The Accident of Gender

Abstract

The intention of this paper is to show how the very archaic nature of gender pushes for settlement, forcing a choice (to be a man or a woman) as a way to settle the traumatic nature of the self for which desire is not finite and where nothing can be set-tied once and for all. Gender in that way is a site of trauma in which an identification with what satisfies the Other (the phallic answer) is all one could hope for, making it extremely difficult to talk about gender outside of this split.
I argue that psychoanalytic writings cannot escape the trauma of gender and that recent investigations into experiences of
gender such as transsexuality have been marked by this trauma

Full text

Gozlan, O. (2008). The Accident of Gender. Psychoanal. Rev., 95:541-570.
(2008). Psychoa nalytic Review, 95 :541-570
The Accident of Gender
Oren Gozlan
I start this difficult paper on the accident of gender with a novel, because sexuality and gender unfold in novel ways,
resisting and revealing assumed origins as fragile attempts to settle desire. Like a novel, in which pages are read to capture
essences that words cannot grasp, gender hints at trauma that has no origin but is rather the result of the struggle to capture
this very unknown, which one can only brush against through terms such as drive and desire. One cannot enter the novel's
narrative armed with the right knowledge to grasp its meaning, but one is affected by the novel's aftershock, its meanings
constructed retroactively. One cannot prepare for sexuality's novelty, and its meanings can be made retroactively only
after desire surprises, strays off familiar course, and forces an engagement with the open question of identity.
The intention of this paper is to show how the very archaic nature of gender pushes for settlement, forcing a choice (to
be a man or a woman) as a way to settle the traumatic nature of the self for which desire is not finite and where nothing
can be set-tied once and for all. Gender in that way is a site of trauma in which an identification with what satisfies the
Other (the phallic answer) is all one could hope for, making it extremely difficult to talk about gender outside of this split.
I argue that psychoanalytic writings cannot escape the trauma of gender and that recent investigations into experiences of
gender such as transsexuality have been marked by this trauma.
Recent articles about transsexuality that purport to represent a postmodern model of gender (in contrast to the binary
conception of biology) treat transsexuality as a disavowal of difference and a collapse to a binary. The transsexual is
conceptualized
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as a problematic figure who cannot accept the limits of the body, or who treats the body as a fetish, thus insisting on
becoming a “real” man or woman, one who could be complete or whole. Sex reassignment surgery is treated as evidence
for such a conceptualization, as it is seen as both a mutilation and an omnipotent attempt to enact a phantasy of rebirth, or
to reach an ideal construction of another sex. On the other hand, gender “indecision”—the resistance to identifying as
either a man or a woman—is often treated as a feature of perversion, a denial of difference, an inability to mourn the
desire to be “both,” and a refusal to accept the “law.” I examine these psychoanalytic formulations as countertransference
reactions to the traumatic nature of gender. My attempt is to reveal how psychoanalytic theory becomes engaged in the
very processes of disavowing internal difference and denying the trauma that it tries to escape.
The character of Calliope (Cal), in Jeffrey Eugenides' (2002) novel Middlesex, opens us to the idea that what is at
stake is not the question of where our desire leads us or the settlement of “who we are,” but whether desire is in itself
possible if the question of what it means to be is foreclosed. Subjectivity begins, we learn, when identity breaks down,
when one can enjoy one's transgressions and can cease to insist on absolute recognition. Analysing the gender
“experiment” of Calliope, this paper explores the “accident” of gender through conflicts of desire between self and other.
As Calliope walks in and out of the clinic, we see how the clinic itself is caught in its own inhibition, performed through
the symptom of searching for an origin to gender identity.
In Middlesex we witness the close connection between memory and imagination. The failure of imagination is
revealed through Cal's memories of origin, spread across three generations. These memories are testimonies for Cal to the
ways in which gender originates and provide explanations of the origins of identity—whether they be genes, socialization,
or fantasies of the primal scene. The attempt to settle gender through recourse to origin, however, falls apart when the
intersexed character of Calliope says, “When I was a little girl, I was a little boy.” The question of origin is confronted
with a strange desire that forces Cal to make meaning, which reveals itself to be fragile at best.
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But the fragility of the question of origin is forgotten and so is the responsibility in making meaning, situating oneself in
gender and acknowledging one's own otherness. The need for testimony, like clinging to genital notions of identity,
defends against responsibility—of not wanting to know—by settling one's anxiety through an answer. What is it that Cal
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acts out but does not remember? What is acted out in psychoanalysis that forgets its own otherness and attempts to settle
the inchoateness of gender through disavowal of its own understanding of difference, or a recourse to normalcy?
It is interesting that Calliope's phantasized history begins with a story of incest, a brother and a sister: Calliope's
Greek grandparents, unable to comprehend or resist their desire, fall in love and eventually marry. This union is
phantasized as the origin of Calliope's genetic accident, which is really a denial of other accidents: the accidental desire of
the brother and sister in the absence of a prohibiting parent and the accident of gender itself that is always lacking in origin
and is always a lack. But the lack of prohibition also installs another prohibition. The phantastic incestuous union of
Calliope's grandparents betrays desire, which can only be borne of unpredictability. There is a desperate insistence in their
wanting that is certain of its object. There is no questioning of their desire, no second thoughts. There is something about
gender that is also desperate and certain, which makes what we want and what we must have transparent and narrows the
elusiveness of ourselves and our objects. There is something about the unintelligibility of gender that is hard to bear and
that attaches to notions of prohibition—desire becomes a dangerous other (equated with loss and absence)—and
enjoyment of domination—where normativity and certainty are celebrated—and replaces vulnerable searches for meaning.
