The Socio-Medical Construction of Transsexualism: An Interpretation and Critique

Abstract

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Being A ‘Kothi’: An Ethnographic Interrogation with A Male Transgender in Kolkata, India

“…They play the role of insertee in sexual penetrative act. 3 Malinowski in his studies of Trobriand Islanders between 1915 and 1918 documented various forms of sexuality.…”

“…Many recent works thoroughly documented the presence of diverse expressions of same-sex sexuality in African traditional societies 20 . Sociological research on transsexuals 21 studies on how the body is used in doing and attributing gender (Bolin 1988;Ekins 1997;Garfinkel 1967;Kessler and McKenna 1978) or managing stigma and passing (Feinbloom 1976;Kando 1973) or how the physical body is surgically altered (Billings and Urban 1982;Hausman 1995;Raymond 1979) tell us about the relation of gender and sex and gender related social obstacles.…”

Therapy and the Nontraditional Transgender Narrative

“…They explain that gender is not something innate, but instead something that exists due to a continual performance of what it means to be a man, or what it means to be a woman. Billings and Urban (1982) explain that just as the idea of male and female are constructed through social interaction, transsexualism is constructed similarly. We understand what it means to be transsexual due to cultural meaning.…”

“…As members of society who are generally not transgender themselves, mental health professionals' constructions of gender as a binary system are thought of as truths rather than culturally relevant. (Billings and Urban, 1982). The often unexamined idea that an individual will either identify wholly as male or as female is reflected in the traditional transgender narrative the typical mental health provider expects to hear.…”

Doing extra-ordinariness: trans-men's accomplishment of `authenticity' in the research interview

“…In engaging with these difficulties many authors, utilising a range of social constructionist perspectives within sociology and feminism, tend to dismiss and/or distrust the self-representations and identity narratives of transsexuals. The main argument forwarded is that these are unreliable or always already inauthentic as, in order to both establish their identities and secure medical treatment, transsexuals merely 'mimic' the medical discourses and the hegemonic, normative regimes of gender and sexuality that created the phenomenon of transsexualism in the first place (Hausman, 1995: 143;see also, Raymond, 1994;Billings and Urban, 1996;Shapiro, 1991). Such an argument, however, has increasingly been criticised and challenged, particularly on the grounds that its various social constructionist underpinnings deny agency and, 'overwhelmingly fail to examine how transsexuals are constructing subjects' (Prosser, 1998: 8).…”