ABSTRACT
Hera’s comment corresponds to a current assumption about the commodication of issues like love, sex, gender, and body appearance. It was important for me to state the obvious, that some feelings, emotions, and unconscious leanings may resist commodication. The ideological illusion that commodication frees one from the burden of old-fashioned hangups, in fact, is the key to the democratizing of transgenderism in a society based on free choice. In a free market, one should be free to choose one’s preferred commodity. What could be more democratic, more essentially American, than giving everyone the choice of turning transgenderist, with a gender that can be changed on demand? In such a context, technology and market rules play a crucial role because contemporary transsexual transformations depend on a surgeon and an endocrinologist (Hausman, 1995, p. 75; Millot, 1990 p. 17). With this type of medicalized transformation, the subject is reduced to a body that is seen as a malleable natural phenomenon; its plasticity extends to sexuality. As Charles Shepherdson (2000) notes, medical science offers the possibility of a transformation predicated on the presupposition that we are dealing with an organism and not a body. This transformation assumes that what the transsexual seeks is an anatomical change and not a different embodiment. Shepherdson adds that “the surgeon works with a conception of anatomy that presupposes a natural version of sexual identity, thereby foreclosing the question of sexual difference” (p. 101).
