This discussion takes up Leon Hoffman's (this issue) classical psychoanalytic inclination to interpret gender difference, such as anatomical distinction, as an expression of hierarchies, and as bound with pain. Hoffman finds Colonna and Newman's (1983) assertion that “a girl's penis envy and a boy's castration anxiety are intensified by the birth of an opposite-sexed sibling during the phallic phase” to be “intuitively obvious” (this issue, p. 98). These interpretations are reworked from the Foucauldian position that the body is the scene of cultural inscription. The clinical material is re-read to suggest that such normative formulations bar access to the child-patients' struggles with gender binaries and melancholy, and foreclose possible forms of attachment.