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Before her unexpected, untimely death in October 2019 - just as an essay on sexual fantasy and transgender identity was going to press in the preeminent German journal Psyche and shortly after attending one last conference on sexual politics and clinical issues in Hamburg that September - Sophinette Becker (born 1950) had been one of the most remarkable, influential, widely admired experts working on sexuality-related topics in West and then united Germany. Deeply informed by - and dauntingly knowledgeable about - the intricacies of Freudian psychoanalysis as well as critical theory in the vein of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, trained at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main as a psychologist with a specialty in psychosomatics (after a stint studying law in Berlin), she divided her working life between long hours of listening intently to patients with a wide range of sexual and gender-expression concerns, providing inspirational continuing education training to medical, psychotherapeutic, and social work professionals, and writing lucidly on themes both therapeutic and cultural-political or historical. Unsentimental to the point of seeming caustic to some, with an acerbically gruff, wryly self-deprecating persona that never hid her justifiably self-confident intellectual acuity, she also had bottomless kindness in the face of vulnerability, uncanny perceptiveness about the complexity of human motivation, and an unerring instinct for saying just the right and necessary thing - whether in the privacy of a one-on-one encounter or in a large and cantankerous crowd of her peers.1