The Psychoanalyst and the “Transsexual”: Transgender Identities as Personal-Political Subjectivities

Abstract

In his two part series on psychoanalysis and “homosexuality,” William Meyer lays out a sordid history of psychoanalysis wielded against gender and sexual minorities. The present article is an extension on that work into the realm of “transsexuality.” Analyzing the work of Freud, Rado, Bieber, Socarides, Ovesey, Stoller, and Money, the psychoanalysis of “transsexuality” demonstrates a parallel history to the psychoanalysis of “homosexuality.” From a critical departure from psychoanalytic inquiry as presented by these authors, transgender activists and theorists have presented a model of transgender subjectivities arising from the tradition of the feminist personal-political challenge to the divided private and public spheres. Pointing toward a transformation of psychoanalysis, transgender subjectivities recenter the somatic and political within the relationality of analyst and analysand. The article concludes a direction for psychoanalytic practice with transgender people thus maintains: (1) a personal-political paradigm of liberation practice, (2) an investment in somatic treatment, and (3) a relational practice establishing mutual personal-political struggle.

Notes

1 It is important to recognize that due to ambiguities surrounding connection between procreation and gender, both “sex” and “biological sex” are hotly contested terms that have been replaced by “birth assignment” in current usage. For example, not all women who are assigned female at birth have the capacity for carrying a child. Furthermore, the visual identification of a penis or vulva on an infant does not identify whether or not this infant has an intersex condition. These are two examples of many that demonstrate the difficulties associated with the concepts.