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We are now obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man.
Freud propounded a theory of libido as always only active, that is to say, masculine. In a radical (if fanciful) reading, this implies that all women are trans: they may come to accept their natal bodies and the yoke of a castrating femininity through renunciation, but they are born as little men in desire and identification. In any case, for the father of the discipline gender boiled down to something like a fraught negotiation between the body one has and the socialized repudiation of the feminine.
In “The Masculine Vaginal: Working with Queer Men's Embodiment at the Transgender Edge,” Griffin Hansbury sets off an earthquake in the Freudian bedrock. If anatomy is destiny, what Freud could not begin to imagine was just how radical the destiny of anatomy would become, how alterable flesh itself could be, and what these alterations might foretell for the future of our illusory theorizing. Freud's famous dictum that our bodily form preordains our fate may be discredited in its most literal sense, but it stubbornly endures, peeking out from the edges of our theorizing: the binary structure of anatomical sex and gender is the subterranean foundation on which much of our theoretical house is built. Hansbury shakes it up.
Hansbury posits the “capital-V Vaginal—not the vagina per se, but the symbolic counterpart of the Phallic, a counterpart that has too long been denied attention and conceptualization in psychoanalysis” (p. 1010). In Hansbury's formulation, the Vaginal changes the psychoanalytic geometry; at the very least it adds a second focal point, one that makes an