The paper “First Class or Nothing at All: Aspects of Early Feminine Development” (1983) argues that Clarissa, a four-year-old girl, struggled with her discovery of genital differences, believing that being a girl meant being “nothing at all.” She did not make use of the genital difference metaphorically but experienced it as a painful narcissistic blow that she believed explained the damage to her relationship with her mother. She felt defective and ashamed. In revisiting this clinical material in light of contemporary thinking about gender, I argue that the young child’s cognitive reliance on binary modes of categorization organizes the sense of self in specific ways. When the culture, as presented through the parents, instantiates this binary approach to gender, the child may rely on gender as a salient, explanatory “fact” in an effort to understand earlier trauma, particularly in the realm of deficits in maternal care.