Cisteria! A Psychoanalysis against Anti-Trans Panics

This article introduces a special issue on trans lives within psychoanalysis, theorizing two interlinked concepts: transpectres, the caricatured figures that haunt and produce gendered life; and cisteria, a defensive formation that organizes contemporary anti-trans panics. Drawing on histories of hysteria within and beyond psychoanalysis, it relocates pathology away from trans subjectivity, toward ciscentric psychology and its associated structures of power. The analysis traces how state security regimes—such as the trope of the “trans terrorist” as “Nihilistic Violent Extremist”—consolidate authoritarian control while generating lethal conditions for trans life. The authors develop “threat psychoanalysis” as a trans method, reading cisteria across intrapsychic, relational, and sociopolitical registers while refusing respectability politics or demands to prove trans innocence. The article concludes by introducing the special issue’s contributors, whose clinical, theoretical, and creative interventions co-imagine a shared transpsychoanalytic experiment in play, feeling, critique, and shared world-making.