The Transgender Phenomenon and its Effect on the Practice of Anatomic Pathology: A Futuristic Perspective

Introduction of the 'Transgender Phenomenon' "Dave King and Richard Ekins are the leading world sociologists in the field of transgender research. They have put together a brilliant synthesis of history, case studies, ideas and positions as they have emerged over the past thirty years, and bring together a rich and grounded account of this field, providing a state of the art of critical concepts and ideas in this field further during the twenty first century."¹ Based on two decades of fieldwork, life history work, qualitative analysis, archival work and contact with several thousand cross-dressers and sex-changers around the world, these researchers have distinguished a number of contemporary Transgendering 'stories'. 'The assignment of an individual as being of the male or female sex is most often based on the phenotypic appearance of the external genitalia at birth, which is largely determined by the chromosomal type (most commonly 46,XX or 46,XY). Gender identity, however, is an individual's perceived or experienced gender, which may or may not be the same as one's sex assigned at birth. The concept of gender identity includes gradations of masculinity to femininity and maleness to femaleness, as well as identification of some individuals as having nonbinary gender, which means being essentially neither male nor female, or a combination of both. Gender nonconformity is behavioral variation in gender expression (e.g., clothing, mannerisms, accessories, and hairstyles) from cultural and societal norms expected for that gender. Sexual orientation is defined as the physical and emotional attraction of an individual to same-sex people (lesbian or gay; homosexual), both same-sex and opposite-sex people (bisexual), or opposite-sex people (heterosexual).² Transgender is an all-inclusive term that may include all individuals whose gender identity or expression does not align with their assigned birth sex and/or those whose gender identity is outside of the binary male/female classification'.².