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Saketopoulou and Pellegrini's (2023) Gender Without Identity has emerged at a time of intense cultural anxiety in which gender has once again become a battleground in the public sphere and in psychoanalytic debates. Trans lives, in particular, have become the object of moral panic mobilizing regulatory anxiety in increasingly violent ways. At a time when institutional psychoanalysis is under pressure to recognize the ways in which social and psychic reality are imbricated and held accountable for a profoundly difficult history of encounters with queer and trans people, gender has perhaps not surprisingly become a flashpoint. It is not an exaggeration to say that Gender Without Identity has become a central text in these discussions. Thanks to the urgency of the writing and the authors’ labor to share their ideas with a wider audience, the work has migrated into other spheres and taken on a life of its own online. Rarely does a psychoanalytic text have such an effect within and outside of the psychoanalytic community.
Gender Without Identity is built around an expanded version of the authors’ award-winning article, “A Feminine Boy: Normative Investments and Reparative Fantasy at the Intersection of Gender, Race, and Religion,” which was awarded the inaugural Sexual Diversity Committee's Tiresias Prize at the 2021 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Originally intended to be published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, it was released as a book after the removal of sections of the article deemed “too political” by the editors became a condition of its publication in that journal (p. xi). As the authors describe, the editorial requirement to remove an acknowledgment that spoke to the violence experienced by queer and trans analysts and analysands and welcomed trans and queer folks as peers and colleagues led to an impasse and to a version of the article being published in a separate volume. The disputed passages are inc