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Dear Sir,
As a practising psychiatrist who has worked within and for the transgender community, as well as a member of that community, for the previous decades, I would like to send some constructive criticism to the paper that you published by Colette Chiland (2000). I bring this criticism at this point, not only to advance the discussion initiated by Dr Chiland, but in order to correct certain assumptions made by the misapplication of psychoanalytic theory, and to bring it to a greater congruence with queer and gender theory, by those of us who are actively engaged in the gender community as health care providers, and as a member of the Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA).
She neglects to bring into the discussion theories of gender ambiguity of identification and attachment with both parents, articulated by Jessica Benjamin (1996), or of gender and its correlates as a performance and as a construction of society, by Butler (1993), and neglects the gender constructivist theory by Chodorow (1989), while conflating identity formation of transsexual and homosexual patients, as well as her possible treatment of the same, when it is the considered view of many experts that neither can be treated, and that they are acceptable variations of sexuality in human beings.
Dr Chiland discusses what are in her mind three distinguishing components the identity component proper, the homosexual component and the transvestite component. She does not further illustrate, or define these issues in the interests of brevity, and therefore further confuses the issue. Individuals who are transgendered or gender discordant all in the end have the identity component as the predominant component, whereas the homosexual component is usually found in those who are young, ignorant of the transgender world and its multiple definitions of gender, or come from a society or culture in which the homosexual component serves as the best operational definition. The transvestite component