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This book, by a seasoned, experienced psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who has had an unusually rich experience over many years
with patients seeking transsexual hormone therapy and surgery, will be of inestimable value to anyone interested in gender issues. For those who work directly with such patients, as I do, the book impresses me as required reading. In France, people who want sex-change surgery are required to obtain psychiatric treatment at designated treatment centers, so there is relatively ample opportunity to study the phenomenon of transsexualism in considerable depth.
Colette Chiland is, among other things, psychiatrist-in-chief at the Alfred-Binet Center in Paris. She has written numerous articles on transsexualism, drawing upon extensive experience over many years at three different centers that work with such people, but her papers have previously been available only to those with access to the French literature. In this book, translated into English, she pulls together her conclusions about the transsexual phenomenon in a literate, eminently readable, informative, and pragmatically useful manner. I recommend the book highly to anyone interested in the topic.
On a linguistic note, Chiland points out that the French language distinguishes more precisely between the words gender and sex than does English:
The words that a given language accepts or rejects reflect profound differences in conceptualization. For instance, in English “gender” has come to be the normal term for social or psychosocial sex, but the equivalent French word cannot always be used in this sense. Similarly, words like sexué or sexuation, used in French with reference to the division between the sexes, will not go into English directly. [p. xii]
As Chiland indicates, the patients to whom she addresses herself suffer enormously but are far from easy to treat psychotherapeutically. They may or may not be psychologically minded, but, even when they are, they adhere powerfully to the vie