Psychiatry and Sex change

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/mchugh.htm

The essay is a remarkable commentary from the psychiatric point of view on the sex change operation. This is one of the more striking passages:

Yet, if you justify augmenting breasts for women who feel
underendowed, why not do it and more for the man who wants to be
a woman? A plastic surgeon at Johns Hopkins provided the voice of
reality for me on this matter based on his practice and his natural
awe at the mystery of the body. One day while we were talking about
it, he said to me: "Imagine what it's like to get up at dawn and
think about spending the day slashing with a knife at perfectly
well-formed organs, because you psychiatrists do not understand
what is the problem here but hope surgery may do the poor wretch
some good."

The zeal for this sex-change surgery--perhaps, with the
exception of frontal lobotomy, the most radical therapy ever
encouraged by twentieth century psychiatrists--did not derive from
critical reasoning or thoughtful assessments. These were so faulty
that no one holds them up anymore as standards for launching any
therapeutic exercise, let alone one so irretrievable as a
sex-change operation. The energy came from the fashions of the
seventies that invaded the clinic--if you can do it and he wants
it, why not do it? It was all tied up with the spirit of doing your
thing, following your bliss, an aesthetic that sees diversity as
everything and can accept any idea, including that of permanent sex
change, as interesting and that views resistance to such ideas as
uptight if not oppressive. Moral matters should have some salience
here. These include the waste of human resources; the confusions
imposed on society where these men/women insist on acceptance, even
in athletic competition, with women; the encouragement of the
"illusion of technique," which assumes that the body is like a suit
of clothes to be hemmed and stitched to style; and, finally, the
ghastliness of the mutilated anatomy.