Psychiatric Demarcations of Sex/Gender Available to Purchase

This chapter concerns the scientific proof of transsexual nature, a term used in the legal codes on transsexuality in Turkey. The first part of the chapter examines the scientific history of the contemporary regulation of sex/gender nonconformity and transness by situating the medicolegal model in Turkey within a transnational framework of sexological and psychiatric knowledge production and circulation. The second part illustrates the medical steps trans people took to collect evidence of their “true” sex and shows how psychiatrists evaluated these steps. The psychiatric space of sex/gender confirmation also involves negotiations between doctors and trans people over conflicting meanings of bodily time, sex, gender, and sexuality. A focus on this space draws attention to trans multiplicities and ruptures that emerge in institutional efforts to tame bodily time into a psychiatric timeline.