On the Problem(s) with Keeping Difference(s) Where They Belong: Response to Lynne Layton

If they see breasts and long hair coming they call it woman, if beards and whiskers they call it man: but look, the self that hovers in between is neither man nor woman.

The difficulties of managing differences without splitting occupies Layton and the three papers she critiques. Ironically, while working through my reactions and preparing a written response to her paper, I found myself struggling with the differences between me and her. Appreciative of Huck Finn's pragmatic advice that when you are on a raft together you want everyone to get along, I attempted to get inside of Layton's logic. I certainly do not want to whitewash the legitimate differences that exist (more about those later), but I do see much of the variance on this gender/sex raft as reflecting something about the complexity and elusiveness of our subject and evoking the blind manelephant parable, something about the particular piece of the raft we are clinging to.

I don't want to go from gender splitting to hair splitting, but Layton's project of encouraging clinicians to question the conveyance of gender in hierarchical binary terms seems right in line with the efforts of Bassin, Elise, and Stimmel to clinically deconstruct polarized intrapsychic organizers and critically theorize alternatives. Unfortunately, Layton reads