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In Her Essay, Irene Fast Pushes Her Thinking About Gender Identity in a number of new directions. Her paper, with its quite complex structure and agenda, takes up questions of theory, of ethics, and of practice. This mixture allows us to see that questions of gender go to the heart of identity and personhood and that any decision we make regarding our theories, our practices, or our clinical judgment has powerful moral and political implications.
As there is a lot going on in the essay, let me provide a summary. Fast's strategy is to reread and critique those aspects of Stoller's (1976, 1985) work on gender that stress repudiation of feminine identifications as central to establishing masculinity. Stoller has been a central influence on contemporary gender studies, and Fast uses her rereading to comment on several new developments in the field of gender studies. First, she revisits a notorious case of sex reassignment. Second, she builds on her own work to embed the concept of core gender identity through elaborating the relational matrix in which gender is made meaningful for a child. She ties gender meanings to relationships but also sets this process within the context of unambiguous sex assignment. Third, she takes up the question the relationship of gender to the child's body and body sense and finally proposes a reframing of identification processes in line with the post-Mahlerian views developed in infancy studies—namely, that attachment and individuation are mutually interactive, transforming states.
Fast begins by raising an ethical and clinical question of great importance in her rendering of the case of a gender reassignment conducted and reported by Money. It is going to be difficult and painful