Congress Paper Abstract

Bodily gender: the interelations of ’sex’ and ’gender’ in the psychiatric discourse on transsexuality

Anne Kroon, Doctoral Student, Department of Sociology, Uppsala University 

Email: ann.kroon@soc.uu.se

The paper is an attempt to analyze the inter-relations of "sex" and "gender", or "body" and "gender identity/role", in psychiatric accounts of transsexuality. The paper focuses the pre-SRS body and its functions for the credibility of the transsexual’s gender performance, especially the (asymmetrical) evaluation of female and male bodies. The psychiatric assessment is aimed at ensuring the transsexual’s claimed gender, but is here also understood as a "gender gate-keeping", operating on a more subtle social level. The specific empirical frame-work is the Swedish psychiatric assessment of transsexuals, drawing from published psychiatric literature and PhD dissertations, reports and evaluations from the Swedish National Board of Health. 20 It is suggested that the psychiatric assessment is based on an assumption of a necessary correspondence between "inside" - gender identity - and "outside" - the body and gender performance, often evaluated in accordance with stereotypical and hegemonic gender norms. Delineating the different criteria that meet the bodies of FTM and MTF transsexuals when evaluating what is called the transsexual’s pre-SRS "bodily conditions for living in the opposite sex-role", the paper uses the analytical term "bodily gender" in order to understand the body’s task to signal that the carrier "inside" is a "true" and "proper" man or woman.

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