I Want What I Want

‘I want what I want . . . not what other people think I ought to want.’ What Wendy Ross wants is simple – to live and love openly as a modern, independent woman. The problem is that according to her birth certificate her name is Roy Clark and she is a boy. Mistreated by her father, who is appalled at having such a child, misunderstood by her sister, whose clothes she has stolen, and committed to a mental hospital where she is mistaken for a homosexual, Wendy finally gets her chance to escape when she turns twenty-one and inherits a small legacy. But life isn’t easy for a transwoman in 1960s England, and things get even more complicated when she falls in love with the handsome Frank ...


A groundbreaking novel and a landmark of transgender fiction, Geoff Brown’s classic I Want What I Want was originally published in 1966 and was the basis for a 1972 film adaptation written by Gillian Freeman and starring Anne Heywood. This edition, the first in decades, features a new introduction by Prof. Michael Bronski of Harvard University, an award-winning writer of books on LGBT history.