Transsexuality

Transsexuality is a term that has a problematic history and, as a result, many scholars of media and gender have stopped using it. However, countless researchers, social activists, and everyday people proudly self-identify as transsexuals still today. In general, transsexuals are people who are born with what medical professionals deem normal male or female bodies, but psychologically they identify with the opposite sex. For example, feeling trapped in the wrong body is a common theme in discourse coming from transsexual people and in media coverage and medical reports about them. As a result, many transsexuals not only dress up as the opposite sex but also change their bodies to align with the opposite sex by undergoing hormone therapy and/or sex reassignment surgery. Transvestite is an older name for transsexuals who did not physically modify their bodies, whereas pre-operative or postoperative females-to-males (FTMs) or males-to-females (MTFs) have become more common names for them in recent decades as a result, in a large part, of advancements in medical treatment and an increase in its accessibility. Sometimes transsexual people refer to themselves as (or are referred to as) cross-dressers, drag queens or drag kings, or queer. These people are rarely called hermaphrodites or intersex, since they are not born with ambiguous gonads or external genitalia.

Transsexuality did not emerge as an identity category until the 20th century, when social scientists started studying gender-crossing in dress and body modification that occurred in various cultures across the world. As people in Western cultures sought medical and legal aid to transform the sex they had been assigned at birth, the modern medical establishment began to recognize and name them transsexuals as well. Initially, then, transsexuality was a medicalized term for the pathologization of a person who cross-dressed, underwent hormonal therapy, and/or had a sex-change operation. Specifically known as “gender dysphoria syndrome” in the 1960s and classified by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 as an “official disorder,” transsexuality was considered a pathology of someone's psyche in particular, because transsexuals usually expressed, and were diagnosed by their physicians as, having a body that did not properly conform to what they thought was their real gender. This concept of transsexuality is problematic for a number of reasons, foremost because it conceives of people who transition gender as diseased, or at least sees them as unhealthy until they make physical modifications to the exteriors and/or interiors of their bodies. Even when transsexuality is celebrated instead of denigrated, underlying this belief in a real gender and the desire for a person's bodily sex to align with it is the reinforcement of the gender/sex binary, a traditional two-gender/sex system, and an authentically gendered self. Exemplifying this latter line of thinking is Jay Prosser, a female-to-male scholar of transsexuality, who argues that transsexual people have a right to have “gender homes,” as he terms them. For Prosser, gender homes are recognized if and when transsexuals are accepted as real men and women, get health insurance coverage for sex reassignment surgery, and/or are legally allowed to change to the opposite sex on their birth certificates. Another leading transsexual theorist is Janice Raymond, who similarly suggests that transsexuality involves social conformity yet disagrees that it is an authentic gender identity. Media messages about transsexuals successfully passing in or blending into society as normal males or normal females also fit within these assimilative conceptions of transsexuality.

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