Dear Cis Analysts
A call for reparations
McKenzie Wark
Dear psychoanalysts,
I’m going to assume nearly all of you are cis, even though you may have trans patients. There are so few trans analysts. And why is that? And what are you doing about it? I have to say I doubt that psychoanalysis has anything to offer trans people at all, particularly given its history of contributing to our oppression. It’s an uncomfortable conversation, I know, but you are supposed to be good at those.
I don’t care if you think you are queer. That doesn’t really equip you with any contextual knowledge that is of much help to trans people. Queer theory is sometimes as implicated in transphobia as psychoanalysis—particularly in structures of transmisogyny, which will be the main topic of this letter, and which is central to the demand I shall shortly make for reparations from the institutions of psychoanalysis on behalf of trans people in general and trans women in particular. (Let’s not get into the minutiae of definitions: I’m speaking broadly here of the trans feminine experience of life.)
The figure of the transsexual, particularly the transsexual woman, has exercised a fascination over modernity for as long as there’s been “modernity.” Modernity has among its components the subordination of women to men, the institution of compulsory heterosexuality, and the eradication of any but the most abject place for gender-variant people. For trans feminine people, that means the stripping from us of sacred office and, more often than not, our confinement to sex work. We’ve nevertheless continued to exist, relegated to the margins—there for your amusement, or as specimens to study, but otherwise disposable.
As if haunted by this violence, modernist culture continually returns to transness as an allegorical figure, standing at once for what is both best and worst about the transformative capacities of modernity itself. Modernity keeps rediscovering us as a new thing it has itself marginalized. One can point here to the place of trans femininity in the work of James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Genet, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Molinier, Andy Warhol, and so on. It ends up as the figure of “becoming woman” in Deleuze and Guattari.
As Emma Heaney suggests, this allegorical function repeats among queer writers. Consider the macabre fascination the film Paris Is Burning exercised over Tim Dean, bell hooks, and most famously, Judith Butler. In queer theory, trans feminine camp is celebrated as a queer aesthetic, whereas actual transsexual women are the bad object—too implicated in the desire for normativity. Out of queer theory, a whole transgender theory has extruded that also takes its distance from the transsexual, and in particular the transsexual woman.
As in theory, so, too, in practice. The Stonewall rebellion of 1969 has been coopted by cis homosexuality as a founding moment, erasing the role played in it by what in the language of the time were drag queens. A few years later, Sylvia Rivera had to fight her way to the stage at a queer liberation rally to state her case. Meanwhile, a whole branch of the women’s movement was constructing itself out of attacking not the patriarchy but trans women.
The place of the T in LBGT has always been a contested one. Ours is a difference that’s different. Gay and lesbian organizations abandon us when it’s expedient. Trans people have had to organize for ourselves. Trans women have had to organize for ourselves. What Julia Serano called “trans-misogyny” is a very particular flavor of weaponized panic that has the power to limit or end our lives. Particularly trans women of color, or those who have been abandoned by family and community, denied housing, trapped in the cycles of incarceration—it’s killing my sisters.
So, we have our own networks of care. We look out for each other. We provide material support. We counsel newcomers in how to come out; get hormones; what expedient half-truths to tell psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and other gatekeepers. How to do survival sex work. How to, as most of us must, pass in the street. We take care of each other because institutional support is rare and not always to be trusted. Even our presence in gay spaces can turn ugly.
When it comes to transsexuality, psychoanalysis has no better a record than any other institution of control—and usually worse. Among talk therapy methods, it has the worst record when it comes to gatekeeping us, dismissing us, or practicing conversion therapy on us (at our own expense, of course). It’s time to ask what is wrong with the methods and concepts of psychoanalysis itself, rather than treating these horrors as mere deviations from “best practice.” It’s time for some accountability for the failure of psychoanalysis when confronted with the reality of, and the needs of, trans people.
By this, I mean something more than mere hand-wringing and evasion: I mean a material accountability for failure. After a century of misunderstanding, mistreatment, and arbitrary gatekeeping, it’s time to call for reparations. The various institutions of psychoanalysis should set up funds to support the autonomous care of trans people by trans people. Without accountability for past misdeeds, any “progress” by psychoanalysis is meaningless.
There are a handful of cis psychoanalysts whose practice includes trans people who have found potentially helpful insights in Freud’s work. Let me mention, for instance, Patricia Gherovici’s book Transgender Psychoanalysis. Some of those insights are as follows: Human sexuality is diverse. There’s no necessary connection between sex, sexuality, and reproduction. Heterosexuality is as contingent as any other sexuality. One could extend these insights to the sexed body, which one could also think of as variable. The cis body is not normal—it’s just common.
