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Exploring questions of gender is to step into a potentially polarizing space, one charged with hot and powerful feeling. Such heat may cook up something new; or it may instead only burn up and destroy.
Reckoning with this hot topic is important though: People whose assigned gender identity does not “fit” may grow through an exploration of this aspect of themselves, and some of this exploration may happen within a therapeutic space.
This reckoning is also important for the world of depth psychology. Beyond the Binary, a collection of essays edited by Boston-based psychotherapist Shari Thurer, starts with an essay by Thurer titled “Psychoanalysis Meets They”. In it Thurer reminds us of how slowly the psychoanalytic world embraced homosexuality: “You merely have to glance at psychoanalytic journals of a few decades ago to find homosexuals described as overly narcissistic, perverted, arrested in their development, and/or incapable of mature love” (p. 16).
The collection of essays that makes up Beyond the Binary offers a series of individual views and personal experiences focusing on non-binary gender expression and identity in a bid to increase visibility and knowledge. We are invited to see the world through the eyes of people who identify as non-binary, as well as the parents of non-binary offspring. There are also commentaries and reflections on these narratives from psychoanalytic clinicians, many of them affiliated with the Boston Psychoanalytic Society.
As such, the book offers a place to start conversations rather than proposing a defined theoretical position. Taking in the experiences of people who identify as non-binary allows the reader to think about “how it is” rather than “why it is”. I was reminded of Ursula K Le Guin's speaking on the “offering of experience” in her Bryn Mawr Commencement Address (published in Space Crone in 2023): “We tried to offer our experience to one another. Not claiming something: offering something” (p. 32).
Thurer makes a case for not