Bytt, bytt kommer aldrig mer igen

Sammanfattning: In 1972 Sweden became the first country to allow citizens to change their legal gender. However, candidates were required to be sterilized. The matter of required sterilization pinpoints the ambivalent relationship between the state and the individual. The aim of this study is therefore to examine discursive change in the Swedish government’s approach toward transsexual people and in motives to require sterilization, with focus on the trade-off between biopolitics and the individual’s autonomy. The study draws on Michel Foucault’s understanding of discourse, construction of the subject and biopolitics as well as Judith Butler’s heterosexual matrix. The hands-on implementation of the discourse analysis is inspired by Ulf Olsson’s dissertation and it is conducted on Swedish Government Official Reports from 1968, 2007 and 2010. The study shows that the state has gone from understanding transsexuals as deviant to vulnerable and from putting the state’s interest first to acknowledging transsexual people’s human rights. The concluding discussion shows that the 1968 and 2007 reports can be understood as signs of gender confusion caused by the transsexual individual and the required sterilization as the state’s biopolitical punishment for causing instability. However, the 2010 report does not follow the pattern which could implicate the matrix’s fading influence.