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Please Select Your Gender (2010) stands out as a particularly well-researched book in the field of psychoanalysis. Although its focus is on the problematics of current transgender issues as a contemporary form of hysteria, the author leads her readers through a complex web of fascinating chapters on the history of hysteria, sex change operations, and Freud's famous cases of Schreber and “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.”
In order to construct her final synthesis that transgenderism should no longer be considered as evidence of severe psychopathology, but instead be viewed as an expression of freedom “to choose one's own gender while claiming ownership of one's own body” (p. 246), Gherovici places her argument in a far-reaching historical context. The chapters are not just useful preparatory steps toward a final synthesis of a democratization of transgenderism; they themselves are jewels of independent texts that familiarize the reader with many of Lacan's most controversial concepts, which include the “phallus,” the “sinthome,” Lacan's idea that “there is no sexual relationship between men and women,” and the schema of sexuation.
Gherovici has a gift for translating difficult ideas into common language, and for making them clinically useful and intellectually available to psychoanalysts of all theoretical persuasions. Take, for instance, her chapter “Falling Into Sex Like Falling in Love,” in which she elucidates Lacan's theories about Freud's treatment of the woman described in “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.” Freud's only nameless published case became one of Lacan's favorite Freudian texts, one in which Lacan illustrated, among other things, the difference between a “passage a l'acte” and acting out. Using the extensive literature that has been published posthumously about the case of the homosexual woman whose identity is now firmly established as that of Margarethe von Trautenegg, born Czonka (Rieder & Voigt, 2003