Jane E. Brody’s “Deeper Understanding of Gender,” 6/14/16 New York Times, on being transgender, is illustrated with a picture that depicts multiple personality.

Yesterday’s online version of Brody’s article, “Being Transgender as a Fact of Nature,” is accompanied by a photo of male-to-female transsexual, Christine Jorgensen. But today’s print version of the article, “A Deeper Understanding of Gender,” is accompanied by a picture of a man who is looking at himself in the mirror and sees a woman. The latter illustration is a mistake. It depicts the subjective experience of persons with multiple personality, not the subjective experience of transgender persons.

The reason that a transgender person with a male body, but a subjective sense of being female, might seek sex-change surgery, is that he does NOT see a female when he looks in a mirror, and he wants the sex-change surgery to change what he sees in the mirror to match his subjective sexual identity.

However, persons with multiple personality may sometimes see the image of one of their alternate personalities when they look in the mirror. So if a man with multiple personality has a female alternate personality, he may sometimes see that female image when he looks in the mirror. And that is what is inadvertently illustrated by the picture accompanying the print version of Brody’s article.

For further discussion, search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog.