Gird Your Loins: The Transgender Psychoanalysts are Coming!

In “Gird your Loins: The Transgender Psychoanalysts are Coming!" Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Tobias Wiggins, stages an intervention in which he explores the institution of psychoanalysis and its history of girding its loins against transgender subjects since its inception, despite some of its most fundamentally queer and gender nonconforming premises. Through a pronounced attention to genitality, binarism, and a dense history of homo- and trans-phobic cases, clinical psychoanalysis has almost exclusively cast transgender subjectivities into the realm of either perversion. Indeed, by way of the now bygone theoretical trifecta fetishist/homosexual/transvestite, those with wayward gendered convictions were seen to be the worst regressed and most attached to a “too close” mother. These early, well-supported psychoanalytic perspectives have laid a sturdy groundwork for assorted clinical dismissals, or outright degradation of gender nonconforming subjectivities and these theories have evolved over time. Echoing our opening expression’s antagonism between danger and dismissal, transgender people have been treated as a serious threat to the various gender-based Western normativities embedded within psychoanalytic organizations, while simultaneously being painted as inconsequential and humorous given their assumedly profound psychological deviance.