Looking Back (To)wards the Body: Medicalization and the GRA
| Author | Sharon Cowan |
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663909103627 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
THE BODY: MEDICALIZATION
AND THE GRA
SHARON COWAN
Edinburgh University, UK
‘Don’t you find it odd that surgery can cure a mental disorder?’1
ITIStrue that the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) embodies what
could be termed groundbreaking reform, in that it goes much further than
the legislation of other jurisdictions in its protection of certain rights of
transsexual people. However, as has already been suggested, there are a number
of serious issues that the GRA does not address. The Act purports to move
forwards, to look beyond the body, since a trans person need not have
surgery in order to be granted a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). But
the Act’s continued reliance on psychiatric and medical understandings of
what it is to be a transsexual person has simultaneously taken us a step back-
wards, in that the historical medicalization of the transgender ‘condition’ has
now been given the stamp of statutory authority.
As Ralph Sandland suggests in his contribution to this debate, the GRA is
a repudiation of anything other than a heterosexual dichotomous sex/gender
system and in this sense represents what he has called a ‘failure to recognize’.
It is in the context of a refusal to question the heteronormative binary sex/
gender system that one might say that the GRA has failed to recognize the
problem of the body. That is, the GRA takes for granted the separation of
mind and body that dominates both medical and legal discourse. Here the
dichotomy between mind and body is created by the heteronormative impera-
tive to line up one’s somatic sex with one’s sexuality and one’s internal sense
of sexed/gendered self. Feeling that one’s mind and body do not match, that
one is in the ‘wrong body’ is not an uncommon way for transsexual people,
or for those psychiatrists and other medial professionals who police the trans-
gender boundaries, to understand and speak about the experience of what it
means to be transsexual.
Sally Hines (2007: para. 5.3, quoting Jay Prosser) argues that this discourse
persists for transsexual2 people simply because this is genuinely what it feels
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES © The Author(s), 2009
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0964 6639, Vol. 18(2), 247–252
DOI: 10.1177/0964663909103627
248
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(2)
like to be transsexual – there is a ‘desire for an embodied home’. But in her
research in the transgender community, Hines also found that transsexual
people know all too well that use of this mind versus body language is necess-
ary if surgical intervention is to be medically authorized. Hines argues that this
‘wrong body’ narrative is not straightforwardly an internal transsexual emo-
tion, but rather is at least partly given meaning by external social and political
factors; she claims that our sense of self does not develop in isolation from the
development of the body, and both are profoundly subject to social processes
and pressures. The ‘wrong body’ narrative is at least partly given meaning by
external social and political factors; here, these external forces are, in the main,
heteronormative medico-legal discourses of the transsexual ‘condition’.3
In Hines’s research, many respondents rejected the wrong body narrative,
and also questioned the idea of moving across a rigid gender binary. But the
GRA, in contrast, adheres to the tenacious notion that the wrong body/right
mind problem can only be solved if self-identity and public identity corres-
pond in a way that does not confound existing sex/gender categories. It is
true, as Sharpe has shown, that under the Act, the granting of a GRC is not
dependent upon a trans person’s acceptance by, or fully passing in, the
community; however, arguably the set of assumptions about what it means
to be and pass as a man or woman in society also underpin the medical model
of transgendered life that the GRA explicitly enables.
But if we base our explanation of what it is to live as a transsexual...
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