[The French physician and judge confronting the transsexual in 1986. I. The position of French and foreign jurisprudence].

The authors have searched through French and western jurisprudence about transsexualism. Thanks to their experience of how judges and magistrates have reacted they have been able to analyse the evolution of attitudes and the present-day attitudes to the subject and how the condition should be treated and viewed by the law. There are only a relatively few numbers who wish to change sex but these are estimated at 1 in 50,000 to 1 in 100,000 according to different statistics. The proportion of males who want to change is 3 times greater than of females. The fact that transsexualism is a phenomenon much more often found in North America, in North Europe and in the West, and almost not at all in the third world or in socialist countries, or in the Mediterranean basin, makes one think that this is a syndrome connected with a legal attitude that allows people to dispose of their bodies in the way they wish. This in turn derives from the European Convention of the Rights of man as against those found in the legislation of individual nations in the community. The French legal system is justified in being cautious, seeing how hesitant lawyers are and how extremely prudent the French medical corps is. The reserve of jurisprudence in the U.S.A. and Canada (with the exception of two provinces) and a certain hesitation about the indications for medical treatment to convert from one sex to the other voiced by the principal pioneers of such treatment in the U.S.A. together with the absence of specific laws which cover surgical treatment and the change in the legal state (with the exception of Sweden and the Federal Republic of Germany) is to be taken along with the check that Italian law has placed on the operation recently, in 1982. As far as French law is concerned, Mme M.L. Rassat has carried out a recent and very pertinent study which makes it possible to analyse the attitude of magistrates, which until 1975 was basically very restrictive as far as demands for change in civil sex was concerned. Recently, however, they have become laxer but the Appeal Court strictly refuse to recognise the idea of psychological or psychosocial sex.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)