In 1950, the psychiatrist Medard Boss reported about an operation on a biologically born male who had sex reassignment surgery, which for Boss was like being turned into a new human being, for his main critic Alexander Mitscherlich however it was a mutilation. The fierce dispute which followed, whose participants included L. Binswanger, V. v. Weizsäcker, C. G. Jung, M. Heidegger and others focused on problems which still exist today: patient autonomy and medical responsibility, normativity of anthropological concepts, psychotherapeutic self-understanding. This debate is documented here for the first time in articles, some of which were previously unpublished.