Adult Male-to-Female Transsexualism: A Clinical Existential- Phenomenological Inquiry.

Male-to-Female transsexualism [MtF] manifests itself in the form of a subjective experience of discrepancy between the male sex assigned at birth and the subjective experience of belonging to the female gender, which in many, but not all, cases also involves a somatic transition by cross-sex hormone treatment and genital surgery. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the last edition of which dates back to two years ago, considers this condition as a possible “expression” of a broader taxonomic category, Gender Dysphoria, whose main diagnostic criterion is: “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender of at least 6 months’ duration” (APA 2013) In my talk, I have shown how , today, is not, in effect, in such cases, solely and simply a transcendence of the contingent nature of what is a given in bodily anatomy referable to the difference between the sexes, the rising up of an individual above their own facticity through technical advancement . More precisely, it is not only this, but rather a specific and more complex existential way of being, a specific world-design, a specific form of being-in-the-world. More specifically, in my speech, I have reread, and I have discussed MtF transsexualism in the light of Ludwig Binswanger’s theories on Mannerism and Jean Paul Sartre’s observations on the self, the body, the real and the imaginary.