Transsexuality as a State of Mind

Commentary on “A Matter of Choice,” by Jean Wolff Bernstein (DIVISION/Review, issue 3, Fall 2011, pp. 4-5) and “Which Side Are You On,” by Richard Ruth and helen DeVinney (DIVISION/Review, issue 5, Summer 2012, pp. 12-14)

As new forms of sexual identity and orientation become increasingly visible in our social landscape, new psychoanalytic conceptualizations of transsexuality have begun to emerge. While in contemporary cultural life the visibility of transsexuality is part of a larger cultural revolution reorienting the nature of identity, sociality, and modes of self-fashioning, in the therapeutic clinic, transsexuality is still often considered a pathological condition. Historically, psychoanalysis has approached transsexuality through a normative framework where questions of “gender certainty” and “sexual difference” are often invoked as markers that delineate the boundaries between normalcy and pathology. While more contemporary theories of gender (e.g., Dimen, 2002; Harris, 2005; Benjamin, 1998) attempt to depathologize transsexuality, these theories often treat gender categories as sociological descriptors that indicate an individual's perceived and projected sexual identity. Even when masculinity and femininity are approached as psychic positions (e.g., Gherovici, 2010), discussions are often limited to “the transsexual individual,” with no conceptualization of transsexuality as a psychic position in its own right and its implications for psychoanalytic theories of subject formation.

A recent edited collection of essays compiled by Giovanna Ambrosio (2009), which was reviewed by Ruth and DeVinney (2012) in issue 5 of DIVISION/Review, reflects the extent to which psychoanalytic discourse around gender in general, and transsexuality in particular, is symptomatic of a wished-for stability of knowledge and consequent foreclosure of thinking when it comes to the concept of transsexuality. The edited collection is described by Claudio Laks Eizirik (as cited in Ambros