ABSTRACT

The psychotherapy literature is replete with descriptions of parents, partners, and other family members of the full spectrum of transgender individuals. The articles reviewed offer little help to therapists working with either the transgender person or the family. Psychodynamic explanations implicating the role of the mother's pathology, along with a colluding father, are offered as theories of the etiology of transsexualism (Lothstein, 1979; Stoller, 1985). Other discussions in the literature include male-to-female transsexuals' perceptions of theii parents (Parker & Barr, 1982), female-to-male transsexuals' perceptions of their parents (Cohen-Kettenis & Arrindell, 1990), treatment for parents (Newman, 1976), a comparison of parental and interpersonal relationships between transsexual and homosexual men (Šípová & Brzek, 1983), and the role of maternal grandmothers in early childhood (Halle, Schmidt, & Meyer, 1980).