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These insightful commentaries, one by Muriel Dimen, an enormously influential gender theorist, and the other, by Robert Galatzer-Levy, a significant contributor to the analytic study of sexuality, raise significant points regarding the nature of embodiment, issues around the nature and etiology of gender, and the role of mourning in clinical work with trans patients. I cannot in this brief reply delve into these many compelling points in ways that do justice to their sophistication and complexity; instead I am responding with some reflections best approached as departing points for ongoing conversations about gender and gender embodiment. Where I agree with how my discussants read my work, I raise further thoughts that draw on our mutual commitment to thinking gender expansively. Where I diverge, I try to clarify my positions, explain the set of reservations that inform my differences, and offer some questions their points bring up for me.
My hope is that readers will leave this exchange generatively perturbed, such that they may approach work with trans patients' gender and embodiment with renewed curiosity and interest.
Galatzer-Levy makes several vitally important points. The first draws on the importance of cultural factors, something he has noted in his own work on homosexual experience and identity (Galatzer-Levy and Cohler 2002; Cohler and Galatzer-Levy 2013). In his discussion here of Harris's approach to gender as softly assembled (2005), he usefully underscores the critical role of culture in recognizing gender attractors. The interplay between gender's fixity and its permutations with prevalent social attitudes is a vital ingredient in how gender figures in psychic life. This is an important topic on which there is no dearth of writing, though to my knowledge most of it is not analytic (for a general discussion, see Nanda 2008; for studies of specific cultures, see Bartlett and Vasey [2006] on the Samoan fa'afafine, Reddy [2005] on the hijras in India, and