It is difficult to describe the intersexed Calliope without getting caught in the unintelligibility of gender. Calliope
creates mixed emotions and perplexes our fragile hold on gender. We attempt to force Calliope into a gender position,
acting out the reader's projection. Situating Calliope in gender seems inevitable and urgent. Are we captured by Calliope's
illegible experience or our own anxiety of meeting our own illegible gender? As readers, we struggle throughout the book
with the question
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of where to situate Calliope in gender. Calliope's narrative and the reader's struggle with gender positioning reflect the
difficulty of thinking about gender without recourse to an origin story. There is something unintelligible and traumatic
about gender that provokes anxiety and inhibition and drives us to an act of “forgetfulness” of what we are not, through a
fixation or splitting of gender identifications. Calliope's narrative may serve as an example of how the problem of sexual
certitude affects and inhibits sexual exploration and desire in and outside of the analytic space. In this way, it may help
elaborate the transsexual patient's dilemma in seeking comfort in a fantasy of “settled” gender as he or she encounters
otherness as a human condition, well masked by the symbolic equation of gender with biology. But it may also broaden
the dilemma of gender as a human condition, not limited to the transsexual position. The reader comes to treat Cal's body
as a signifying body, and as we identify with Cal's urgency to settle the question of identity we also come to see every
body as a hysterical body, a signified body in the Other's terms.
Through the novel we are confronted with trauma; there is never complete knowledge of oneself, therefore there is
never a complete gender or a normal self. This is a precondition for desire, rather than a killing of desire, which relies on
incompleteness, suspense, and yearning. Yet if gender does not have a firm history, if masculinity and femininity are not
bound to biology or sociology, why does psychoanalysis insist on biological markings of gender? Are we not treating
gender as a fetish by asking this question, and if so, why can't psychoanalysis hold onto its question of symbolization and
meaning? Adam Phillips (2006) asks a similar question around the ending of analysis: “What would it be like to live
without a sense of endings?” (p. 316). Must one's novelty—or indeed the novel itself—end? Are endings absolute?
Gender and The Psychoanalytic Clinic
Calliope's adolescent ego is confused by a desire to answer the environment's demands to be a girl when a surprising
desire arises for the object of her phantasy, who happens to be a female.
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Things become unintelligible for Calliope, who is uncertain of who she or he is. Once introduced to the clinic, Calliope is
forced to pass tests of certainty—to decide upon a gender. The tests take on a life of their own, promising the certainty that
some sort of truth can come out of distant observations, biological investigations, and a psychological line of questioning
where answers have particular known meanings. A decision is made that she is indeed a girl, based on her preemptive
answers—“Yes, I like boys”—and the way she smiles “in keeping with females of her generation.”
The clinic's attempt to stabilize Calliope's identity and the reader's desire to settle the question of gender identification
mirror the dilemma of psychoanalysis over gender and are reminiscent of the defense of psychoanalysis against difference.
Normalcy, however, is already a defense against uncertainty, where gender is structured as a position in relation to the
presence or absence of the penis, and the phallus is taken literally to close the gap on desire and the uncertainty of never
knowing where desire will lead us. After leaving the clinic, running away from its terrorizing notions of normalcy,
Calliope comes to understand normalcy as a shaky structure, a defense, an idealized prohibition.
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I read Calliope's narrative and think about my own entanglement with gender, wondering about the impact of the
unconscious on psychoanalysis itself, as a theory and clinical practice. As a clinician I find it difficult to identify the
places where I stumble and get caught in the normativity of gender. I ask, can psychoanalysis identify the places where it
is caught up in its own normative discourse? When does psychoanalysis's own unconscious collapse upon the very
theories it wishes to uphold? Inevitably the dilemma inherent in gender, its unintelligibility and the anxiety over difference
this provokes, is played out on both sides of the analytic couch.
Freud (1978c) situates trauma at the heart of difference. He conceives of difference as hostile and threatening. Freud
relates the “narcissism of minor differences” to the fact that men and women are biologically different, and this difference
poses a threat precisely because men and women are “otherwise alike” (p. 166). The problem of difference for Freud
relates to fetishism
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and concreteness, where there is at once a registration and repudiation of reality. The psychic apparatus is conceptualized
as inherently resistant to the registration of dissonant realities. In “Negation” (1978d) Freud posits that at the level of
phantasy what is “bad” and what is alien to the ego is identical at the beginning because both increase tension. If Eros
represents a push to relationality and connectedness through sexuality, its tension-raising qualities will inevitably
overwhelm the subject and will result in repudiation. What will be repudiated is the otherness, the difference that is the
cause of the tension. Concreteness occurs in response to the threat of difference and comes as a way to treat reality as
transparent and to confuse perceptible objects with relief. In this way, a belief in actual castration becomes a defense
against the absence of the wholeness it presumes—against loss. However, if reduction of tension invokes a repudiation of
difference, one can read identification as a process of repudiation: reducing tension between the self and the Other's
imagined desire.
Alan Bass (2000) looks at Freud's paper on fetishism as a way to understand and expand the notions of difference and
otherness as both constituting and threatening subjectivity. In Freud's original conception, traumatic knowledge is
registered unconsciously but repudiated by “primary wish fulfillment and defenses” (p. 64). Fetishism and concreteness
become ways to defend oneself from the overwhelming other, both internal and external. Holding onto perceptual
identities dependent on visible minor differences (such as the presence or absence of the penis) becomes a way to disavow
internal difference. Yet Freud's treatment of gender difference became a symptom of psycho-analysis's (or Freud's) own
disavowal of difference and unconscious repudiation of otherness. Despite Freud's reference to the masculine and
feminine identities as positions that are not settled by gender assignment alone, Freud treats sexual difference literally, in
accordance with the absence or presence of the phallus. This is reminiscent of his formulation of the fetish, in which the
presence of the phallic object provides reassurance of sexual difference and relief from the danger of ambiguity and
difference within the self. One can see how gender, perceived as a transparent binary dependent on biology, is an example
of fetishism,
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where the actual presence of the phallus provides relief from the anxiety of difference by supporting an illusion of
wholeness.
