I stumbled upon Jack Chalker’s The Identity Matrix while  browsing at a Dalton Books in the mall back in the 1980s.  This was before the Internet was big, before ebooks existed, and my search for media dealing with sex-change and TG issues involved spending a lot of time in libraries and bookstores just searching and searching through the books, looking for titles and covers and blurbs that hinted I might find some TG content, which at the time seemed rare.

And there it was, right in my hands, a book that seemed like it had come right out of my own imagination, tapping into and adding ideas to the thoughts and dreams I had been having;  a body-swap story, and one that featured a male character that kind of reminded me of myself– bookish, shy, bad with women,Victory Gonser finds himself trapped in a female body and forced to live her life.

The other body-swap media I’d found up to this point always shied away from sex, instead dealing with other gender issues such as clothes, objectification, behavioral challenges like putting on make-up or wearing high-heels.  But the The Identity Matrix delved into the questions of sexual identity, and especially after the mind-wipe scene which seared itself into my memory.

In this scene, Gonsor has been living as a woman for a time, but nefarious forces decide to erase his memory and make him believe he has always been a woman named Misty Ann Carpenter, a stripper and enthusiastically erotic woman.   The idea of him being given such a feminine name thrilled me, and the new life as a stripper, something that was so utterly female, and where he would be displaying his body to men as an object of pleasure–  a total reversal far more radical than say, a businessman becoming a business woman.   The scene went something like this, with the character hooked up to some sort of apparatus and a voice asking him questions:

What is your sex?

“Male.”

What is your sex?

“Female.”

What is your name?

“Victor Gonser.”

What is your name?

“Misty Ann Carpenter.”

It wasn’t working! She thought.  The mind swipe was failing.  She was Misty Ann Carpenter, and she would never forget it!

It was a powerful concept to me, frightening and alluring, that someone could be erased.  They could be turned into someone else.  Frightening because I didn’t like the idea I could be erased, and alluring because I longer to rewrite myself, to become someone different.

Later, the Victory and Misty personalities merge, and that is where I liked the character and the story best, because Victor now has the body language and behaviors of a flirty stripper, something which is noted by the other characters, and which he flaunts as he not only accepts but revels in his new identity that merges his male and female selves.

I know over the years some have criticized Chalker’s writing, the style, skill, maybe even his commitment to craft.  But I leave all of those questions to others.  To me, Chalker’s book was a rare and special document that came along at an important time in my life, and helped to both fuel my own explorations of identity as well as to realize that I was not alone, because someone else was writing the things I was feeling, and other people were reading it as well.

Check It Out On Amazon

Falling solidly in the center of the “Freaky Friday”-style body swap movie, All Screwed Up features a switch between a nerdy African American high-school girl with ADD and a popular white male jock with ambitions of earning a college scholarship.  It’s a walk a mile in my shoes kind of gender swap that offers some interesting wrinkles.

For one thing, the girl is an outcast, a poor dresser and an unwanted female who does not have to put up with any kind of boorish male attention.   So, when the guy becomes her, he doesn’t find himself suffering from unwanted sexual attention as is often the case, but instead, he is either ignored or bullied and ridiculed, especially by his old girlfriend.  He hates his life, and cannot imagine being stuck living as her not so much because he is now female but because as her he is a nobody.  Her body also suffers from ADD, and he struggles as he experiences her inability to focus.

Meanwhile, the nerdy girl finds her new life thrilling as she goes to parties, gets to hang out with the cool kids and even is able to physically bully some of the guys.  She flatly admits that she would rather stay HIM, and seems callous to his despair at being stuck in her body.   She does get to talk to some of his friends about their bullying and tries to get them to stop, but it is clear she would rather be a dude and a protector than go back to being a nerdy girl victim.  Of course, things can’t stay easy for her, and she eventually faces struggles when she tries to play his role as a basketball star and fails, consequently becoming the object of scorn and ridicule.

The boy, facing the reality that he may be stuck as her, eventually starts dressing cute and doing things to be more attractive, and he ultimately offers to remain in her body if it will make her happy.  The two fall in love, and what I ultimately loved about this movie was this message- that it was the empathy they each gained, their understanding of the other’s lives, that let them fall in love and appreciate each other.

This can’t be called a perfect film, but the actors are game and do their best to bring these characters to life as people and not just types, and I felt for the characters as they went through their journeys.  I gotta say I dug it, and if you want to check it out you can see it on Amazon.

All Screwed Up on Amazon