This well-edited collection of papers gives a clear picture of current clinical and research work on transsexualism. The chapters are arranged in five parts dealing with various aspects of transsexualism: social and clinical, psychological, somatic, treatment, and medico-legal. The contributions in general are unusually comprehensive and instructive for a compendium.

The psychoanalyst will be reassured by the fact that in this country, unlike several centers abroad, the transsexual cannot obtain sex reassignment surgery on demand. Reassuring too is the waning enthusiasm of several contributors who, a decade ago, were 'gung-ho' for surgical conversion. Whether this surgery should ever be performed on an anatomically normal male remains highly questionable.