Looking back on the first half-century of transsexualism, it is clear that for a long time officials understood what they were doing as resolving a tiny number of anomalous situations, a task they accomplished with varying degrees of compassion and logical coherence. Two long-term societal trends influenced their decisions, though they did not tend to acknowledge this: the growth of bureaucracy and the shift to individual, rather than communal, conceptions of personhood.
