“Growing Up Haunted” by Jennifer Finney Boylan: Asks why person with gender dysphoria, a condition without visual hallucinations, would see “ghosts”

Professor Boylan (1, 2) had already published a memoir about the resolution of gender dysphoria by sex reassignment surgery, so her next memoir, I’m Looking Through You, Growing Up Haunted (3), was meant to raise a separate issue: why she had seen “ghosts” (4).

“I do not believe in ghosts, although I have seen them with my own eyes…Maybe someday researchers will tell us more about what makes people see things that are not there…In the meantime, when it comes to ghosts…we’re all pretty much on our own” (3, p. 107).

Two ghosts she had seen, while he was growing up (prior to sex reassignment surgery), were a young girl standing before him, and an older woman when he looked in the mirror.

If visual hallucinations cannot be accounted for by a neurological condition, medical condition, or psychosis, then the cause may be multiple personality, especially if the person is a novelist, playwright, or poet.

Search visual hallucinations, ghost, ghosts, mirror, and mirrors.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Finney_Boylan

2. https://barnard.edu/profiles/jennifer-boylan

3. Jennifer Finney Boylan. I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted (A Memoir). New York, Broadway Books, 2008.

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/opinion/31boylan.html