Summary
Contents
Subject index
"Transsexualism is a stimulating, proactive and important book. Colette Chiland does not back away from difficult issues. She forces all of us to look at our assumptions about transsexualism and to re-examine what gender and sex really mean" - Christine Ware, author of Where Id Was: Challenging Normalization in Psychoanalysis
"In a nutshell, the book offers a much-needed alternative view of transsexuality from a psychiatric and European point of view… Chiland's interesting and well presented book is a valued reminder of how different the same topic can appear in an alternative perspective" - Transgender Tapestry
Colette Chiland exhibits a masterful and encyclopedic knowledge of transsexualism, drawing together the insights of depth psychology, psychoanalysis, history, anthropology and sociology for rethinking transsexualism in terms of identity, subjectivity and the wider socio-historical world. This book is written with considerable precision on complex, technical issues, whilst at the same time keeping the broader question of the relationship between transsexualism and society firmly in mind.
Transsexualism, or Requesting a Sex Change
Transsexualism, or Requesting a Sex Change
The term ‘transsexualism’ was coined by the endocrinologist and sexologist Harry Benjamin in 1953 and came to be generally accepted some time after his first use of it.
Invention and Adoption of the Word
It is often pointed out that, four years before Benjamin coined the term, in 1949, the journal Sexology had printed an article by D. O. Cauldwell entitled ‘Psychopathia transsexualis’, a term modelled on Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia sexualis. In his introduction to Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (Green and Money, 1969, p. 4), Benjamin explains:
the late Dr D. O. Cauldwell had related in Sexology magazine … the case of a girl who obsessively wanted to be a boy, and he called her condition ‘psychopathia transsexualis’. ...
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