Hans Loewald (1951) questions Freud's treatment of reality as bound up with the father through emphasis on the role
of the Oedipus complex in the introduction of difference. Reality for Freud is seen as an outside force that interrupts the
“tensionless narcissism” (as cited in Bass, 2000, p. 97). Loewald points to a contradiction in Freud's conception of the ego
as a defense against a reality “out there” by focusing on the development of the ego as a development away from primary
narcissism. Through emphasizing the intrinsic tension in primary narcissism—that of the unconscious registration of
difference—Loewald argues that the tension between unconscious registration and repudiation exists from the start
(Loewald, 1951, p. 8). This is the tension on which subjectivity depends and that risks collapsing into a binary if the
tension become intolerable. The threat of differentiation calls for regressive movements that reduce the tension between
the environment and the subject (Bass, 2000, p. 98). In this way defenses lessen the differentiation between inner and
outer experience. Defenses are compromise formations, a way of handling what cannot be symbolized or integrated.
Defenses reorganize reality as a way to defend against anxieties over difference.
In his early work Freud uses phallic organization as a stage of libidinal development for the child. The choice of
identification offered to the subject is framed within a binary of castrated/noncastrated. Bass (2000) shows how Freud's
(1978a, 1978b, 1978c) treatment of gender differences, reflected in his reference to the “fact of castration,” implies a
conflation of reality and fantasy in the very grammar of the statement. In spite of his understanding of fetishism as a
disavowal of sexual difference that is replaced by sexual monism, and his insight into the hostility created by the
narcissism of minor differences, Freud (1978c) still treats sexual difference concretely. Psychoanalysis becomes blind to
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the very problem it is attempting to engage in, creating a metapsychology that is distinct from psychology's and medicine's
assumption of a knowing subject. This is obvious in the case of gender, where femininity and masculinity are treated
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as a biological fact and where investment in genital sexuality becomes a measurement of maturity.
Freud, then, understands fetishism as a result of the narcissistic threat of sexual difference, which raises tension,
leading to a conflation of reality and fantasy (Bass, 2000, p. 33). The fetishist's solution involves fixation on visible
“minor differences” that help maintain the fantasy of a cohesive gender. In this way concreteness eliminates the tensions
raised by difference. For the fetishist, castration is real. Freud, like Collette Chiland and other recent gender theorists,
struggles with gender, and his theory reflects this, oscillating between a concrete, fetishized view of gender and a more
fluid one.
Carmela Levy-Stokes (2001) points out that Freud's unique contribution lies in “setting out the different ways in
which the phallus is revealed for each sex” (p. 137). Freud uses phallus instead of penis in his 1925 paper to describe the
inscription of a lack. For the boy, the lack is signified with the phallus. For the girl, the phallus is used as a sign for the
mark of identification, which also covers for her lack. Jacqueline Rose (1986) points out that often critics of Freud fail to
recognize that his concept of the phallus was part of his awareness of the impossibility of sexual difference, which, he
suggested, comes at a price precisely because such division registers as a law that exceeds biology. Rose exposes the
gender binary operating on the side of any psychoanalysis that attempts to resolve the difficulties in Freud's account of
gender. She argues that Freud's understanding of sexuality is tied to the unconscious and to the nature of subjectivity,
which is inherently divided. The attempt to stabilize the status of women within psychoanalysis can be considered
therefore a collapse back into the binary.
Resistance to the centrality of castration anxiety in the structuring of sexual difference resulted in many theorists
turning to developmental and biological theorizing. Theorists such as Jessica Benjamin (1998), for example, turn away
from castration in order to get away from biology, but end up with an equally concrete notion of gender.
According to Benjamin, oedipal gender complementarity, which dominates psychoanalytic thinking, assumes the
origins of sexual differences rather than explaining them. In this way, identity
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is elaborated through the idea of anatomical/biological castration or is founded on identifications with social roles.
Benjamin (1998) instead analyses the gender divide in terms of the object relation to the mother (p. 43). Benjamin
believes that a reconstructive analysis of the oedipal position offers an alternative origin to gender other than castration
anxiety, through the idea that gender emerges as the result of shifting multiple identifications. She criticizes the Lacanian
position, claiming that it still resides within a binary logic of identity, as it refers to the “law” that decenters and divides (p.
48). Reading castration in Freud or Lacan as a literal or psychical relation to the actual presence or absence of the penis,
Benjamin asks, “Is it possible to postulate an archimedian point of leverage that explains sexual difference?” (p. 48).
Rose (1986) problematizes such literality in feminist theories like Benjamin's or Nancy Chodorow's, which attempt to
bypass the question of castration by placing emphasis on mothering and separation, pointing out how ignoring the
question of castration bypasses the inchoateness of the unconscious and the fundamental role of absence in creating desire.
For Rose, as for Lacan, the unconscious knows no gender, and so gender itself, and also castration and the oedipal scene,
can stand for or elaborate a much deeper lack inherent to desire. In this way, the phallus is not an organ but is what we
invent as an origin in a chain that has no origin. Paradoxically, any insistence upon the difference between the genders
represents an anxiety about a wished-for union that is believed to be real. This binary attempts to capture and represent
this gap of difference and the reality of the splitting of the subject that is beyond simply gender differentiation.
The Question of Finitude
Calliope's static and hostile self-perception as offending gender, being a sham, or being nothing at all is mirrored in
psychoanalytic theories that treat the reality of gender in a binary and hostile fashion, while in some cases ironically trying
to present an argument for a flexible or “fluid” view of gender. An example can be found in theories of gender that treat
transsexuality as
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“madness.” For Chiland (2005), the transsexual demand for the surgery and hormones that will grant “true” identity is
“crazy” because the wish to be the other sex is but a personalization, an attempt to adopt a social role. The “sham” of the
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postoperative body is a mere phantasy and a proof that the transsexual lives outside of symbolization and has to concretize
gender through surgery (p. 15). In a similar vein, Chiland (2003) describes transsexuals who seek surgery as “militant” in
claiming they are “man (or woman) and have always been a man (or woman)” (p. 8). For her, the surgery marks the
foreclosure of the complex nature of the “problem they face” and a denial of difference. She declares with certainty,
Transsexuals are sometimes said to belong to both sexes, in the sense that they embody one sex while in
their mind they feel they belong to the opposite sex. But in fact, they are highly intolerant of psychic
bisexuality: they try above all to rid anything that might remind them of the sex they loathe and to forget
everything that has to do with their past life as members of the sex they reject, (p. 8)
Chiland's sentiment is echoed in much recent analytic writing, including Shepherdson (2000), and Fiorini and
Vainer (2003). But a close look at these writings reveals a collapse of meaning, resulting in the authors taking refuge in
binary notions of gender and a concrete grasp of “difference” while they resort to a narcissism over minor differences, of
all of which the transsexual is accused. For example, transsexuality for Chiland is equated with omnipotence and with an
underlying psychotic—or at least borderline—structure. Chiland, beginning from a view of gender bound to biology,
argues that transsexuals' rejection of their body and the desire for a “true” body that corresponds to their “felt” gender is a
sign of a refusal to occupy the symbolic place of the other. Chiland (2003) argues against the body/soul binary, claiming
that we cannot speak of a “feminine soul in a man's body” and that therefore the transsexual's identification is ultimately
an illusion (p. 39). Along with other theorists she sees the transsexual plea to have their identity defined by their “mind” or
“soul” as contradictory to their request for sex reassignment surgery. She goes on to say “The statement: ‘give me my true
body,’ and the belief that someone will be able to give
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them a real body of the opposite sex is madness” (Chiland, 2005, p. 14). What the transsexual identifies with, according to
Chiland, are the stereotypical cultural signs of gender: mannerisms, clothes, and the like. Chiland struggles with gender as
possibly representing something “beyond” gender. For her, sex equals gender. She considers the transsexual phenomenon
as a product of “our technology based, individualistic culture, a token of its contradictions, and a disease of our
culture” (Chiland, 2003, p. 2).
Catherine Millot also views transsexuality as “a short-circuit of the symbolic order,” in that the transsexual seeks
anatomical sex rather than a different psychical sense of embodiment (as quoted in Shepherdson, 2000, p. 101). In this
way, seeking sex reassignment surgery is a “demand for an exit from the question of sexual difference” (Shepherdson,
2000, p. 101). Transsexuals' certainty of their gendered position and their appeal to the other to recognize them as such is
seen as a desire for an omnipotent jouissance, outside of the law. Transsexuals are seen as constituted within a narrow
range of options: either as complying with chosen social roles and therefore seeking surgery to resolve the dilemma of
sexual difference, or as taking gender as a performative role to be worn like a garment, in an attempt to circumvent desire
and choose freely.
We can see that, whether the choice of sex or gender is conceived as independent of or as dependent on physical
determinations, transsexuals are in trouble when it comes to psychic health and their negotiation with otherness. In both
conceptions the transsexual fetishizes either the feminine or masculine body, searching for an ideal. The body is mutilated
in search of an ideal construction, much like pallingenesis, which refers to anatomical rebirth (Assoun, cited in Fiorini
and Vainer, 2003). However, there is something suspect about this hostile reaction to the transsexual experience that
points toward a trauma. There is also a tacit normativity in the seemingly “fluid” conception of the body as a symbol,
which reveals itself in the inevitable recourse to biological origin: The transsexual transgresses the limits of the biological
body.
Transsexuals are seen either as encasing their original femininity/masculinity with a mere sham—an alternative make-
believe
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body, which under a microscope will reveal itself as unchanged chromosomally—or, in the alternative position, they are
unable to hold onto a fluid occupation of gender without disavowal and recourse to surgery, a proof of the concrete
relation of transsexuals to gender and their denial of sexual difference. What is trau-matically disavowed in this
formulation of transsexuality is the meaning of sexual difference, which is reduced to either the surface of the body or a
universal dilemma about the certitude of gender. Is gender a mark of difference or a place of trauma where difference
masks unbearable sameness and anxiety over minor differences that covers up for an inability to accept difference within
the self? Something happens in gender that becomes a gravestone for these difficult questions and also for desire.
Something too is happening in psychoanalysis that prevents it from playing with gender, from allowing gender to become
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a transitional space, a placeholder for desire. This failure often results in a collapse in meaning, where surgery becomes
equated with gender foreclosure, even while gender as a psychic position can surely survive surgery.
There is a blind spot, a binary that prevents us from seeing transsexuality as one of many solutions (homo- or
heterosexuality being others), which can be taken either as a transitional space or as collapsing into bodies taken as truths,
phallic extensions that foreclose desire. In this way, transsexual surgery is irrelevant in treating gender as a placeholder, as
the body is a mere representation that forecloses the psychic dimension. Can one not have surgery to avoid the tension of
painful encounters while holding onto masculinity and femininity as positions within the self? The treatment of
transsexual surgery as evidence for a disavowal of difference reveals the difficulty in psychoanalysis with difference as
interiority, where difference becomes difference from the Other as opposed to difference within the self—the ability to
integrate one's own hetero- and homosexuality, passivity and activity. The result is a collapse into a binary as seen in
analytic theories of gender that reflect their own stake in the traumatic nature of sexuality. When sexual differentiation and
the question of reality testing take on a normative tone, identity is treated as transparent and dependent upon perception (in
particular, of the penis).
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The inherent problem with theories that equate subjects' gender history with their biological history is the attempt to
occupy an impossible position in relation to a “known subject,” which is reminiscent of the diagnosis of the transsexual's
binary “conviction” as psychotic, or at least borderline. Indeed, a transsexual patient's wish for a “complete” gender, and
the analyst's certitude in his or her own gender can make for a concrete trap of cross-projections. This trap can be seen in
Calliope's struggle to become comprehensible to himself and to the Other, and animates a dilemma inherent to gender
when desire and normativity clash. Until adolescence, there is no struggle for Calliope over gender. The body and its
gender do not matter. This is a time when Calliope is permitted to play with gender, where gender is a placeholder for
what can be created accidentally through identifications and encounters. However, this all changes when Calliope reaches
adolescence, when desire leads him to the object of his love. From this point on, gender identity is at stake in the pressure
to be or have the phallus. Calliope is caught in a clash between his desire and the restrictions of the social, which he
defends against by inhibition. Something stops his ability to play with gender and produces an investment in answering the
demands of others to live as a girl.
