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Roberto D’Angelo’s (2025) recent paper in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis reanimates an enduring fantasy in psychoanalysis: a wish for an “origin story” – a belief that the analyst’s task is to discover and treat the “underlying cause” of gender variance in youth. Beneath the ostensibly analytic posture of neutrality and concern, D’Angelo’s argument replays a tired suspicion towards trans identification – a suspicion framed as clinical precaution but tethered to an almost melancholic wish for psychoanalysis to return to its paternal function as guardian of the psyche against the distortions of culture.
However, what if the desire to locate an “underlying” conflict, to “treat” it before “affirming”1 (a term whose meaning is far from fixed) a trans identity, is itself a defence – one that veils the analyst’s own difficulty with the temporality of psychic life and the ethical demands of transference? As I have argued elsewhere, (Gozlan 2008, 2014, 2018, 2022, 2025) if we take seriously the Freudian (1905/1953) idea of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, then what we encounter in the analytic situation is never a stable core, never a clear “root cause”, but rather the plating out of dispersed fantasies whose origins are lost to time. There is no “underneath” to discover – only layers of displacement, repetition, and identification. The insistence on unveiling an “underlying trauma” or “unprocessed conflict” – whether anorexia, internalized homophobia, or a fragile ego structure – treats the symptom (in this case, transness) as a mistake to be reversed, rather than as a creative solution to the inassimilable.
There is a profound difference between theorizing gender as a defence against conflict and understanding gender as a way of working through it – a distinction D’Angelo collapses. Gender, like any symptom, is a mode of psychic labour. It is not that gender “masks” conflict, but that it recruits conflict, metabolizes it, and makes it available to psychic l