The Transsexual’s Turn: Uncanniness at Wellesley College

ABSTRACT

A controversy over the admission of transmen into an all-women’s college featured in a recent article in The New York Times, “When Women Become Men at Wellesley” (Padawer, 2014), captures the ways in which transsexuality orients discussions of identity, sociality, at-homeness, and modes of gender self-fashioning. The presence of transmen in an all-women’s college also incites debates over the history of the school’s identity and the challenges of colleges in transition.

Rather than entering the debate of whether transmen should or should not be allowed into the college, my articlearticle addresses the terms of this debate through its arguments over the conceptualization of gender. Whereas transmen at Wellesley College bring to the fore social implications, my discussion approaches conflictive orientations to gender through a psychoanalytic lens with special attention to the fantasy structure of gender. Working with Freud’s (1919) idea of the uncanny, the essay explores the question, How may the presence of transmen in an all-women’s college be thought of as opening an emotional experience and as signifying for the college a transitional time between adolescence and adulthood? Is there something about a segregated community that is desirable for transitioning? In the case of an all-women’s school that carries a historical legacy involving a number of transformations regarding how we approach questions of race, gender, desegregation, and the recognition of the struggle of lesbians, the article argues that the transmen’s request to belong at the college is the college’s historical legacy. The article concludes with the old question that Freud asked about women: What does the transman want?

Acknowledgments

I thank Deborah Britzman, Paola Bohorquez, Eyal Rozmarin, and the editorial team of Studies in Gender and Sexuality for their close reading of my article and for their thoughtful suggestions.

Additional information

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Oren Gozlan

Oren Gozlan, Psy.D., ABPP, is a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the chair of the Gender and Sexuality Committee of the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education. Dr. Gozlan has published numerous articles in psychoanalytic journals. His recently published book, Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian Approach (Routledge, 2015), has won the American Academy & Board of Psychoanalysis’ annual book prize for books published in 2015. He is currently working on an edited collection for Routledge.