"We make love at special moments, we're men or women at all times. We are born male or female or intersexed. We become men or women. 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 : you cannot change the appearance of the body. "It's better " states one transsexual, "to change what's in the mind". Will we succeed in doing so ?"
Colette Chiland

A university professor, Colette Chiland taught psychology and psychopathology of children and adolescents, then clinical psychology at the Sorbonne University in Paris. As a psychiatrist, she has worked at the Alfred-Binet Center (Paris) and was president of the International Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Associated Professors. A psychoanalyst, she is founding member of the Psychoanalyst Society of Paris. She has published, among others, My Child is not Crazy and Homo psychanalyticus.