Rage Against the Machine

Transsexual Men Discover Differences Are More Than Skin Deep
2007-01-03

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By Jacob Anderson-Minshall

Dhillon Khosla wants to have things both ways. His personal publicist ( Levine Communications ) bills his new book, Both Sides Now, as “a rare glimpse in to what it is like to live as both a woman and ( currently ) as a man—and offers extraordinary insight and perspective into the sexes.” Yet in the concluding chapters of the memoir he writes, “If there ever was a time when I thought I had some special insight into the minds of women, that time was now past.”

Khosla declined to be interviewed for this article. In a recent appearance on The View—explaining his discomfort at the term transgender—Khosla says that after 15 surgeries, he feels “to use any other label but man feels like a betrayal to those efforts.” Elsewhere, he’s noted that he feels more accepted in blue-collar bars than the LGBT community. Neither sentiment however, precludes an interest in queer money, and Levine Communications is actively courting the LGBT press and marketing Both Sides Now directly to LGBT readers.

The East Indian-German first-generation American ( who recently left his post as a staff attorney to California and federal judges to join the lecture circuit ) insists that “warmth and openness” is his natural state, but nearly every chapter in Both Sides Now references his “murderous, overwhelming rage,” which he describes as “simply a reaction to my circumstances.”

That fury is directed at doctors; his mother; fellow spiritual students ( one of whom says “I hate the kind of masculinity you have come to embrace” ) ; people on the street who mistakenly call him ma’am in the early stages of his transition; and lesbians. Angry that a woman he’s interested in won’t date him because he’s now a man, Khosla—who once identified as a lesbian—fumes in Both Sides Now: “Fuck lesbians. Fuck all of you. When I was in a different body, you all wanted me—drooled over me. And now it’s different? Well, you’re all hypocrites because I’m the same person.”. . .