I personally take a somewhat more radical view and think the medical community, through stigmatising and medicalising transgendered and transsexual individuals, have magically created a profit centre where there might be a simple elective surgery centre, and contributed to the oppression of a class of individuals, just as they had the gay male and lesbian communities before.

Society allows men to have hair transplants, penile implants, "pec sculpting," liposuction, and whatnot, essentially at will, and all they have to say is that they want to improve their looks.

Likewise, women can contract for breast implants, "nose jobs," "tummy tucks," and a host of surgical procedures designed to enhance their "body image" and essentially all the medical community will ask is, "Will that be cash or credit?"

I don't think there should be any gatekeepers or filters standing in the way of anyone who wants to change the way they look, and the only reason they get away with it is due to invidious discrimination and hatred on the part of the society at large, and many members of the medical community.

Some years ago, Samuel R. Delany wrote a novel, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, later republished as Triton.

In it, he describes a society free of that particular sort of oppression, in which one can arrange, for any reason at all, to have one's gender and sexual orientation changed at will, and in fact he arranges to have his body and sexual orientation changed, but it still unhappy, because he hasn't managed to change his soul. His young life was spent in an oppressive society, one in which he was forced to work as a prostitute, and his perceptions of himself, and of his own sense of self worth, were irreparably damaged by that experience.

One might take this as commentary on any number of things, although it seems clear that the oppressive society of Mars, which exists only "offstage," lies at the heart of it all. I recommend it.

Cheers,

Puddin'