From the introduction:

This paper was written for a university presentation on TG identities through time. It does not set out to make a point, but to offer the fruit of historian's work on the development of gender in general and of transgender identities in Western psychiatry in particular. Western psychiatry now has a history of 150 years. Three periods stand out.

Part I discusses its first fifty years (1860-1910), when psychiatry defined a number of inverted gender-identities . We show a few case histories. Part II shows the rise of psychoanalysis over the second fifty years of psychiatry (1910-1960), and it's view of gender as a matter of genital fact. To them transgender practices (like cross-dressing or expressing transsexual longing) were a mere denial of homosexuality, and they ceased transgender surgeries. Part III shows how during the 1960's psychiatry gradually reinstated transgender identities and surgeries. In the TG community started using non-psychiatric terms like 'transgender' and political ones like 'freedom of gender-expression'. This way the US TG community started to gain control over its self-understanding and representation. In Western Europe a different emancipation strategy led to transgender care being taken up in health insurance schemes. The paper discusses the pros and cons of both emancipation strategies.

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