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Colette Chiland
Changing Sex
Some human beings refuse to take the path that leads from being male to becoming a man or from being female and becoming a woman and want to belong to the sex for which their bodies were not designed -and this at any price. In our culture, these transsexuals want to both occupy the other place in the network of symbolic exchanges and have a mark of this change in their bodies. Their sadness is irremediable, for although they can change their social sex, they cannot change their bodily sex. "It's better " states one transsexual, "to change what's in the mind". Will we succeed in doing so ? A university professor, Colette Chiland taught psychology and psychopathology of children and adolescents, then clinical psychology at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
Janine Mossuz-Lavau, Anne de Kervasdoué
Women are Not Just Men
The changes which have come to be in the second half of the 20th century have taken women a long ways from the profile adopted by their mothers. Do all these transformations lead us to trace the portrait of a woman who has become a clone of men ? We can ask ourselves this question when we remember the arguments of feminists in the 70's employing the "egalitarian" themes of Simone de Beauvoir. More recently, some have gone so far as to announce the coming of an "androgynous" society. But what do the women and the men of this country think about all this ? How do women see themselves in relation to men ? How do they define themselves and how do they describe the men of their lives ? A very pointed realization of today's female identity. Janine Mossuz-Lavau is Director of Research at the CNRS.