helps explain the wide range of ill-fitting terms the character in the novel uses. Newspapers most often used "sex change", whilst doctors often used "sexual invert", "extreme homosexual", "transvestite", etc.. Without a common term and without sympathetic published work even the best libraries - and the character in this novel has combed Hull reference libary thoroughly - were largely useless. So the novel is quite realistic, if partially now as a period piece.
    Not entirely outdated though. An online search of the catalogues of the public libraries in the Hull area unfortunately reveals a shocking paucity of relevant books. This novel, although set in Hull, is entirely missing. A single copy of a 1991 (and so largely outdated) pamphlet by a support group is apparently all there is. But there are computers in the libraries giving free access to the Web...
    To return briefly to the movie based on this novel; it gets criticised for having a woman, who never manages to come over as a boy, playing the lead character and for the process of transition between gender roles being portrayed as smooth, and yet neither of those, related, points are fair. Some transsexual people's experiences do come over in a similar way, although others do not. Many varied portrayals are needed, rather than a single one reflecting some "typical", or most common, or most sensational experience. The true problems with the film are the crudity of the portrayal of such a "boy", and those who mistreat "him", and how, in failing to be realistic, it also failed, in vital ways, but not in the more trivial ones, to take into account the years that passed between the novel being written and the film being made. The costumes moved forward a decade, embracing the giddy heights of 1970s women's wear, and the arrival of the "second wave" of feminism (the protagonist ostentatiously reads 'The Second Sex' at a garden party) was acknowledged, but, even though the ending was changed, the fact that knowledge of and treatment of transsexuality in the UK by the National Health Service had "gone public", was not. And thus the film contributed to the ignorance and misinformation, when it could easily have done the opposite.
    Although there are massive quanities of "transformation" or transgender fiction around now, mostly portraying unwanted happenings for the excitement of transvestites, I Want What I Want seems to have been the first English-language novel to portray male-to-female transsexuality. Christopher Bohjalian's highly researched but far less involving Trans-Sister Radio, aboout later transition from several perspectives, followed in 2000, 34 years later, with Julie Anne Peters' acclaimed teen novel Luna (2004) apparently being the only the third.

Now read the novel...

The arrow on this map of modern Hull (properly known as Kingston-upon-Hull, in northern England) indicates "The Avenues" area where the novel's main character passed her time as a girl. The map does not show the river ferry upon which one scene is set, since those ferries ceased to operate when the Humber bridge was opened in the late 1970s. The ferry linked the city centre with New Holland, on the south bank of the Humber. The rail line to Cottingham and Beverley, and thence to Bridlington, is shown. A contemporary map from the 1960s will be substituted if one can be found.