 In response to this charge, Prosser (1998) argues that autobiographical narrative is essential to understanding transsexual subjectivity (103).  In his view, autobiographical narrative—required by the clinician, and then perhaps re-visited through a formal autobiography—allows transsexuals to confer intelligibility upon their lives.  Such accounts, Prosser points out, are always retrospective. And they involve a split between the narrated self and the narrating self. Such tensions between claims to having always belonged to a sex (on the one hand) and of going through a process of surgical sex-change (on the other) are simply constitutive of the types of tensions that arise in autobiographical narrative (1998, 114–120).