Kroppslinjer – Kön, transsexualism och kropp i berättelser om könskorrigering

Abstract

The aim with this dissertation is to analyse the construction and challenge of body and personhood in transsexual persons narratives on gender correction, as well as what these narratives tells of the terms through which human bodies become intelligible and recognised as possible persons. The analysis focus on the human body as a lived socially produced materiality, yet also a dynamic material actor of flesh and blood. Questions raised are: What consequences does the Swedish act for declaration of sex in certain cases have on transsexual person’s life situation? How do material bodies matter in the processes where psychiatrists decide a person as transsexual or not? What does narratives on lived gender corrective time courses tell on resistance to prevailing conditions of transsexual personhood? The study is based on in-depth interviews with transsexual persons, autobiographical blogs, texts written by informants, internet posts, e-mails, photographs and fieldwork notes.

The dissertation shows that original bodies play an important role in the psychiatric assessment that decides who will be granted the diagnose transsexualism. Current health care logic stresses that a Swedish citizen should be unequivocally materialized as one or the other sex. Therefore, transsexual women must reject their penis and no transsexual men get to keep their ovaries. By contrast, aversion towards penis does not count for all transsexual women. Also some transsexual men wish to give birth. Moreover, the gender corrective health care system does not only make transsexuals lives more liveable. It also functions as an oppressive gender conservative biopolitical system that often leads to experiences of life as less liveable. Those who qualify for gender correction are legally acknowledged as the gender they recognise themselves to be. Nonetheless legal recognition is conditioned by loss. Any Swedish citizen who aims for a new legally defined sex must submit to enforced bodily surgery, renunciation of reproduction, and if married divorce. Prevailing conditions of gender correction means that many transsexual’s turns to internet. Internet serves as an important political platform where persons and groups can resist the meanings that medical doctors and Swedish society assigns transsexual bodies and lives.