Volume 46, Number 15 · October 7, 1999
Skin Deep
By Fiona MacCarthy
Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery
by Sander L. Gilman
Princeton University Press, 396 pp., $29.95
Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty
by Nancy Etcoff
Doubleday, 325 pp., $23.95
This summer three British transsexuals who want to be women won their appeal against the local health authority which had refused them a sex-change operation. In a case widely publicized in the UK, the Court of Appeal upheld an earlier High Court ruling that the authority had acted unlawfully, without consideration of what was 'the proper treatment of a recognized illness.' The significance of this is that transsexuals in Britain, of whom around 1,000 are currently awaiting surgery, will now be able to demand to have their sex-change operations on the National Health. The solicitor representing the transsexuals commented at the end of this long-drawn-out case that the estimated £200,000 spent on it could have funded twenty sex-change operations.
Review, 4124 words
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