ARTICLE

TRANSEXUALS AND PSEUDO-TRANSEXUALS

By Virginia Prince, Ph.D.

Editor's Note: This is a paper delivered at the Harry Benjamin 4th International Symposium on Gender Identity, Stanford University. Feb. 28-March 2, 1975. I hope it will shed a little new light on the sub- ject for readers of TVia as well as the surgeons, psychiatrists and psy- chologists at Stanford.

If you will forgive a slight alternation of the famous soliloquy from Hamlet, it seems very expressive of what I want to talk about.

"TS or not TS- that is the question;

Whether 'tis wiser to suffer the slings and arrows Of frustrated desires, or, to seek surgery

Against the sea of troubles and by reassignment end them.

To die

―

to sleep, to live no more and by such death To say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to.

To die, to sleep — perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub."

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"Perchance to dream ay there's the rub." How could it be better expressed? The whole concept of change of sex is the death of one aspect of self and a hoped-for rebirth of another. But dreams of es- caping the "slings and arrows, the 1000 natural shocks -" etc. are often just that, dreams. There is many a "rub" in the process and these are but little understood by the presumptive "transexual" and fre- quently not by the professionals who treat them. I refer to an un- derstanding of the basic motivations underlying the demand for sur- gery, the probability of its fulfillment, and the other alternative ways of satisfying the same desires.

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