Transsexuals

Transgender phenomena include complex conditions such as transsexuality, transvestism, and cross-dressing. Apart from analysis based on the definition of medical and moral labels and their detrimental effects on identity constructions, the study of transsexuality and its theoretic construction reveals a history of discrimination of sexual differences within social science theories, both in terms of explicit reference to “deviant” or pathological practices and in terms of denial or concealment or simply nonrecognition. For example, in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, transsexualism is featured as a “syndrome” that is characterized by a strong and persistent identification with the opposite sex; by a persistent preoccupation, lasting at least two years, with removing one's primary and secondary sexual characteristics and acquiring the sexual characteristics of the opposite sex; and by persistent unease regarding one's sex, leading to a sense of extraneousness toward the role of that sex, and to unease that becomes clinically significant and that notably compromises relationships, work, and social interactions.

Transsexual individuals are, according to medical descriptions, people who feel they have been born and trapped in the wrong body and belong to one of two main categories: (1) individuals who are born with male sex characteristics (penis and testicles) but whose gender identity does not correspond to their original sex characteristics but tends toward an elected female gender—this is the case with so-called MTFs (Male-to-Female); and (2) individuals born with female sex attributes (vagina and ovaries), whose gender identity does not correspond to these characteristics but rather to an elected male gender—FTMs (Female-to-Male). It is most common for transsexual individuals, once formally defined as “ill” by medical and psychiatric diagnoses, to turn to legal procedures of gender reassignment surgery.

Let us consider the aspects of interest to social scientists and scholars of phenomena perceived to be “pathological” and/or “abnormal”—how medico-surgical and legislative practices relating to transsexuality resort to formal (and informal) ceremonies of debasement and attribution of often pathologizing biomedical definitions and discriminatory sociolegal constructions. The process of attribution of the new sex status (both biological and in terms of vital statistics) can be divided into two main stages: (1) the medico-surgical adaptation to the elected sex and (2) related amendments to vital statistics. Some Western countries pathologize the individual, through the so-called diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Recently, there have been movements of opinion that profoundly criticize recourse to compulsory psychotherapy in transsexual adults, asking that they conform instead to protocols of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.