The Accident of Gender

I start this difficult paper on the accident of gender with a novel, because sexuality and gender unfold in novel ways, resisting and revealing assumed origins as fragile attempts to settle desire. Like a novel, in which pages are read to capture essences that words cannot grasp, gender hints at trauma that has no origin but is rather the result of the struggle to capture this very unknown, which one can only brush against through terms such as drive and desire. One cannot enter the novel's narrative armed with the right knowledge to grasp its meaning, but one is affected by the novel's aftershock, its meanings constructed retroactively. One cannot prepare for sexuality's novelty, and its meanings can be made retroactively only after desire surprises, strays off familiar course, and forces an engagement with the open question of identity.

The intention of this paper is to show how the very archaic nature of gender pushes for settlement, forcing a choice (to be a man or a woman) as a way to settle the traumatic nature of the self for which desire is not finite and where nothing can be set-tied once and for all. Gender in that way is a site of trauma in which an identification with what satisfies the Other (the phallic answer) is all one could hope for, making it extremely difficult to talk about gender outside of this split. I argue that psychoanalytic writings cannot escape the trauma of gender and that recent investigations into experiences of gender such as transsexuality have been marked by this trauma.

Recent articles about transsexuality that purport to represent a postmodern model of gender (in contrast to the binary conception of biology) treat transsexuality as a disavowal of difference and a collapse to a binary. The transsexual is conceptualized