RANSVESTIA

BOOK REVIEW

THE TRANSSEXUAL EMPIRE

Review By: Thomas Szasz

THE TRANSSEXUAL EMPIRE The Making of the She-Male

By Janice G. Raymond

220 pages, Beacon Press, $12.95

Review by Thomas Szasz

In the old days, when I was a medical student, if a man wanted to have his penis amputated, my psychology professors said that he suffered from schizophrenia, locked him up in an asy- lum and threw away the key. Now that I am a professor, my colleagues in psychiatry say that he is a "transsexual," my col- leagues in urology refashion his penis into a perineal cavity they call a vagina, and Time magazine puts him on its cover and calls him "her." Anyone who doubts that this is progress is considered to be ignorant of the discoveries of modern psychiatric sexology, and a political reactionary, a sexual bigot, or something equally unflattering.

Like much of the medical-psychiatric mendacity character- istic of our day, the official definition of "transsexualism" as a disease comes down to the strategic abuse of language - epito- mized by confusing and equating biological phenomena with social roles (in the present case, chromosomal sexual identity with acting

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