Sissy Dance $1: The More and More of Gender

In a scholarly yet playful conversation, the authors explore why analytic thought about trans remains so intransigently difficult. They propose that countertansferential responses to trans patients manifest not just in clinical work but also as blockages to psychoanalytic theorizing. They draw on extensive experience treating trans and non-binary patients, on teaching and supervisory work, and on analytic scholarship to think about why and how theorizing on trans stalls. Whereas in the social realm trans bodies are often hyper-sexualized, in metapsychology and the consulting room trans is notably desexualized. What is the cost of that and why does it occur? The authors locate the problem in the disaggregation of gender from the sexual, arguing that not only has this separation outlived its (once exigent) metapsychological utility, but that it is itself a defense against the anxiety of polymorphous perversity and psychic bisexuality that trans bodies can awaken in analysts of all genders, and especially in cisgender analysts.