ABSTRACT
A transsexual is a person who repeatedly feels-often causing great frustration-that he is a member of one gender trapped in the body of the other. He wants to live and be accepted in the society as a member of the opposite sex. A male transsexual, for example, is born with normal male genitalia and other secondary characteristics of the masculine sex, but very early in life he begins to identify with women and behaves in a manner appropriate to the female sex. Since his sexual orientation is that of a female, he can become so frustrated by male genitals on his body that he tries to castrate himself in order to give a female appearance to his external genitalia.1 It is important to differentiate a homosexual from a transsexual. A homosexual man knows that he is a male, and is quite comfortable with his gender. He simply wants to have sex with members of his own sex. A transsexual male, on the other hand, is very uncomfortable with his biological sex; he repeatedly feels that he is a female trapped in a male body. Given a choice he would transform his body to that of a female and then engage in sex with males. Transsexualism is also not the same thing as transvestism. The chief difference between the two conditions is the same: while a transsexual wants to change his sex, a transvestite does not. Furthermore, a transvestite derives erotic pleasure from donning clothes of the opposite sex, despite being comfortable with his biological sex. A transsexual may need to don the clothes of the opposite sex, not because he gets erotic pleasure, but because he strongly feels he belongs to the opposite sex.*
Transsexualism and intersex individuals are also different. In intersex individuals, the 6 components of biological sex (chromosomes, gonads, internal genitalia, external genitalia, sex hormones, and secondary sexual characteristics) do not belong to the same sex (please see also chapter 1). In true transsexualism on the other hand, there is no incongruity among the six components of biological sex2 (please see Table 16.1).
