Transvestia

Of course, the book is not primarily devoted to TV, but covers a much broader area. The first third is on patients with biological abnormalities, and the fact that many of them have no question of gender identity. This applies to those who are assigned a gender mistakenly at birth due to psuedo-hermaphroditism, as well as other intersex cases, and he cites many examples of the assigned gender role wiping out the effects of chromosomes and Barr bodies, plus cases where the socially applied conditioning failed to work and the girl (or boy) within revolted successfully and proved she really WAS a girl. In the last chapter of Part I, the good doctor does a lot of soul-searching on the question of a biological force which tends to direct the gender role regardless of anatomy and society. He has changed sides on this matter, and is now rather heavily committed to a psychodynamic explanation in spite of his earlier conviction that there WAS such a force. While he makes a great effort to be open-minded, he shows no evidence of having seriously considered the possibility that some people are born with an abnormality in the BRAIN which can be the cause of their gender role conflict. Instead, he has fallen in love with a very special theory, backed by a few cases, which is developed in Part II.

This concerns patients without biological abnormalities, mainly transsexuals plus some very active type TVs, for whom he finds the common factors of mothers who had bisexual tendencies and who maintained an abnormal amount of body-contact with their sons, plus fathers who were absent or withdrawn from the family circle. This point is proved well, for the four cases studied in detail plus a few others, but I do not find it entirely convincing . . . at least on the general level at which he feels it applicable. I do find it strongly persuasive that a person with an inborn TV tendency, when subject to such influences, would grow up a TS or what I have come to think of as a "quasi-TS", a TV so highly motivated that others think her a TS wrongly. At any rate, the author is certainly entitled to his theory, and takes pains to point out frequently its weaknesses. Every specialist is prone to the same thing, and I find myself trying to explain EVERYTHING in terms of thermodynamics, whether that is applicable or not; I imagine psychodynamics is just as addictive!

The third part concerns treatment, and I note with pleasure his scorn for the behaviorist approach of "therapy by torture" called aversion treatment. The TS part need not concern us, and he