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Psychoanalysis takes two, one to speak and one to listen. A distance between sender and receiver is necessary if together they are to identify a latent meaning in the discourse. One could thus object to Jay Prosser's text that he seems to produce the discourse of trans-sexuality without attention to a latent meaning. He speaks very eloquently, but he is not listening.
Since transsexuals do not usually address their demand to the psychoanalyst but rather to the surgeon, it is permissible to conclude that a listening with the third ear is not what is expected. The writer of a theoretical work is however in a different category altogether, since the book must encounter readers in order to exist, and if the work is to make a scientific contribution, its message must not limit itself to a capture on the level of the imaginary.
Prosser proposes to treat “body and narrative—in their relation to transsexuality”: “My primary purpose in reading transsexual narratives is to introduce into cultural theory a trajectory that foregrounds the bodily matter of gender crossings” (4).
For a transsexual to achieve the acting out of sex change, the demand for hormones and surgery has not historically been enough; a narrative has had to be produced, a story which would result in the clinician pronouncing the diagnosis which would permit treatment. More than twenty years ago, Robert Stoller recognized that the biographies produced upon the demand of the medical establishment by candidates for sex change operations had little value for psychoanalysis, since they feature memories organized in function of the demand for transformation. He recommended not taking them at face value, or rather adopting an attitude of prudence and attention to precise clinical details. This is to say that he did not wish to accept this discourse without analysis. What risks going unperceived in these autobiographies that are organized in terms of a manifest demand is the message of the unconscious.
As Prosser notes,