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Feminism and the postmodern turn have vaporized the commonsense meanings of gender and sexuality, both in psychoanalytic theory and, for many, as lived experience. Yet the so-called anatomical difference—a social distinction that fixates on the genitals, determining our sex assignment as man or woman— remains the first fact that matters about personhood. This foundational act of categorization exaggerates and mythologizes the relatively small anatomical differences between men and women, creating The Difference: a singular polarity of counteridentities that slip from body to mind, such that Man/Woman is made equivalent to the nominal gender categories Male/Female, which become conflated with the ideologically charged psychosymbolic categories of Masculinity and Femininity.
Note that even here, within our psychoanalytic community, gender has been installed in a taken-for-granted way. Much of our thinking has been organized in terms of nominal gender oppositions— male analyst/female patient—a format that conflates sex assignment (man/woman) with gender categorization (male/female) and makes the a priori assumption that likeness and difference can be mapped onto gender in some self-evident way, as in “same” or “opposite” sex pairs. But gender does not “speak for itself,” to borrow Kim Leary's (1997) memorable phrase about race. Rather, she continues, it “is worn and lived similarly and differently by each one of us, flourishing in the tension between universal and unique experience” (p. 185).
There are a multiplex of intrapsychic, intersubjective and cultural processes that are engaged in the act of simply inhabiting a taken-for-granted