Pursuing Views and Testing Commitments
Pursuing Views and Testing Commitments
Hypothetical Questions in the Psychiatric Assessment of Transsexual Patients
This chapter, written by Susan Speer, considers the role of hypothetical questions (HQs) in interactions between psychiatrists and transsexual patients in a British gender identity clinic. The psychiatrists studied in this chapter perform a gatekeeping function vis‐à‐vis their transsexual patients in that they must diagnosis the patients as true transsexuals before the patients can receive publically funded sex reassignment surgery. Speers argues that the psychiatrists use hypothetical questions in this context as a diagnostic tool, specifically, as a way of testing the patients' commitment to a sex change. In particular, the psychiatrists use HQs to construct hypothetical scenarios about the negative consequences of treatment and query the patients as to how they would “feel, behave, or cope” given such a scenario.
Keywords: hypothetical questions, transsexual, gender identity, gender identity clinic, gatekeeping, hypothetical scenarios, diagnostic tool, psychiatric assessment
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
