In Canada, the institutional answer is yes, and plenty of trained professionals will help you do it. They will diagnose you with gender-identity disorder or gender dysphoria, and they will offer elaborate, painful and mutilating cures, which, in B.C., are covered by health insurance. Maybe you'll feel better after, or maybe not. No one really knows. Paul McHugh, chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, calls it malpractice.
Some people are convinced they can only be fulfilled if they have a leg amputated.
But most of us believe that amputating their legs is unethical. Maybe some day we'll think the same way about the people who encouraged Ms. Nixon to amputate her penis. We can castrate her and shave her Adam's apple. We can give her electrolysis and hormone injections and breast implants.