Clinical dimensions of a 'biological concept': transsexualism and the interplay between etiological theory and clinical therapy

- The rise of (1) sex reassignment and (2) somatic notions of transsexualism co-occurred.
- The somatic therapy promoted somatic theories about transsexualism's etiology.
- Different theories about etiology, in turn, undergirded different therapeutic practices.
- Clinical therapies and etiological theories were mutually constitutive.
- Etiological concepts intervened in fundamental ethical and philosophical debates.

In 1966, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine became the first American medical institution to perform sex reassignment surgeries. This article interrogates the relationship between the emergence of this clinical therapy in the United States and the changing medical understandings of the contemporaneous condition it was intended to address - 'transsexualism.' I argue that, during the mid-to-late twentieth century, therapeutic practices and theories about the etiology of transsexualism were mutually constitutive. On one hand, the clinical development of sex reassignment surgery precipitated a newfound interest in the possible biological, as opposed to psychopathological, underpinnings of transsexualism. At the same time, different theories about etiology were marshaled by both advocates and critics of sex reassignment in their efforts to secure or undercut the medical legitimacy and clinical presence of competing therapeutic practices. Debates surrounding transsexualism's etiology were therefore about much more than the causes of this condition: these etiological conversations also intervened in fundamental debates about the ethics of medical care and the therapeutic identity of different clinical practices (that is, whether sex reassignment and psychotherapy were to be considered primarily symptomatic or curative).