…As Butler exemplifies, queer theory has written of transitions as discursive but it has not explored the bodiliness of gendered crossings. The concomitant of this elision of embodiment is that the transgendered subject has typically had center stage over the transsexual: whether s/he is transvestite, drag queen, or butch woman, queer theory’s approbation has been directed toward the subject who crosses the lines of gender, not those of sex. Epitomizing the bodiliness of gender transition–the matter of sex the cross-dresser has been applauded for putatively defying–the transsexual reveals queer theory’s own limits: what lies beyond or beneath its favored terrain of gender performativity.

Second Skins reviews and begins the task of redressing queer theory’s elision of the experience of “trans” embodiment by focusing on transsexual narratives. It is imperative to read transsexual accounts now in order to flesh out the transgendered figure that queer theory has made prominent. If, for queer theory, transition is to be explored in terms of its deconstructive effects on the body and identity (transition as a symptom of the constructedness of the sex/gender system and a figure for the impossibility of this system’s achievement of identity), I read transsexual narratives to consider how transition may be the very route to identity and bodily integrity. In transsexual accounts transition does not shift the subject away from the embodiment of sexual difference but more fully into it.
–Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality