Written by admin on 2009-04-07T04:48:10+0000">April 7, 2009 – 4:48 am
Transsexual, the adjective, means simply going from one sex to the other. Thus one could have a casual transsexual thought or dream, one’s hermaphroditic baby could have a transsexual change of the birth announcement or as a hermaphrodite, and one could undergo a transsexual reassignment of one’s sex. A person of non-hermaphroditic, non-ambiguous genital anatomy may also seek and qualify to undergo a legal, hormonal, and surgical sex reassignment. This is the person who, in today’s nomenclature, is known as a transsexual.
Definition and description
The transsexual is genitally an anatomical male or female who expresses with strong conviction that he or she has the mind of the opposite sex, who lives as a member of the opposite sex part-time or full-time, and who seeks to change his or her original sex legally and through hormonal and surgical sex reassignment.
The actual demand for hormonal and surgical intervention has been dependent historically on the patient’s knowledge of the availability of such procedures. The personal sense and conviction of having the wrong-sexed body, however, predates such knowledge. Typically, a transsexual dates in childhood the onset of his or her sense of belonging to the other sex. The age at which sex reassignment becomes an id?e fixe varies. It may be prepubertal or adolescent, or it may be delayed until, in young adulthood or early middle age, the obsession finally can be postponed no longer.
Incidence
Public health statistics in the United States do not include incidence figures on any sexological problems, including the incidence of birth defects of the sex organs. Voluntary registration of sexological problems would fail statistically, owing to the social penalties of self-disclosure. Therefore, there are no authentic estimates of the incidence of transexualism in the United States or anywhere else. However, it can be said that postoperative transsexuals in the United States now number in the thousands, but almost certainly not in the tens of thousands. In a total United States population of just over two hundred and twenty million, the condition is far more common than most physicians might think, but not so common that every physician should expect to treat several cases in the course of his or her career. Some will see no cases, and some will miss cases because the patient is too apprehensive to state his or her chief complaint.
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