I never chose to be like this. I was born like this. It is not a whim. It is a medical condition. In a culture which has endless sympathy for all things medical, but rather less for psychological eccentricity, this scientific research has been a momentous breakthrough for transsexuals.
Scepticism survives in some quarters.
Womanhood, they argue, amounts to more than a pair of breasts and some oestrogen, and it is a travesty of female experience to suggest that surgery can make you a woman. So unhappy people can hop on the bandwagon and become a card-carrying transsexual to excuse themselves. There's no way of knowing. What we do know is that the ones who have been successful in one sex will be so in the other. The disasters as men also become disasters as women.