Cal's narration offers two experiences of gender: one that is absorbed with the social and one in which he is using his
desire as his own compass. Calliope's gender question—Am I a boy or a girl?—asks for the other's knowledge and thus
assumes both the authority of the other and the stability of the other's knowledge. Calliope's search for “the” answer, the
missing object, is an appeal to the other, who is assumed to possess the wholeness that he lacks (e.g., others are “real” men
and women), to tell him how he, too, can get “the object” (become a girl or a boy). This demand to know or to situate
oneself in gender reflects how unsettling gender is. But what is unsettling about gender? Is it gender that is unsettling or
what gender represents? We soon find out that Cal's quest for history and origin is a way to avoid difficult questions
around his sexuality and desire. Cal's erotic encounters are subsumed by a need for history where gender—and desire,
too—becomes a stable point in memory, and a knowledge of himself and his object is locked in impossibility. He forever
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feels excluded from “what could have been,” an exclusion that represents an inability to tolerate the insatiability of desire
as well as a phantasy of being excluded from the complete knowledge of the other because of the limitations of his
incomplete body.
The quest to know oneself and the other, like the quest for certainty and origin in gender, dispels desire and relieves
the self of its tension. There is a resistance in Calliope, as in the psychoanalytic treatment of gender, to the reality of
desire, which is unexpected, unpredictable, and unknowable. Calliope's relation to himself and the “Object,” the unnamed
object of his desire, is unknowable and in this way manipulated in phantasy. The Object becomes lodged as a longed-for
impossibility, yearned for and never mourned. The passion of Calliope in pursuit of the Object is bound up with his wish
and phantasy that complete satisfaction is possible. His search for closeness to the Object intensifies, becoming obsessive,
addictive, and fraught with hatred for himself, the Object, and for desire itself. His search to “know” the Object, like the
pursuit of his own history and stable knowledge of his own gender, is problematic. The need to stabilize desire and
knowledge, to take possession of oneself and the other, leads to a static, manipulative relation where objects are distorted
and controlled and where subjectivity is killed.
Cal's quest tells us how the tyranny of the material body, and the armor of knowledge and assumed origin, are all
ways in which one attempts to settle the trauma of desire's unknown path, as well as a traumatic foreclosure of the
question of creativity and choice.
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The Question of Normativity
Calliope's encounter with the clinic and its knowledge illustrates the ways in which the clinic's residence in
normativity animates his own inhibition by looking to place him in gender rather than allowing him to explore his desire.
His clinical experiences introduce a disruption in the form of a confrontation with Calliope's own lies about his history
(telling the doctor that he always felt like a girl). It is also an example of how the clinic is caught up
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in its own defense against the inchoateness of gender by treating itself as the “subject presumed to know,” as if the clinic
were in possession of the phallus, the object of certainty. The clinic is also caught up in the desire to “normalize” the
transsexual through the “real-life test” and other presurgery tests) and treats gender indeterminacy as pathology.
Calliope's trip to the clinic starts as an encounter with the “subject presumed to know,” an appeal to normativity and
cohesiveness. Calliope is told he is a female and is given a biological explanation for his physical appearance. The
encounter with the clinic brings him closer to what is known but not yet thinkable for him about his body. In his appeal to
be recognized as something he cannot recognize himself, he is also asking to be stopped and prohibited, and he is forced to
receive a phantasy answer, saturated with certainty, to his question. The clinic's response to Calliope animates his own
prohibition. He must be a girl. He cannot play with thoughts. When he left the constraints of the clinic and his parents,
now calling himself “Cal,” he realized something he knew all along: the clinic's and his parents' narrative of gender is a
mere defense, a fiction presented as an integrated object. Cal must ask the question, Am I a boy or a girl? To raise doubts
is to be able to be affected by language and to think.
The clinical experience is useful only insofar as Calliope was confronted with his own lies, found in his own file.
Calliope is then forced to betray his ideal of wholeness, of fitting in. It is only through giving up his search for stability in
identity that Cal is able to learn about himself. He gives up on being or having the phallus and accepts his otherness as a
position in “middlesex.”
Giving up a normative sense of gender with ties to biology as a point of stability seems difficult in social, medical,
and psychological discourse. The notion of a normative gender that follows a phantasy of origin (gender believed to be
originating from biology or from “culture”) entraps thinking and creativity and forecloses understanding of the existential
dilemmas of the transsexual as identity. Identity then becomes the function of the other's desire through the
conceptualization of a “normal” gender. Viewed in this way, gender becomes a literal construetion,
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void of interiority and subjectivity, and the infiniteness of desire is killed. When it comes to the question of another
experience of gender, such as transsexuality, the binary conception of gender provides a second entrapment for the
transsexual who feels outside of the phantasized comfort of the body and outside of the limits of normalcy. The clinic's
failure to provide Calliope with an answer, origin, or stability to gender, and its resignation to the splitting of gender
(Calliope's gender is fated by either genes or stereotypical upbringing) animates a collapse of both meaning and
subjectivity. Gender becomes a “thing in itself rather than a becoming, a position where incompleteness is structurally
necessary.
The binary of gender introduced through the clinic, which distinguishes “normal” from “maladaptive” gender
development, repeats the trauma of gender when the phallus, now in the form of knowledge, holds pedagogical sway. The
clinic installs itself as a master of knowledge and becomes the significant other to whom identity succumbs as a way to
prevent loss through the hope for a blissful union or wholeness.
Calliope's belief in the clinic and his parents' ability to provide him with knowledge about himself erodes. He comes
to realize that not the clinic, or his parents, or anybody else has a complete hold on knowledge of his desire or their own.
Gender loses its ground. One can see the transsexual desire to be “normal” as, itself, a plea for certainty and a denial of the
ambivalence that is part of identity. The transsexual's wish to be a complete or “normal” man may also reflect an
identification with the aggressor, that is, an identification with the clinic's contempt for the lacking body of the
transsexual. The transsexual fills his perceived lack with an envious idealization of the completeness that the other
represents, leading to a symbolic equation. The desire of the other is collapsed with the literality of the phallus.
