Based on the first legal sex change in Spain

Abstract

The following study describes and analyzes the various factors that contributed, according to the author, to making Malaga, (in the south of Spain), the first Spanish city to carry out the first legal sex change in the late seventies. It must be stressed that acknowledgement of this new syndrome, i.e. transsexualism, received great interest from the medical setting in Malaga (notably the official College of Medicine and the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Malaga), followed by the media as a whole. On the other hand, the person who was biologically a man asking to have his sex changed in the registry, constituted a prototype of the syndrome, complying entirely with all the characteristics that defined transsexualism. And, lastly, those who intervened in this legal process, (lawyer, judge and magistrate), were s own to be profoundly human in the face of this medical and legal enigma. The legal decision assumed the predominance of gender (experiences, behavior) over biological elements (chromosomes, gonads, secondary sexual characteristics), considering the previous gender as a mistake which, therefore, would be rectified by it.