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From the moment we are born, we are assigned sex and gender. Pink persists as the color of choice for infant girls and blue for newborn boys. Marketing efforts target little girls with dolls and play kitchens; trucks, trains, and guns are aimed at little boys. College and employment applications and online customer satisfaction questionnaires require us to check the box for male or female. All this happens without conscious questioning. How did we know which bathroom to use as young children? Growing up, how did we know our sex or gender? Is the sex/gender binary of female and male, a social construction or a natural fact? In spite of the contributions of postmodern scholars and some relational psychoanalysts, many psychoanalysts still believe in the orderly linear development of binary gender identity. This issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry raises questions, many questions, and, if the authors have done their jobs well, we will not come to conclusions. Ironically, the need to be sure has created problems for psychoanalysis in its treatment of people who have variant expressions and experiences of gender, sexuality and sexual orientation.
In the film XXY, Puenzo (2007) evokes a hyperaware limbo in which the viewer scrutinizes all of the characters’ masculine and feminine qualities; in this issue Corbatta uses the film to explore how gender and sexual identities are created. Watching the film, we scan Alex’s body ever more aware of what we are not seeing—and wish to. We look for signs that will orient us towards who Alex “really is.” The gravitational pull toward culturally embedded cues—the plucked eyebrow, the wisp of modified eyelashes, or search for a whisker—is powerful. Words like disturbing, unsettling, beautiful, and confusing come to mind in contemplating her appearance. As the film progresses, one slowly begins to ignore her face and, instead, one’s gaze is drawn downward. The narrative structure of the film parallels our need to know through the vehicle of Al