Contemporary awareness of transsexuality comes on the heels of technological and medical advances, which have
allowed the distress of the transsexual's condition to be addressed through surgery. This surgery is still considered by
many to be a misguided assistance in self-mutilation, or alternatively an enactment of an inner struggle that arrests any
possibility of a “working through.” But isn't this inner struggle the condition
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inherent in gender identification? Is not all gender the very “regression to social stereotypes” (Chiland, 2003, p. 2) that
Chiland and others apply to the transsexual alone?
The misalignment of the biological body and subjective identification is anxiety provoking. What is articulated
through this anxiety is a tension between normalcy and the damage done to gender through transsexual “contempt.” It
seems that biological and social theories play out this tension through projective identification, each placing in the
biological and the social containers their anxiety over spoiling the normal, and their yearning to be bestowed with a
certitude of normalcy by a known other.
The Question of The inchoate
For Freud, the moment of trauma is at the point where the boy and girl discovers his or her differences. But as Rose
(1986) points out, the discovery of difference, where something is seen to be missing, is already based on a preexisting
symbolic meaning of the missing object. In On Being Normal and Other Disorders, Paul Verhaeghe (2004) offers a way
of thinking about the question of castration and gender that stands outside of an originary moment or a “point of leverage.”
When both gender and castration are signifiers for something “beyond,” such as the division inherent in subjectivity, the
phallus is understood as a position that can be taken by both men and women, not as an organ with originary meaning. In
this formulation the phallus receives its significance retroactively, as a signifier for and an imaginary solution to the
question of absence, one that can take many forms. The phallus becomes significant only in a sense that significance is
attributed to it as a marker of difference. Gender identity is problematized in the Lacanian account because gender itself
becomes a representation, via the absence or presence of the phallus, as a form of prohibition in relation to being and
having. One must lose in order to desire, but there is no guarantee of what will be lost, where desire will migrate, and what
will be made of it.
Verhaeghe (2004) offers a way to conceptualize sexual differentiation that does not focus on Oedipal castration and
instead views castration as a secondary representation, a defense
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against a deeper castration that is “beyond gender” and has to do with the subject's confrontation with the real—“the
irrevocable Object that has no name” (p. 12). In this way, gender is not traced to biological or social origin, but is in itself
a defense against trauma. The trauma of gender is not an originary “fact,” but rather is the residue of symbolization, an
effect of the impossibility of a complete symbolization and its incoherent excess. Gender becomes a container, a
compromise formation of what cannot be symbolized and creates the tension of difference. Gender, as a phallic
identification (the thing that answers the other's desire) can provide a relief from difference through an illusion of
complementarity. Verhaeghe's emphasis on desire and lack offers a bridge between interiority and object relations. By
situating anxiety at the center of the appeal to the other, Verhaeghe treats gender as a psychic construction dependent not
on biological finitude but on the position one constructs in relation to the phallus as the signifier of the other's desire.
The phallus for Verhaeghe, as for Lacan, is the name given to what is lacking in the mother and as such is a repetition
and elaboration of a primal castration, a void in desire that cannot be filled (Verhaeghe, 2001). Castration anxiety is in
itself a defense against being engulfed by the excessive enjoyment of the mother at a time when gender is not
differentiated. The phallus signifies both what the other has to satisfy in the mother and what defends against the mother's
engulfing desire. The phallus becomes the law, the cut (limit, castration) that inherently seeks satisfaction but is
structurally caught in an impossibility. This treatment of the phallus as a signifier of lack rather than an answer to desire
opens a way to think about gender as something beyond binary, as an accident that is neither a choice nor fate but a
destiny one confronts in the struggle for subjectivity. Read through a Lacanian positioning of the phallus as a signifier;
transsexuality becomes one position among many. Verhaeghe stresses how the phallus, for Lacan, is not a thing but a
signifier in the subject's unconscious, of the other's (mother's) desire. As an object of desire, it is always lacking. Gender
can be conceptualized as actual pathology, something that cannot be symbolized, or as a response to the ever-present
demand for satisfaction (Verhaeghe, 2004). It can be seen as a site of trauma because it
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is the failure to symbolize desire that is the failure of symbolization itself. The phallus comes to signify “the one,” “the
answer.”
It is useful at this point to briefly map out the dilemma of gender as a defense against anxiety. Lacan situates anxiety
at the center of the appeal to the Other, making gender a psychic construction dependent not on biological finitude but on
the position one takes in relation to the phallus, the signifier of the Other's desire. The agent of castration is the mother, as
the first Other to whom the child appeals, not father. The threat involves engulfment by the enjoyment of the mother, of
being reduced to a function to fulfil the enjoyment of the Other. The phallus, represented by the function of the father, is a
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secondary process, one that anchors this dreaded disappearance onto the Other's abyss. The dreaded anxiety is transferred
into the phallus/father in the form of conceptualizing the second Other (father) as not lacking and as the one responsible
for the mother's satisfaction. Verhaeghe argues that castration anxiety is implemented only after the child is aware of the
mother's lack rather than his or her own. The threat of the dreaded void of the nondivided first Other is shifted to the
phallic enjoyment of the Other through identification with the lack. Castration is the secondary elaboration of a much-
dreaded anxiety over engulfment or usage by the Other and defends against being engulfed by “the big Other.”
All this implies that the symbolic world is inevitably a phallic one, representing the lack, the ever-insufficient answer
to the Other. This formulation opens a discussion on gender that resides in neither the body nor the social but in the
internal world of object-relations, where identity formation and sexual identity in particular can be conceptualized as
complex constructions built not out of a linear progressive history but on solutions to questions of ownership and desire as
they relate to the Other.
Verhaeghe, following Lacan, positions the dilemma of gender internally as a structural trauma, a clash between
anxiety that is in excess of symbolization and the desire to close the gap and bind this anxiety. This structural impossibility
creates a circular, never-ending movement toward and away from symbolization, hence toward and away from
relationships. The desire to bind the unboundable anxiety is animated through relatedness when
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desire seeks an anchored answer, in the form of recognition and satisfaction in the Other.
