Gender
For years, Hemingway claimed, he had experienced gender dysphoria. He experimented with wearing women's clothes on a number of occasions. Wife Valerie wrote:
All his life Greg fought a losing battle against this crippling illness. He lacked critical early help because his parents were unable or unwilling to accept his condition nor could he come to terms with it himself for a long time, taking up the study of medicine in the hope that he would find a cure, or at least a solace. Failing that, he developed an alternate persona, a character into which he could retreat from the unbearable responsibilities of being, among other things, his father's son, and of never ever measuring up to what was expected of him, or to what he expected of himself.He considered gender reassignment surgery as early as 1973 and had the surgery in 1995 and began using the name Gloria on occasion. Despite the surgery, Hemingway, presenting as a man, remarried Galliher in 1997 in Washington state.
His public persona remained male. As Gregory, he gave occasional interviews about his father as late as 1999. In July of that year he attended events marking the centenary of Ernest Hemingway's birth in Oak Park, Illinois. He also spoke at the dedication of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum in his mother's family home in Piggott, Arkansas, when it opened on July 4, 1999.
Hemingway's transition from male to female was a long process left incomplete at death. He had breast implant surgery on one breast and then had it reversed. He was sometimes seen in women's attire. Yet dressed as a man he frequented a local tavern and presented as what a patron called "just one of the guys." When arrested just days before his death, the police report said that he first gave the name Greg Hemingway and then changed it to Gloria.
Read more about this topic: Gloria Hemingway
Famous quotes containing the word gender:
“... lynching was ... a woman’s issue: it had as much to do with ideas of gender as it had with race.”
—Paula Giddings (b. 1948)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“Most women of [the WW II] generation have but one image of good motherhood—the one their mothers embodied. . . . Anything done “for the sake of the children” justified, even ennobled the mother’s role. Motherhood was tantamount to martyrdom during that unique era when children were gods. Those who appeared to put their own needs first were castigated and shunned—the ultimate damnation for a gender trained to be wholly dependent on the acceptance and praise of others.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)