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When we first decided to create a Psychoanalytic Inquiry issue centered on the LGBTQ+, we weren’t sure how the broader psychoanalytic field would respond. To our delight, the response from colleagues – both known and new – was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. The sheer volume of interest quickly made it clear that this topic could not be addressed adequately in a single issue. We organized the submissions into three overarching themes, beginning with an issue on Gay Life and we are now thrilled to present the second issue, dedicated to transgender experiences.
The essays gathered in this issue traverse the evolving terrain of gender as it is lived, imagined, embodied, and encountered in psychoanalytic practice. As analysts increasingly engage with transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive patients, these contributions refuse closure – of identity, of meaning, or of the analytic process. Instead, they remain attuned to the unconscious as it intersects with the lived complexity of gendered life.
Gender, in these pages, is not a static identity to be affirmed or denied, but a space of becoming. Across childhood and parenthood, trauma and transition, silence and speech, gender emerges in relation – to others, to culture, to the analyst. These writers listen for longing and defense, and for the process of inhabiting a gendered world.
Throughout these authors there is a shared conviction: analytic listening must evolve, and the frame must stretch. The analyst’s own positionality – gendered, racialized, situated – cannot be disavowed. Drawing from clinical work and interdisciplinary thought, these authors offer a psychoanalysis that is ethically engaged, politically aware, and alive.
We open this issue with a wide-ranging conversation between psychoanalysts and coauthors Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou, whose book Gender Without Identity has already made waves. Interviewed by us – Stacy Berlin and Estelle Shane – this conversation is not merely a reflection but a provocati