Some definitions of transsexuality include the issue of sex reassignment surgery as an inherent desire of all transsexual people. This paper aims to investigate the meanings assigned to the surgery by four transsexual women, seeking to highlight the conceptions about the changes that reassignment creates in the personal life of the transsexual. The data were collected by individual application of open-ended interviews using life history technique. The transcripts were organized into collective case studies and analyzed on basis of the Queer Theory. The results suggest that the meanings attributed to sex reassignment surgery have multiple meanings and are changeable during the process of development and that the desire of an operation should not be included as a criterion in the definition of transsexuality.
transsexuality; surgery; psychosexual behavior
