In 1972, Sweden was the first in the world to legislate on state-funded care for people in need of gender reassignment, which in an international perspective was considered radical. However, it is not until July 2013 that the requirement that a person must be an unmarried and sterile Swedish citizen to change legal gender is deleted from the law, which means the end of the forced sterilizations that were carried out on transgender people between the years 1972 and 2013.
In "Body Lines", ethnologist and gender researcher Signe Bremer describes and analyses some of the concrete consequences that the old gender recognition law had in the lives of individuals. Cultural conditions that also concern contemporary experiences of gender reassignment are problematized and questions about bodily integrity are scrutinized. By closely reading stories about undergoing gender reassignment surgery before the 2013 legislative change, Bremer examines how the category of transsexualism is embodied, made, renegotiated and lived in a gender reassignment time course.
