Transsexuality

• Transsexuality and feminism – a contribution to a controversial and necessary debate

The aim of this anthology is to educate: about the difference between, on the one hand, a serious conflict that causes psychological suffering based on the deep conviction that one is living in the wrong body and, on the other, the current trend of considering mere gender role frustration as “transsexualism.”

While the editors welcome the legal and medical assistance that has been available for 40 years for diagnosed “gender dysphoria,” they point to humanitarian and political concerns about the current trend to respond too quickly to every instance of gender role frustration with severe hormone treatments and surgery. Not by chance, the direction of “transitioning” (formerly predominantly male to female) has statistically reversed in recent decades, a trend that is unmistakably related to the inability of meeting the expectations of the constricting female role. Rather than encouraging girls to break out of the rigid role corset, biological “sex” is made to conform to the gender role.

Alice Schwarzer and Chantal Louis’s anthology gives a voice to psychiatrists, therapists, educators, and parents, but above all to those who are directly affected: women who have become men, men who have become women. Some have stuck with it, others have “detransitioned."