Desire, however, is the site of misrecognition, and its very nature relies on a lack, a yearning for an unrealizable
closure. The ego misrecognizes itself through a myth of unification, taking its own phantasy of what the Other wants it to
be, as itself. Once desire becomes conscious, it is inspired by the belief that one can answer the Other's desire, but one can
never know what the Other really wants. Identity is a miscommunication, an anchor on a shifting ground. When lack and
absence are placed at the core of desire, identity is destined to miscommunication. As such, it is always a failure, a half-
truth. The self is shaped by accidental identifications made of failures of communications and cover-ups to fill in the gaps
of desire. Gender identity becomes a collage of unconscious phantasies, acted out and defended against at once, a site of
trauma where what cannot be known, satisfied, or settled becomes somatized, and fixated in a binary as a way to kill
desire. What is destroyed through the collapse to a binary is the otherness of gender where one can play with gender as a
placeholder for identity. The idealization of the literal difference, as described earlier, is a defense against the ultimate
sameness that appears in the absence of the flesh. This similarity may stand for and embody a much-dreaded fear of being
devoured by the mother.
It is the presence of the second Other and its physical signifiers that give the bare bones of the child its gendered and
then sexualized self. This literalization of the body is not likely, or even desired, to be given up. The cost of such
relinquishments is fear of annihilation. What would the world of boys and girls look like in the absence of the
imagined/real phallus? Where would our anxieties be placed? It seems that much hangs on the phallus, and the question
“How's it hanging?” holds more meaning for the answer for difference and fusion (differentiation and de-differentiation).
The myth of the phallus is captivating.
If the phallus holds imaginary powers and is the sign for gender difference, its discourse is enforced in the
parent—child web, and then, through the social inscription, further literalized explicitly and implicitly in a retroactive
fashion. Gender identity can be thought of as being structured and restructured by the
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anxiety over separation and incorporation. The child's first anxiety involves separation from its mother through failure to
fulfil her phantasized ideal image of the child's self. With oedipalization, this fear turns to fear over castration, or loss of
the mother's love. Castration symbolizes the first loss, of the mother, through separation. If the child's initial fear was
about separation from the mother, with the introduction of the second Other, it becomes a more specified fear over
satisfying the phallic needs of the mother (Verhaeghe, 2004). This fear of castration proves murky: Is it castration by the
mother that is feared most, or by father? Is the subject of castration a boy or a girl?
Symbolization in this formulation repeats the existential struggle of desire. The child sends an anxiety-filled message
that cannot be fully verbalized to the first Other who, in turn, distorts the message through his or her phantasy. The first
Other provides a response that is further distorted by the self and by the child's own projections and phantasy. So we can
see that desire—and so gender—is not a clear message, and the literal form it takes stands as proof of its traumatic nature.
The literal is an attempt to keep representation away from a deeper awareness. The literalization of gender forecloses the
subject's ability to keep distance or verbalize it. It installs a conflictual division in the psyche (boy/girl, man/woman), the
way trauma does.
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Gender then, can become an “actualpathology” (a term first used by Freud and later elaborated in Verhaeghe's [2004]
discussion on trauma) of identity: the part of identity that does not simply signify but is instead collapsed as real. The
transsexual position can elaborate this universal existential dilemma insofar as in transsexuality one often finds a reliance
on an idealized phantasy of the completeness of the Other that fills the felt gap of desire that is literalized through the
envied phallus. The anxiety over the real cannot be contained by phantasy and requires body alteration because one's self-
constructions are not recognized in the literal, engendered society, leading to an anxiety of annihilation.
The phantasy of being a boy for the anatomical girl is not different from the phantasy of being a girl for the same
anatomical girl. Gender is taken as a psychical achievement (embodiment) rather than a biological fact, as the body of
psychoanalysis
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is neither a natural fact nor a cultural production. Rather, like symptoms, it is governed by and subject to the law of
representation (Shepherdson, 2000, p. 96). In this sense, while the human body is subjected to historical representations,
one has to come into one's own body.
The position of the transsexual in relation to representation and the law. In particular, one may wonder if the rejection
of the parental “assignment” of gender, which is bound up with cultural signification, is a rejection of the “law,” which
becomes an omnipotent denial of otherness. But the question of identification is in itself problematic. The “Other” is
always the Other that calls forth (through our identification with the Other's desire) our sexuality, seducing us into being.
We are forever caught in desire, and so identification itself may refer to a process of repudiation, an attempt to reduce the
tension between the self and the Other's desire.
A Way Out of Normativity in The Question of The Transsexual
At the heart of the wish to be normal lies the desire to close the gap of uncertainty and thus to destroy desire itself.
What is split off is the uncertainty and fragility of gender and the division of the self through a wish to answer the desire
for the Other's desire, leaving nothing to be desired or mourned. The transsexual wish “to be normal” and the projection of
envy (of the phallus and phantasized completeness), along with a wish to be the phallus (in the form of acceptance and
normalization), has many implications for the analytic process in handling the subject's desire and the phantasies of having
a damaged self and doing damage to the Other. The tendency in psychoanalytic literature to pathologize transsexuality
may be a reflection of a certain projective identification with the transsexual dilemma about the handling of desire,
normalcy, and a phantasy of completion.
Many psychoanalytic arguments, for example, attempt to settle the existential problem of transsexuality, addressing
questions of pathology, difficulty in mourning, and so on. There is a resistance to allowing the subject of analysis to come
to its own subjectivity. Patricia Elliot (2001), for example, identifies a worry
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within psychoanalysis “that transsexuals strive to maintain an unattainable fantasy, a fantasy of the other sex they hope to
become through SRS [sex reassignment surgery]” (p. 316). Lothstein (1979) describes the transsexual demand as an
infantile wish that surgery will “resolve all polarities and conflicts” (p. 228). Sandy Stone describes it as a seemingly
manic “narrative of redemption” (as cited in Elliot, 2001, p. 316). Elliot (2001) further identifies the psychoanalytic
atmosphere around trans-sexuality:
The predominant psychoanalytic view is that complicity with the transsexual demand to become the other
sex is doomed to fail since it confirms the fantasy that becoming the other sex will put an end to suffering
and colludes with the idea that the subject's internal conflict can be solved by external means, (p. 316)
The fiction of gender is not an unattainable phantasy for the transsexual alone. The failure of gendered embodiment is
a universal outcome. If gender is understood as a defensive construction, an “actualpathological” kernel at the heart of
identity, and identity as an achievement oriented around the desire of the Other, then the transsexual construction
(“demand”) is but one of many gender fantasies and possibilities (“demands”). The goal of analysis in light of the task to
facilitate the conditions for subjectivity may be seen as establishing an identification with the lack, and mourning lack's
inevitability.
