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Just as Ralph Roughton challenged us in 2001 to reexamine our theoretical understanding not just of homosexuality but of all sexuality (Roughton 2002), our panel aimed to challenge the psychoanalytic community to reexamine outdated theories of gender and their impact on our patients and on candidate education. We used an episode of the award-winning TV show Transparent to delve deeper into our personal experience of gender, our reactions to the problematizing of the gender binary, and the possibilities that come with a richer experience of gender boundaries.
The panel was arranged in response to a request from APsaA's Program Committee to its Committee on Gender and Sexuality, which Susan McNamara and I co-chair, for a panel on transgender issues. It was held at the Chicago meeting of APsaA in June 2016 and was chaired by Ethan Grumbach. Robert Galatzer-Levy and Susan McNamara were presenters. I was asked to be the panel's reporter and to speak about my perspective as a candidate. The panel takes us on a journey through the political, societal, and institutional forces that shape the gender binary, the violence engendered by counterphobic attempts to police this boundary, unconscious fantasies of the chaos that ensues if we loosen our mental grip on this boundary as portrayed by the series Transparent, and finally the creative potential of accepting the complex nature of gender boundaries, elegantly depicted as a fractal boundary by Galatzer-Levy.
In his introductory remarks to the panel, Grumbach dedicated the panel to the forty-nine people who died and the fifty-three who were injured at the Pulse Club mass shooting in Orlando earlier that same month. He noted that although huge shifts in LGBTQ rights have taken