That’s not much more than what the founders of sexology were attempting to teach the founders of psychoanalysis over a century ago. The Berlin Psychoanalytic Society was cofounded by analyst Karl Abraham and pioneer sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in 1908. It was Hirschfeld who coined the terms “transvestite” and “transsexual” and who did pioneering empirical studies with thousands of informants—records lost when the Nazis destroyed his institute. Hirschfeld was a cross-dresser, so one of the founders of psychoanalysis might have been, in the broad sense, trans. Hirschfeld was excluded, however, in part because of Jung’s homophobia, and, in part, because he insisted on an organic basis of transness, which, were it to prove the case, would put transness outside the scope of competence claimed by psychoanalysis.
It’s important to stress that we still know little about the origins of transness and that this does not matter. Trans people exist. And exist cross-culturally. Two-gender systems may even be in the minority across the world, or at least may have been before Western imperialism imposed the Oedipal model. For example, Deborah A. Miranda has researched what the Spanish called the joya, or “jewels,” among Indigenous people in southern California. They dressed like women, and their special social role was care of the dead. The Spanish, thinking them sodomites, had them torn apart by dogs.
Hirschfeld established the independence of transness from homosexuality by empirical study. But even in Freud’s wild analysis of Judge Schreber, a repressed homosexuality is imposed on Schreber’s gender euphoria at the image of herself as a fuckable woman. Likewise, in Emil A. Gutheil’s report on “Elsa B.,” perhaps the first psychoanalytic case study of transsexuality, it’s read in terms of homosexuality. (Of course, Gutheil blames the mother.) Elsa B. did not want to be treated or cured. She just wanted Gutheil to sign off on a document to allow cross-dressing in public, as was possible in Germany at the time.
One can sometimes read transsexual survival between the lines in these cases. Karl Abrahams saw a trans woman who had learned from hypnosis how to enter dissociated states in which her trans femme body could be experienced as whole and ecstatic. Bless her. But, of course, Abrahams thought it was repressed homosexuality. Even though Hirschfeld had already established the independence of transness from sexual orientation, for much of its history, psychoanalysis was simply unable to perceive transsexuality at all. A failure of your method rarely even acknowledged.
It has to be said that while it was able to distinguish transness from sexual orientation, sexology fared little better than psychoanalysis. It did not try to “cure” us, but it still set itself up as the gatekeeper of our needs—for a fee. Harry Benjamin thought psychoanalysis useless but insisted on therapy as a defense against malpractice suits. Robert Stoller—drawing on the work of John Money, who founded the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic—formalized the separation of sex and gender. But the purpose of this was to make of socially sanctioned gender roles a norm to which the good transsexual should conform. Stoller was in the business of making “normal” heterosexual women out of us. Incidentally, he, too, used psychoanalytic language to blame our mothers for our existence.
No school of thought has made much progress overcoming the history of harm psychoanalysis has done us, but the Lacanians are surely the worst. This is especially true when one considers the influence those connected with that school have had over the years on the family law and policy of the French state and its educational practices, as Camille Robcis has shown in The Law of Kinship.
In his 1971 seminar, Lacan speculated that trans women mistake the penis for the phallus and take castration literally. It’s a canard that still reappears in queer theory twenty years later. Catherine Millot’s book Horsexe of 1983 deploys the name of Daddy Lacan to mount a vicious attack on trans feminine people. The book begins with Janice G. Raymond’s transphobic writings and ends with Millot’s unconscionable refusal of a letter in support of medical care to a trans patient. Her views on trans people as psychotic did not seem to have changed by the time she published her memoir in 2016.
Gherovici’s Transgender Psychoanalysis does its best to put a positive interpretation on Lacan’s very occasional encounters with transsexuality. Its hysterical symptom, shared by most Lacanian texts, is the relentless need to legitimize everything through the master. I appreciate Gherovici’s effort, and I’ve drawn here on her historical account of the vicious comedy of psychoanalysis’s obsessive need to control and explain transsexuality, but the conclusion I draw is that you are simply not legitimate authorities on trans people. Your incompetence needs a thorough exposure, and amends must be made for the harm it has done to us.
The first thing any transsexual woman could tell you is that there’s an ambiguity in the psychoanalytic term “castration.” Does one mean the cutting off of the dick, the balls, or both? What can we say about those trans women who want to keep their dick and their balls? Or those who want to keep their dick but not their balls—who are thus both castrated and not castrated at the same time? And how to understand vaginoplasty anyway? There are several procedures used by trans women. No modern forms involve the cutting off of the penis. Rather, it’s turned inside out. The space within which transsexual women think about these things is both literally and figuratively manifold.
Does this talk of slicing open and reversing a penis make you uncomfortable? That’s your problem, not ours. The Roman poet Catullus already expressed that curiously ambivalent fascination and panic that cis people can feel, and that psychoanalysis merely repeats, about the thought of voluntary castration in his poem number 63. Like most of his contemporaries, Catullus imagined castration as something suitable only for domestic animals and slaves. Like you, when confronted with the Galli, the castrated votaries of the goddess Cybele, he could only imagine them as an aberration. In modern times, actual castration is linked to colonial pursuits as a form of violence against the racialized other—a context usually skipped over in the contemporaneous project via which psychoanalysis sought to colonize the unconscious.
