Discussion Questions
1. In many ways, Dick and Noelle experience their adolescence together, simultaneously making the transformation into womanhood. How does each girl cope with this situation? How does Dick approach becoming a woman differently than he did becoming a man?
2. Discuss Dinah and Dick’s relationship. Why is Dinah so invested in Dick despite the face that he is emotionally and sexually distant? Why does she pass up her other prospects to marry him? When Dick transforms into Christine, how does their relationship change? Does Dinah feel as responsible for Christine as she did for Dick? Why or why not?
3. Dinah knew Dick’s secret when she married him, yet it is the secret that keeps themc distant and unhappy. In what ways does the secret damage Dick’s relationship with Noelle?
4. Why is it so easy for Christine to repair her relationship with Noelle and so difficult with Dinah? What about Grandma H is so attractive to Noelle when she is a child? What changes? What does Grandma H later represent to Noelle that she is trying to hard to reject?
5. When they are first married, Dick and Dinah attend a few meetings for crossdressers but neither feels comfortable and they stop going. But later Christine attends meetings that she finds informative and friendly. Discuss what changes have occurred that allow Christine to attend transgender meetings with confidence?
6. Why does Dick take Noelle to see his father’s grave? What is he trying to tell her? What mistakes did Dick’s father make that Dick later repeats with Noelle?
7. Noelle has a turbulent adolescence in which she tries hard to find herself sexually. Why is having sex at a young age so important to Noelle? What is she trying to prove to herself? In what ways does sex dominate her relationships throughout high school and college?
8. On page 222, Dinah tells Dr. Smith, “I spent ages taking care of [Dick], and I don’t have anything to show for it. I don’t even know who I am anymore.” Dr. Smith tells her to try and remember. Does Dinah find herself? In what ways does she come into her own womanhood through Dick’s coming out? By the end of the narrative, how has Dinah changed? What about her is the same? Why does Noelle have a harder time dealing with her mother’s changes than her father’s transformation?
9. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Noelle relates better to her mother than her father. Yet in many ways she is a lot like Dick. Considering Dick’s boyhood, discuss Noelle’s tendencies towards her father’s behavior.
10. Publishers Weekly wrote, “The story of [Noelle’s} father’s coming out as a male-to-female transsexual is only part of a larger narrative of growing up female in America.” What does Dress Codes say about being female in America? What female stereotypes must each of the women in the book face? How does each cope with overcoming how society says women “should” be?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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