ABSTRACT
In this chapter the aim is to put into circulation some ideas about what is pathologised and how this is done. Starting this part of the book, the concept of “disorder” – historically present in the diagnostic manuals – is reviewed, visualising its condensations of meanings between disease and social danger. The centrality of distress in diagnostics is also reviewed, as the main legitimiser of medical interventions, exploring its polyphonies and the double localisation of its source: the internal or psychological world, and the external or social world.
The chapter continues with a critical analysis of the role of the ritual of confession as a psychologising requirement; of what the most reactionary literature on transsexualism understands as “transsexual fraud”; of clinical suspicion of poor mental health in transsexual people – including some common diagnoses also addressed to them, such as Social Phobia – and of the explanatory dependence between diagnosis and treatment. The chapter ends with the bio-political effects of the transsexual category, as a space understood as illegitimate or of transit, as a place configured as uninhabitable or of non-life, from where to produce intelligible life.