Paul B. Preciado famously challenged psychoanalysis in a very polite public intervention, to which Jacques-Alain Miller responded with frankly the most brain-worms text I’ve ever seen anyone produce on the trans question. It’s so embarrassing that you would imagine that anyone not bound by institutional loyalty would publicly distance themselves from it. Someone has to say the boy emperor has no clothes. But the things the Lacanian faithful have said to me about it privately find no public echo.
I’m a great admirer of Paul B. Preciado’s work and stand in solidarity with him. But, please, read some other trans writers! Paul’s positions are distinctive within trans theory and not universally shared. Your fascination with him needs questioning. Why is this the version of us that you want to engage? Is it because what’s challenging in Paul’s work can be set aside, allowing you to read the rest as of a piece with the modern fascination with the transsexual as an exotic other?
Where I agree with Gherovici is in her concept of trans lives as aesthetic projects of self-composition. At best, our symptom is a thing we learn to enjoy. As Preciado does. Composing a life as a work of art out of the technics of sex. A technics that is designed to produce cis bodies, but which we repurpose. Unlike the testosterone Paul was using at the time he wrote Testo Junkie, my three hormones are legally prescribed, but the use I make of them is off-label. While their discipline has its problems with us too, like many trans people, I’ve found that endocrinologists actually understand my needs and have a technics that offer real material benefits for regulating the transsexual body.
Preciado’s most useful insight is that the sex of all human bodies is integrated into a technics. Technology is the third gender of modernity. We trans people are not uniquely implicated in technics. It’s just that cis people tend to be literal-minded as to what the technics of sex are for. It’s all designed for you, after all, and one of the effects of any technics is to render itself invisible. Trans people, on the other hand, have to improvise. We’re artists of the technics of sex.
It’s curious to me though that the kinds of transsexual narratives that cis people, and psychoanalysts in particular, still like best are the ones where we are the only trans person in the story. Both Paul in Testo Junkie and me, in my book Reverse Cowgirl, tried to counteract that by providing a chorus of other voices. And yet you want us still to be singular, to be the anomaly that sets your cis world into relief. To be its other for your comfort. But we’re not singular. We have our own networks, our own communities. We take care of each other because you don’t care for us.
It’s time to call for reparations.
Psychoanalysts are very often among those who still think transsexuality is a mental illness—convenient for you as this makes us a business opportunity. Or, if not an illness to be cured—psychoanalysis has discreetly given up such a claim—then something to be managed. As a branch of talk therapies, psychoanalysis is particularly implicated in conversion therapies, a form of mental torture designed to prevent transition. Keep us talking, and paying to talk, while gaslighting us out of access to care. And refusing, as Millot did, to write the stupid letters legally required in many places to access the trans medicine that might actually be useful to us.
It’s tempting, in response, to see your obsession with transness as some sort of mental aberration of yours. Maybe trans people could teach psychoanalysts how to enjoy their symptom rather than projecting it onto us. It’s OK to be anxious about the instability of the sexed body. Trans people have a wealth of knowledge about just how ductile sex is. We counsel each other through this, so really you could pay us to talk you through it, too.
But rather than accept this language, what if we translated what you do to us into our language? You are chasers. A chaser is someone who desires transsexuality. Someone who is attracted to trans people, most often trans women. Trans women have a range of responses and reactions to the attention of chasers, depending in part on the chaser. Some chasers are worse than others. You are the worst kind. Feeding off us, taking up our time and resources, and offering nothing in exchange. Worst, unable to examine your own fascination and what it says about you, you consequently do us harm.
And so, after a century in which we have been the allegorical prop to your desires and fantasies, not to mention a population to gatekeep and exploit—you owe us. This is the conversation you need to be having about transsexuality: How are you going to make amends for a century of malpractice? What form should reparations take?
Let’s start with something easy: writing referral letters for trans medical care for free. I’m wary of suggesting free sessions, as I’m not convinced you have any useful knowledge about us. Instead, set up a scholarship fund to train trans people in something other than psychoanalysis. In endocrinology, for example. That’s useful care for many of us, and there are very few of us qualified in it. Reparations could also take the form of paying trans scholars to retrain you in the knowledge you clearly lack.
Of course, there are trans scholars and writers who have found useful resources in psychoanalysis. The work of Trish Salah comes to mind. I tend to read those as part of a recovery project aimed at creating another knowledge, another practice. In any case, maybe Schreber is a better theorist than either Freud or Lacan for our purposes—as Deleuze and Guattari intuited, even if theirs was an armchair appreciation of her art of becoming woman.
This is the conversation that needs to happen before there’s any more talk of transsexuality in psychoanalysis: How are the institutional forms of psychoanalysis going to hold themselves accountable and what form should reparations take?
Sincerely,
McKenzie Wark
New York, fall 2022