Patients assimilate the analyst's gender, appearance, age and the prevailing cultural climate into the transference. Differences in gender between analyst and patient may stir up a variety of social conventions, stereotypes and characterological ways of relating to same or different gendered people. Analytic inquiry must focus on the patient's invariant organizing principles, the themes along which a person organizes his or her experience. Two papers presented at the August, 1991 meetings of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies, that addressed the effect of the gender of each of the participants in the analyst-patient relationship are discussed.