The unusual set of writings you are about to read comes from a panel that Lynne Zeavin and I put together for the APsaA meeting in February 2019 titled “What Can I Say? Contested Words and Contested Thoughts in the Contemporary Moment.” Our idea for the panel arose in response to a moment, some years back, that was both quintessentially psychoanalytic and extremely painful. It was at the APsaA spring meeting in Austin in 2016, during the clinical plenary. In the comment period—after the plenary presentation and the two discussions that followed (I was one of the discussants)—an audience member said forthrightly: “I am greatly distressed. I think the plenary speaker and discussants should be made aware of the damage they have caused by their use of the term homosexual. The history of this word, and the oppressive uses to which it has been put, both inside and outside of psychoanalysis, make it unusable, except as an instrument to do further harm.”