Transgender Imagining and the Danger of Normative Theory

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at the harms of superimposing normative theorizing on communities who live and love outside the psychoanalytic norm, particularly transgender individuals. Writing in 2019/2023, an especially perilous period for transgender people’s rights and safety in the United States, McGleughlin critiques a published paper by Alessandra Lemma to illustrate the analytic tendency to rely on normative theory that may harm patients. Lemma’s pieces focuses on a patient called “Jane.” The 18-year-old wishes to pursue body modification to change their gender, but the analyst believes Jane is not “truly” transgender, and she creates a narrative of Jane’s repair. While Lemma’s rhetoric suggests that she does not believe that transgender life is inherently pathological, McGleughlin exposes a beneath-the-surface treatment rife with normative assumptions. Uncritically bringing these assumptions to clinical work has the potential to distort or even erase the story of the other, the author argues, harkening back to treatments in which the clinician is said to have “helped” the gay or lesbian patient show sexual restraint.

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No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the author(s).

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Jade McGleughlin

Jade McGleughlin, L.I.C.S.W., is past president, personal and supervising analyst, board member and faculty member of The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Her writing focuses on gender, the negative, the analysts’ necessary nonsovereignty, and uses of visual art to articulate problems in representation. Her forthcoming book Clinical Storytelling, Art and the Problems of Being: The Analyst’s Necessary Vertigo is being published by Routledge in Spring 2024. She is a portrait painter.