Yuen Wai-cheung, Thursday, 05 June, 2014
The necessity of sex reassignment operations and the legal implications for people who wish to change their sex has come under discussion in the community recently. With more than 20 years of experience in dealing with transsexual patients, I can offer an insight into the kinds of people they are and what their pre-surgery journey involves.
First of all, transsexuals are physically fit adults of sound mind. The only major mental distress they suffer is an incongruence between mind and body. They feel they should belong to the opposite sex.
Typically, they cannot accept the sexual characteristics of their bodies - for a born male, a penis, testes and a prominent Adam's apple. Similarly, a born female is distressed by her sizeable nipples, breasts and menses. Furthermore, they want to gain the sexual characteristics of the opposite sex: a vagina for a born male; a penis for a born female.
This is a very unusual condition. Over the past 30 years, only about 100 people have had sex reassignment surgery in Hong Kong.
More:
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1525450/sex-change-surgery-effective-solution-unusual-mental-condition
