Contested Bodies - Ruth Holliday, John Hassard (Google Book Search)
“Transexual and transgendered people have always spent large parts of their lives managing a ‘virtual identity’…[spending] large amounts of the time they are involved in a social intercourse pretending/pastiching a person whom everyone else assumes or demands ‘in effect’….
…Daily they are involved in portraying a holographic version of the self which cultivates the others’ consensual hallucination. Thus the cyberworld of virtual reality, virtual space and virtual beings is not a new and strange world to the transgenderist, but is a world in which they have inbuilt expertise, albeit that these were gained outside of cyberspace. Ironically, the cyberworld in which others have to learn how to manage their virtuality, is a world in which the transsexual’s actual identity can thrive”- Stephen Whittle, The Trans Cyberian Mail Way (Chapter 11)
