Response to Marchiano, Papert and Withers

I believe Marchiano, Papert and Withers have misread my paper. My main theme, stated early on, concerns Henderson's concept of humanizing an archetype through sociocultural changes and applying his idea to gender expansiveness. I include examples from myth, literature, and clinical material to show how gender expansion evokes many contradictory feelings and reactions. It is not an article about the medical complexities of gender care, gender transition, or detransition. Many of the children and adolescents I see, and those I have worked with over the past 35 years, play with their gender presentation and explore it. I have yet to witness a clinically significant instance where this kind of play and exploration has resulted in a heightened risk to either their physical or psychological wellbeing. As a child and adolescent analyst, I have a good enough sense (thinking of Winnicott's use of the term “good enough”) for how children, teenagers, and young adults play to express themselves and play to learn about themselves.

My impression is that Marchiano, Papert and Withers also misunderstood my case report of the analytic work with Kerry. My patient was the one who saw himself as gender fluid and who discovered this on his own. He spontaneously talked with me about what he understood to be feminine things, an understanding he had from his family, friends, and cultural background. He frequently noted that he felt quite at home in his male body and liked it. When he brought up being gender fluid, I encouraged him to explore what this meant for him. He used his analysis to freely look at many different parts of himself. Freedom is critical for a creative, healing analysis. As I read Marchiano, Papert and Withers's response to my article, I had to wonder how they could come to such misinterpretations of what I wrote. Reading their criticisms, I was led to think that it does not, to my mind, support analytic work when an analyst expresses an authority coming from their supere