Own Study

Personality

The way transsexuals behave when they come for medical consultation does not need to reflect their original personality. By the time they take this step, they have been in conflict with society and Linder great mental strain for a long time, often many years.

Nevertheless, because so few systematic studies have been made of the personality of transsexuals I tried to see whether it differed in any way from the ordinary.

For this purpose I used a questionnaire constructed at the Psychiatric Department of Sahlgrenska Hospital, Gdteborg, for eliciting syntonic traits, asthenic traits, hysteroid traits and schizothymic traits. This questionnaire, originally worked out by Lindberg (1939), has since been modified by Skoog (1959) and Jansson (1964), and I used Jansson's version. In addition, I noted whether or not the patients were psychoinfantile in the sense of Lindberg (1950, 1953).

The questionnaire contains seven questions per trait. Whenever the patients answered Yes to a question, they were given one point, whenever they answered No, one point was subtracted, and whenever they did not know how to answer, they were scored zero. Whenever their score on the seven questions for a trait lay above zero, they were classed as having at least a certain degree of the trait in question. The patients were classed as psychoinfantile if they both gave me a childish impression and answered No to the question whether they felt as secure now as they had done when they were children.

One of the men (case 15) refused to answer the questions. All the other subjects did so.
First the results on the questionnaire:

The only separate questions on which the men and women differed

significantly in their answers were: "Is it hard for you to make up your mind?" (p<0.05) and "Do you tire easily?" (p<0.01), as well as "Do you agree that variety is the spice of life, and like gaiety and excitement?" (p<0.05), and "Have you a vivid imagination and do you get carried away easily?" (p<0.05). The men answered Yes more often to these four questions.

Judging by the separate scores on these traits, the series was characterized as follows:

The men were probably significantly more often asthenic or hysteroid than the women. This is interesting in view of LindegArd's (1966) recent observation that women are more often syntonic, asthenic and hysteroid than men as a rule. He based this conclusion on interviews of about 100 men and 100 women, and used essentially the same method as I did, though not exactly the same operational definitions.

Eighteen of the men, or over 50 per cent, were classed as psychoirfantile, but only 2 women; the difference was statistically significant (p<0.02). Lindberg (1953) pointed out that psychoinfantilism is often combined with syntonic, asthenic and hysteroid traits, and that psychcinfantile persons show a combination of these traits significantly more often than do controls. Fifty-nine per cent of the psychoinfantile patients in the present series were both syntonic, asthenic, hysteroid and schizothymic, or lacked only one of these traits, against 26 per cent of the patients who were not psychoinfantile.

The most common combination of traits in my series was asthenia, syntonia and psychoinfantilism. The next most common was asthenia, hysteroidia and syntonia, also combined with psychoinfantilism.

Because it is so hard to determine the original personality of transsexuals and because my series was so small, and because one must reckon that the frequency of various traits depends on mental state (Jansson, 1964) and age (Skoog, 1959; Lindegdrd, 1963)-l concluded that there was no point in comparing the results from my series – except with those obtained in studies using much the same method. Jansson (1964) used almost exactly the same method in a study of mental troubles in connection with childbearing. Skoog (1959) also used much the same method for a study of anancasms. Skoog classified his subjects according to whether they showed a moderate degree, a strong degree or none at all of asthenic, syntonic and hysteroid traits, and according to whether or not they had schizothymic or psychoinfantile traits, and in order to be able to compare his figures with those from the present series, I pooled his moderate and strong degrees of the first three traits.

Comparison between the figures from the present series and from Jansson's control group of 135 women, and Skoog's control group of 2962 persons admitted to a psychiatric department, shows the following:

The only noteworthy difference between my series and the others was that mine contained a much greater number of schizothyrnic subjects than either of the other series, a much greater number of psychoinfantile subjects than Skoog's series, and a smaller number of asthenic and syntonic subjects than did Jansson's normal women.