I. Introduction: Magical Trans-Formation Transsexual Narratives
How individuals seek to articulate their transgressive gender identities not only informs their biographies but how they understand their present selves. For instance, in the West the “wrong-body” paradigm (Benjamin 1966) that describes a gender identity at odds with the sex-assignment of an individual’s physicality/ biology at birth resulting in cognitive, emotional and physical distress (or dysphoria) is commonly referenced to explain the imperatives of transsexual identities. The more a transsexual encounters dissonance between their internal sense of gender and their material form the further increase of stress, until medical and surgical intervention is warranted. As a long-standing explanatory model, the “born-into-the-wrong-body” model has been one of the most pervasive – and, to gain access for various aforementioned medical and surgical remedies, most widely accepted – of transsexual narratives. Yet it is not the only way transgender individuals in binary-gendered societies attempt to understand their identities …show more content…
Individuals who specifically identify as transsexuals (unlike other, non-binary transgender people) have reported the wish, the dream, and/or the desire to understand or alleviate their dysphoria through some type of magical transformation. Utilizing components of folklore and mythos, such personal stories describe a comprehension and/ or correcting of gender dysphoria by granting a seemingly enchanted bodily transformation; a revelatory discovery of individuals as gendered changelings in desperate need of transposition, or that through sheer strength of will, desires could act as catalyst to initiate physical alterations to the
How individuals seek to articulate their transgressive gender identities not only informs their biographies but how they understand their present selves. For instance, in the West the “wrong-body” paradigm (Benjamin 1966) that describes a gender identity at odds with the sex-assignment of an individual’s physicality/ biology at birth resulting in cognitive, emotional and physical distress (or dysphoria) is commonly referenced to explain the imperatives of transsexual identities. The more a transsexual encounters dissonance between their internal sense of gender and their material form the further increase of stress, until medical and surgical intervention is warranted. As a long-standing explanatory model, the “born-into-the-wrong-body” model has been one of the most pervasive – and, to gain access for various aforementioned medical and surgical remedies, most widely accepted – of transsexual narratives. Yet it is not the only way transgender individuals in binary-gendered societies attempt to understand their identities …show more content…
Individuals who specifically identify as transsexuals (unlike other, non-binary transgender people) have reported the wish, the dream, and/or the desire to understand or alleviate their dysphoria through some type of magical transformation. Utilizing components of folklore and mythos, such personal stories describe a comprehension and/ or correcting of gender dysphoria by granting a seemingly enchanted bodily transformation; a revelatory discovery of individuals as gendered changelings in desperate need of transposition, or that through sheer strength of will, desires could act as catalyst to initiate physical alterations to the