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In Please select your gender: From the invention of hysteria to the democratizing of transgenderism, Lacanian psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici proceeds from an ethical premise. In her own words: “I have tried to explore
what it means to sustain the analytic promise, to operate with the analyst's desire for pure difference in today's cultural context” (p. 247). This ethical premise, which informs how she listens to her analysands, may explain why so much of the book sounds rather strange, knitting together as it does singular truths and episodes articulated in the clinical setting, where free association reigns. Gherovici's discussion of sexual difference and transgender identity draws on sources that would be familiar to students of psychoanalytic, queer, or transgender theory. Her core arguments, however, do not sit easily with the historic Lacanian take on transgender people, or with queer theory doxa, or (more predictably) with dominant ideas about sex and gender in the U.S. today. These arguments include the notion that sexual identity at its seeming easiest is only ever “a happy uncertainty” (p. 185), that “sex needs to be symbolized, and gender needs to be embodied” (p. 230), and that some “sexes” today may be sinthomatic, thus of a different order altogether than either biological sex or gender identity. These claims, which rest on her analysands’ innovations as articulated in the clinic, have the potential to revolutionize how Lacanians work with transgender, transsexual, and gender-non-conforming analysands.
For those for whom transgender is a new idea, Gherovici's first two chapters provide an expansive introduction. Gherovici gathers sources that are remarkable in their breadth in order to introduce and contextualize such key terms as gender, gender identity disorder (or GID), transsexual, and transgender. These sources include, among others, the work of John Money, the sexologist who coined the term gender; reports on and interviews with transgender peo