title: "Living in a Shell of Something I'm Not": Transsexuality, Medical Ethics, and the Judeo-Christian Culture.
abstract: A surgeon participating in a 2008 congress on the topic of trans-identified people posed the question of whether doctors would have to defend themselves when "judgment day" comes for having employed surgical means to turn men into women or vice versa? What might be viewed as a certain level of (medical) irrationality surrounding transgender life, coupled with widely documented cases of violence directed at these groups may well partly be attributable to the deeply internalized doctrine of creation in Judeo-Christian culture. Objections, however, to the use of transgender medicine "in the name of normalization" cannot relate to the biblical tradition, for there is no normative concept of gender and no text whose scope is to articulate theory of gender. In the vast expanse and freedom of the Judeo-Christian creator there is space for diversity, variations, and, above all, for the development of individual freedom.
authors.affiliation: Department of History and Ethics of Medicine, University Medical School Hamburg-Eppendorf, Martinstr. 52, 20246, Hamburg, Germany, m.wirth@uke.de.
authors.forename: Mathias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wirth
mesh_terms: D002835:Christianity / Q000523:psychology; D003469:Culture; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007599:Judaism / Q000523:psychology; D008297:Male; D012068:Religion and Medicine; D063106:Transgender Persons / Q000523:psychology*; D014189:Transsexualism / Q000523:psychology*