Transgender Psychoanalysis

A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference

Patricia Gherovici

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317594178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Drawingon the author's clinical work with gender-variant patients, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference argues for a depathologizing of the transgender experience, while offering an original analysis of sexual difference. We are living in a "trans" moment that has become the next civil rights frontier. By unfixing our notions of gender, sex, and sexual identity, challenging normativity and essentialisms, trans modalities of embodiment can help reorient psychoanalytic practice.

This book addresses sexual identity and sexuality by articulating new ideas on the complex relationship of the body to the psyche, the precariousness of gender, the instability of the male/female opposition, identity construction, uncertainties about sexual choice—in short, the conundrum of sexual difference. Transgender Psychoanalysis features explications of Lacanian psychoanalysis along with considerations on sex and gender in the form of clinical vignettes from Patricia Gherovici's practice as a psychoanalyst. The book engages with popular culture and psychoanalytic literature (including Jacques Lacan's treatments of two transgender patients), and implements close readings uncovering a new ethics of sexual difference.

These explorations have important implications not just for clinicians in psychoanalysis and mental health practitioners but also for transgender theorists and activists, transgender people, and professionals in the trans field. Transgender Psychoanalysis promises to enrich ongoing discourses on gender, sexuality, and identity.

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1

TRANSAMERICA

Despite the tendency to sensationalize the trans experience, Americans’ perceptions of transgender people have been positively influenced by the increasing media presence of complex figures such as Caitlyn Jenner. As a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) showed, about two-thirds of today’s American population is relatively well informed about transgender people and issues, having a good understanding of what the term “transgender” means. Another recent survey from the Human Rights Campaign indicates that 22 percent of Americans know or personally work with a transgender person. This increasing awareness may have contributed to the fact that an overwhelming majority (89%) favors legal protection and equal rights for transgender people. In 2015, President Obama became the first president to use the word “transgender” in a State of the Union address. In doing so, he publicly recognized the transgender community while pushing for its protection against discrimination.

The American population, however, is still divided over whether transgender people should use the public restroom that corresponds to their gender identity. The need to establish sex-segregated public restrooms was discussed by Lacan in a 1957 essay where he called it “urinary segregation,” noting that “public life [is] subject [to] laws of urinary segregation.”¹ While Lacan was at the time discussing how language sets up sexual difference as an impasse, he had also foreseen the recent controversy when he observed that public life is subjected to the inequalities of “urinary segregation.” Lacan illustrated it with an anecdote of transit. Perhaps it can be read today as a journey of transition: A brother and sister take a train journey, sitting across from each other in the compartment. When they pull in to the station, they look at the platform from their window, and the boy exclaims: “We have arrived at Ladies!” while the girl states: “You, idiot! Can’t you see we are at Gentlemen?” As Lacan noted, it seems impossible that they would reach an agreement: “Gentlemen and Ladies will henceforth be two homelands toward which each of their souls will be all the more impossible for them to reach an agreement since, being in fact the same homeland, neither can give ground regarding the one’s unsurpassed excellence without detracting from the other’s glory.”²

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The binary order by which public restrooms are divided creates two mutually exclusive positions. Both boy and girl position themselves differently in relationship to identical doors. Only the signs make them different. Neither child has actually arrived at Ladies or at Gentlemen, as they believe. Both siblings are wrong, and based on their skewed perspective they will have to make a choice. Every time anyone uses a public restroom, one is forced to make a gender decision—choosing the world of men or women. But for folks who express their gender in non-normative ways, the choice of a public restroom could be quite a challenge, going from being a source of anxiety to creating a dangerous situation.

In recent debates about public restroom access, those who opposed the so-called bathroom law used arguments about religious liberty that soon turned into a public safety concern, successfully moving the debate away from the realm of civil rights—opponents argued that the law could allow sexual predators to access restrooms in disguise. The irony is that the topic under discussion was a basic civil rights protection intended to make everyday life safer for gay and transgender individuals.

Not without conflict, awareness is increasing, and as a society we are collectively learning to be more accepting of transgender individuals. A great deal has changed with the progressively increasing cultural and political mainstreaming of transgender identity, but much more yet needs to change. After a protracted discussion, the military lifted its ban on transgender personnel. As the quest for equality gains traction, the discussion is not about whether gender reassignment is acceptable but about whether to start gender transition during childhood.

