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Transsexualism and medical science: Current limitations and new directions
Frank Lewins
School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Australia
Abstract
This paper is broadly concerned with limitations of the current approach to transsexualism in medical science. Several areas of medicine are affected by this increasingly visible phenomenon. In terms of medical practice, for example, advances in surgery make it possible for increasing numbers of transsexuals to undergo reassignment surgery to achieve correspondence of their minds and bodies. Also, the often negative responses to this surgery within the wider society and the medical profession bear on the area of medical professionalism. Specifically, this paper demonstrates that the medical paradigm concerning transsexualism not only has internal weaknesses but also is limited because it overlooks other intellectual vantage points, principally the approach of social science.
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