'THE NEW GIRL'For two months, Mike Reynolds
said goodbye to his old self and became Lisa Anne

Jim Shelton ,
Register Staff

06/08/2003

Mike Reynolds of New Haven recreates his Lisa
Anne Weber persona, the basis for his book. Jeff
Holt/Register photos

Two years after his big experiment, Mike Reynolds of
New Haven still can’t get his sex straight on his Connecticut
driver’s license.

In fact, unless he produces letters
from a physician and a psychiatrist proving otherwise, the
Department of Motor Vehicles will continue insisting he’s
female.

It’s not so far-fetched. For two months in
2001, Reynolds was legally a 35-year-old woman named Lisa Anne
Weber.

He
dressed as a woman, talked as a woman, sought jobs as a woman
and even went to singles dances as a woman — all for the sake
of a literary treatise on gender.

Meet
the author

Mike
Reynolds, author of "The New Girl," $19.95, Publish
America,in a different physical
persona and wrote about the experience. But while Griffin
transformed himself from Caucasian to African-American,
Reynolds chose to become an unemployed, overweight, unmarried
woman.

The result is "The New Girl," a 191-page
softcover book put out by Publish America.

In it,
Reynolds tells of his experiences as "Lisa" at local
restaurants, businesses, social events and religious services
at a prominent New Haven church.

"I was very skeptical
when he first told me about it," notes Michele Hoffnung, a
psychology professor at Quinnipiac and head of the
university’s women’s studies program. "It seemed unbelievable
this large man could pass as a normal-looking
woman."

Luckily, Reynolds had a brief gender-bending
experience before this. Several years ago, he was cast in a
woman’s role for an amateur theater production in Cheshire.
Reynolds noticed that other cast members acted subtly
different around him as a female, which gave him