 For Hausman, transsexual autobiographies serve the function of justifying access to surgery through the deployment of medical accounts. The purpose of such narratives is to compel the reader to comply with the author's experience and to interpret her own life in the same way (156). Indeed, Hausman argues, these very narratives belie several contradictions and are actually self-defeating. For example, Hausman notes a self-defeating tension between transsexual claims to have always been “the other sex” all along and the related demand for “sex-change” surgery (148). If one was always that sex all along, then why sex-change surgery?