Hortense et la question féminine

Abstract

The clinical analysis of transsexuals patients leads us to consider that what constitutes a man or a woman is more a question of a singular and individual construction for each patient than a question of anatomy. The hormono-surgical reassignation when it is well indicated, undoubtedly relieves a significant share of suffering for these people by re-assigning them in the desired gender. It does not however silence the question of the individual construction. We observed that it is often when the desired gender is “marked” in the body through surgery that another form of suffering may appear. This “babyblues” as named by the patients, would be more related to the transition from an imaginary representation to its inclusion in the real of the body. Based on the postoperative follow-up of Hortense, a young patient MtF (male-to-female), we seek to illustrate this transition is far from being linear and continuous, leading us consider that the encounter with the feminine can be problematic. Often present in the childhood, the identity construction will be constantly revised during the psychical development of these subjects. The surgical procedure as an “imprint” in the body triggers psychical upheavals and overhauls which will reactivate the infantile story of these reassigned adults. The “rebirth” that the patients refer to, awakes the infantile part of the subject and allows them to revisit phantasmagoric scenes of their childhood and adolescence. For this patient, like many others, it was once the hormono-surgical reassignation course ended that she was truly confronted with the feminine question because after all: what is being a woman? In the space of her psychotherapy and her postoperative follow-up with the surgeon, Hortense invites us to think about the feminine question and gender identity from a new perspective.