ABSTRACT
Transsexualism should be defined in more characterological terms: In an oversimplified way, this chapter considers a transsexual to be a person who feels himself to belong to the opposite sex while not denying his sexual anatomy. The data suggest that in some cases, advanced transsexualism is a condition whose causes occur in earliest childhood, with the parent of the opposite sex playing the essential role in the metamorphosis of gender identity to the opposite sex. The astonishingly strong identification with members of the opposite sex have led observers to feel that such powerful, profound, and successful identification with the opposite sex could not be simply a “learned,” that is, psychological, phenomenon.