Transgender lives are made visible not just by the “tipping point” appearance of Laverne Cox as the cover girl of TIME magazine, but also by the presence of two transgender artists in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker, long time collaborators, who currently are also associate producers and consultants on the TV series Transparent. Not only did a major American art institution prominently feature two openly transgender life-and-art partners, but one of the main works displayed in the exhibition was a photographic diary of their gender transition, recently published as a book titled Relationship. It documents the evolution of Drucker, a trans woman, from male to female, and of Ernst, a trans man, from female to male. They met not long after they had both started taking hormones: testosterone injections for Ernst and “the slow incline” of hormone replacement therapy for Drucker—testosterone blockers, estrogen pills, and finally injections. They got together while still in the midst of “the unflattering throes of yet another puberty.” ³

The equivocal narrative tangles and untangles gender identity as a construction. Their “auto ethnography and bona fide aesthetic intent,” in the words of Maggie Nelson, shows them in love while capturing not just their relationship as a couple, but their relationship with their evolving genders, with their sexualities, and above all with their changing bodies in all their “bewildered singularity.”⁴ They write, “If our greatest art work is the way we live our lives, then a relationship is the ultimate collaboration.”⁵ The transsexual body as a work of art is an issue I will explore at length in Chapters 16, 17, and 18.

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The trans body is also a social barometer. Drucker’s own description of their six-year trans/trans “life collaboration” (the couple broke up in 2014) is illuminating: “Our bodies are a microcosm of the greater external world as it shifts to a more polymorphous spectrum of sexuality. We are all collectively morphing and transforming together, and this is just one story of an opposite-oriented transgender couple living in Los Angeles, the land of industrialized fantasy.”⁶ Can fantasy, which should be a very idiosyncratic, private, individual construct, be mass-produced? Drucker downplays the exceptionality of their case and makes it a symptom of a general historical drift, a swerve towards new forms of sexuality. Just as technology enables fantasy to become material, the combination of hormone treatments and surgical procedures effects a transition from one gender to another. According to Drucker, gender transition is turning into an industry, and the Drucker and Ernst story is just one among many.

This trend was anticipated in 1987 by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard who saw in transgenderism a new ideological horizon, “an artificial fate,” which he made out to be “not a deviation from the natural order” but rather “the product of a change in the symbolic order of sexual difference.”⁷ For Baudrillard, one of the unforeseen consequences of the sexual revolution of the 1960s was to erase traditional notions of sexual difference; this created gender uncertainty summed up by the basic hysteric question “Am I man or woman?”⁸ Baudrillard presented sexual liberation as having unleashed a certain hysterization, later rephrased as a more generalized hesitation about sexual identities in “a decisive stage in the journey towards transsexuality.”⁹ Overall, Baudrillard takes the figure of the transsexual metaphorically.

Like a car sent for repairs in a body shop, “we are in any case concerned with replacement parts, it is logical enough that our model of sexuality should have become transsexuality, and that transsexuality should have become the locus of seduction . . . we are all transsexuals symbolically,” as the body becomes a canvas for signs, less anatomical and more technological.¹⁰ Transsexuality is not seen by Baudrillard as radical and emancipatory, or even as a critique of the gender binary, but simply as simulation of difference, an “indifferent” simulacrum, a construction of a prosthetic body that leaves out the question of sexual enjoyment. Baudrillard acknowledges that the sexual revolution triggered indeterminacy, anxiety, and consumption, but also fostered choice, pluralism, and democracy. However, the political model does not work in matters of sexuality: “there simply is no democratic principle of sexuality. Sex is not part of human rights and there is no principle of emancipation of sexuality.”¹¹ This is precisely what trans patients have taught psychoanalysts: we cannot simply be postmodern and applaud the multiplication of groundless signs. Contrary to an argument such as that of Catherine Millot, most trans people are not trying to be outside sexual difference, but rather live trapped in it.

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Show and tell

Does the increasing visibility of transgender folk mean political empowerment? Does it make society safer for trans people? What will it look like when the apparent interest elicited by trans individuals goes beyond the obsessive and invasive curiosity about transgender issues, reducing this experience to issues of genitalia?

A well-known figure of the transgender rights movement can allow us to explore the predicament of transgender individuals in the increasingly intrusive public eye. When the journalist and activist Janet Mock published Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More, a memoir of her transition as an impoverished multicultural person of color, her book was well-received and became ...