“In the Darkroom” by Susan Faludi on father’s transsexual surgery gets raves from New York Times and Kirkus, but all neglect to consider multiple personality.

In “My Father, the Shapeshifter” by Peter Haldeman (New York Times, Dec. 31, 2016), he notes that Susan Faludi’s book has gotten rave reviews: “‘In the Darkroom’ is an absolute stunner of a memoir,’ Jennifer Senior wrote in The New York Times, ‘probing, steel-nerved, moving in ways you’d never expect.’ More recently, it was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2016 by The Times Book Review and won this year’s Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.”

However, it appears that neither the memoir nor any of the reviewers considers the possibility of multiple personality, which should be considered before a person gets sex-change surgery. I am not saying that Faludi’s father had multiple personality. All I am saying is that it was not considered, but should have been. Why? Because multiple personality is a possibility whenever change in identity is at issue. Here is one real-life example:

Pearl G. Schwartz. “A Case of Concurrent Multiple Personality Disorder and Transsexualism.” Dissociation, June 1988. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/1351/Diss_1_2_9_OCR_rev.pdf?sequence=4