FEATURED REPRINT Gender Construction In Everyday Life: Transsexualism (Abridged) Suzanne J. KESSLER and Wendy McKENNA There are thousands of transsexuals in the United States today. With few exceptions (e.g. Garfinkel, 1967), the interests of the scientific community have focused either on transsexuals as interesting cases of social deviance (e.g. Feinbloom, 1976) or on the pathology (e.g. Person, 1974), etiology (e.g. Stoller, 1968, 1975) and treatment (e.g. Benjamin, 1966) of transsexualism. In contrast, our interest in transsexuals is not in terms of transsexualism, per se, but only in terms of what transsexualism can illuminate about the day-to-day social con- struction of gender by all persons. To gather information on this process we con- ducted in-depth interviews with 15 transsexuals. The relative uniqueness of our focus was reflected in their reactions to it. As is common among this group of people, they were familiar with the scientific literature on transsexualism (Sulcov, 1973; Person, 1974). Some seemed annoyed, some seemed relieved, and some seemed interested that our only concern was with how their experience could expose universal features of gender construction. All, however, were some- what surprised that we had little interest in learning the causes of their trans- sexualism or in questioning their definitions of themselves. It is not just specific behaviors of transsexuals that illustrate the social con- struction of gender. The existence of transsexualism, itself, as a valid diagnostic category underscores the rules we have for constructing gender, and shows how these rules are reinforced by scientific conceptions of transsexualism. Temporarily suspending ‘belief’ in the independent, objective reality of social and scientific facts like gender allows us to see how the sense of objective facts is produced in everyday interaction. Harold Garfinkel, in whose work this chapter and this book are grounded, has studied several concrete phenomena in Feminism & Psychology © 2000 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 10(1): 11–29. [0959-3535(200002)10:1;11–29;011573]