The true transsexual and transnormativity: a critical discourse analysis of the wrong-body discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How did the wrong-body discourse (WBD) become the dominant medicalised discourse in Canada and the United States? What ideological effects did this dominance have? To address these questions, I conducted a critical discourse analysis informed by Foucauldian genealogy. I analysed texts written in, or translated into, English for a medical-expert audience from the earliest mentions of wrong bodies in 1864 to the institutionalisation of the WBD in the DSM-III diagnosis of transsexualism in 1980. I argue that through the medicalisation of gender variance, the three tenets of the WBD—wrongness of the body; disjuncture between sex and gender; surgical and hormonal solution—developed individually and were brought together by medical experts into a coherent discourse in the mid-1960s. Two main factors likely contributed to the dominance of the WBD: the lack of dependence on any particular etiology that made the WBD compatible with a wide variety of explanations, and the very small number of medical experts responsible for the majority of publications on gender variance all using the WBD. I further argue that medical experts, faced with challenges to their treatment of gender-variant people, turned to the idea of true transsexualism to stabilise the newly-formed WBD and legitimate their treatment of gender variance. In addition to the three tenets of the WBD, true transsexualism also included characteristics and assumptions that medical experts expected gender-variant people to embody if they wanted access to treatment. Through these expectations, medical experts produced a set of norms against which all gender-variant people were judged as legitimate or not, namely, one of the first iterations of transnormativity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".