Transsexualism Illusion and Reality

Transsexualism is a phenomenon of our time. At other times and in other places, there have been, or still are, people not living in the sex of their origin and having a special status. In Western culture, however, hormones and surgery have become available through advances in medical science which have made sex change a reality. Colette Chiland looks at the subject of transsexualism from biological, psychoanalytic, legal and social perspectives, and shows how guidelines and practices differ throughout the world and also contradict each other within the same culture. She draws 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. Transsexuals are caught in a contradiction: while asserting that identity is a function of the sex of a soul - that is, of gender - they are not content to occupy the position of members of the other sex, but demand a bodily token of their belonging to that sex. Chiland writes with precision on complex, technical issues, while at the same time keeping the broader question of the relationship between transsexualism and society firmly in mind.