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Ruth Stein's “analysis of a case of transsexualism” represents almost perfectly where we (or many of us) have arrived in our attempts to understand and analyze gender. In what follows, I offer some reflections about where this is.
To begin, we need to be grateful to Dr. Stein for putting before us the details of an analysis, including her own stumblings, rethinkings, frustrations, and hopes. Without such details—all too often missing in our literature or replaced by short “vignettes” obligatorily added to more theoretical pieces in such a way that there is not enough material for readers to form their own opinions or to disagree with what the author claims the vignette “confirms”—we are really unable to assess whether our theoretical advances make empirical sense and whether they help our clinical work.
Where we find ourselves, and especially where readers of this journal find themselves (see esp. Dimen, 1991; Goldner, 1991; and Harris, 1991), is at the point of having concluded that gendered subjectivity, gender identity, and gender-inflected sexuality are personally constructed and variable. Among individuals, and even for a single individual, gender seems to have multiple meanings: maddeningly, these meanings do not peel off like the proverbial onion as we analyze, one by one, the defensive layers that construct them, leaving, finally, as Freud claimed (and probably hoped), bedrock. We find that there is no simple relationship between gender identity and sexual orientation and