The "Transsexual Phenomenon" (Benjamin) is a reliable index of the historical modifications of scientific, cultural and political perception of sexual identity in the 20th century. As an introduction to a chronology and selected bibliography of this phenomenon, I suggest a clue: the systematic denial of the relevance of psychoanalytic explanations of transsexualism by all the biologists, endocrinologists and sociologists who dealt with the problem.
transsexualism; psychoanalysis; epistemology