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Firstly, I want to thank Alessandra for such a thoughtful and thought-provoking paper on a subject that is challenging on many levels.
She has carefully and rightly emphasised the plural aetiologies of transsexuality, which is not reducible to medical or socio-cultural origins. This of course leaves room for psychoanalytic understanding and Alessandra gives a compelling description of the importance of the returned gaze in identity formation; the recognition of other then brings the other into a state of self-recognition. One of the things I am doing in my reading of this paper, and I think this is what the paper means us to do, is to avoid conflation of description with definition. Before we think of the transsexual dilemma we need to think of our own position, the position of psychoanalysis, in relation to this dilemma. We need to think of the ground on which we stand.
Alessandra has drawn out the challenges that still exist in this country for those who openly theorise from ‘not heterosexuality’. Now transsexuality is of course not directly about ‘not heterosexuality’. As Spry (1997) wrote in her memoir, ‘Orlando's Sleep’, ‘It was my gender that was crossed, not my sexuality,’ as she transitioned from being a straight man to a lesbian woman: her object of desire remained stable. One cannot assume that transsexuality carries homosexuality with it. Yet, the point about how psychoanalysis has carried them both is well made, and is something that I will return to. For the moment, my point is that the question of causation has been much debated for both, but inevitably within a context of problem and pathology. While this remains the case, questions about aetiology inevitably carry agendas, all too often crudely so: what went wrong and can analysis fix it? The problem is individualised. As long as the individual bears the weight of this, it is impossible to expect honesty or transparency, and analysis has little chance of approaching a ‘truth’. As long as analysis start