What the transsexual needs to mourn is not the absence or presence of the actual penis but rather the fact that identity
is not a guarantee and does not provide the answer to the felt void, since identity only replaces it with another lack. In that
sense analysis cannot aim at simply replacing the phallus with a guarantee of normalcy, but rather it must create the
conditions for accepting the transsexual dilemma as a human condition, well masked by the symbolic equation of sex and
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gender. There is never complete knowledge of “one,” therefore there is never a complete gender or a normal self. This is a
precondition for, rather than a killing of, desire, which rests on incompleteness, suspense, and yearning.
In analysis, the process of mourning can be successful in the presence of the analyst-phallus and (his or her) her
ability to
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tolerate what lies “beyond” her own gender and to suspend her phallicized knowledge. Through this process, the envy of
the Other reduces—and is replaced with—one's own version of a phallus, taken as a symbol. This transformation can
never be complete, of course. Gender is, after all, a useful phantasy and an enjoyable one, too. Moreover, in a world where
gender is regarded as real, the transsexual is bound to feel like an outcast. This is, of course, the effect, not the cause of
anxiety, and yet it affects one's ability to tolerate oneself. The body is important, as there is no being beyond the signifier
(Lacan, 1977).
When the place of the phallus is accepted as an exciting illusion through the reduction of envy and acceptance of lack,
space opens for a malleable usage of the phallus. When the armor of identity softens, subjectivity regains significance. The
analyst's knowledge of the subject requires the suspension of his or her desire and investment in normativity. The
assumption of a known subject is the actualpathology of desire, and hence of analysis. It is the ability to play in the realm
of phantasy (one's own and the patient's) that composes therapeutic action. It requires acceptance of impotence: There is
never a known subject, including the analyst. Analysis simply offers a way to think about what one does with what
belongs to the self.
The Clinic, Sex Reassignment Surgery, and The Return to the Question of
Finitude
Given this discussion, how are we to understand the dilemma of psychoanalysis about transsexual surgery? Griffin
Hansbury (2005) suggests that surgery is not the only solution sought by transsexuals. The “scenes” of adaptations
described in Hans-bury's writings give a glimpse into the complexity and diversity of identification and help open the
question of difference in the approach of psychoanalysis to transsexuality. It is possible to hypothesize that the perceived
limitations of the transsexual, such as the idealization and envy of the phallus in the female-to-male (FTM), bring up
unique difficulties with mourning and ultimately shape transsexuals' relationship to themselves and others as I have
described throughout this paper. The difficulty identified by psychoanalysis in the transsexual fantasy that “the subject's
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internal conflict can be solved by external means” indeed touches on the mourning that has to occur following sex
reassignment surgery (SRS) and the realization of the inevitability of the lack (Elliot, 2001, p. 316). If we dispel the idea
of biological finitude, the transsexual “demand” for SRS is not in itself “madness,” but rather a solution for the pain of the
phantasy, shared by all, of the congruency between psychological gender and biological identification. Transsexuals are
not alone in their “mad” claim to certainty of their identity. A transsexual identification may be understood as one way
that gender answers through its construction as a symptom around the unbearable lack. It represents but one of many
possibilities for identification and meaning. In this view, the complexity of SRS lies not in the demand for physical
transitioning per se. It lies in the phantasy that a complete congruity exists for the Other, as here; the defense of gender
cannot contain the dreaded anxiety of the universal lack. The narratives of FTM transsexuals (The Phallus Palace, Body
Alchemy, and An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs), for example, reveal that, following transition, some continue to
struggle with their felt “incompleteness.” The SRS often proves “not enough” in the transsexual pursuit of gender/body
congruity. This often transpires in all areas of life, and particularly in relationships. One difficulty lies in the inability to
take away historical knowledge. The transition cannot be denied, making it impossible to remove the phantasy of once
being female. One's “knowledge” makes it impossible to relax into what one now has.
The transsexual wish is not simply striving for “physical improvement” in a way that a cosmetic change of one's nose
represents. Rather, it is a total panic, not mere discomfort, over an incongruity between psychological identification and
physical representation, at the level of recognition by the Other. It represents an attempt to reconstruct the relationship
with the Other. If gender is not owned by the self, we can see how the recognition of one's identity, which is ultimately an
identification with the Other's desire, is essential in the development of a sense of self. In our story, Calliope's attempt to
ally with the other's desires prohibits his self-exploration. It is Calliope, however, who establishes a master (a “subject
supposed to know”) through a constant plea for acceptance and a belief that it is possible to
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attain complete recognition of oneself as one is. He is looking to others to provide him with answers about who he is and
who is responsible for the awful error.
The quest for origin assumes that gender is a stable construction and resides in normativity as a way to fill the endless
lack, and prevent the misrecognition and inevitable failure of desire to be satisfied or know itself. Calliope's idealization of
normativity in his quest to fit in can elaborate the dynamics of handling the lack for the transsexual who is outside
normative gender, as well as the ability of psychoanalysis to explore the ways in which patients and analysts may be
caught in a normative discourse. Calliope believes that others hold something he does not have access to: a completeness
in gender, an undivided body. Calliope is caught up in the ideal of a finite gender and fills his lack with envy, which
inhibits his imagination and creativity and forecloses his ability to be led by his own desire.
Calliope's narration may help shed light on how the anxieties inherent in sexuality migrate to gender and may be
elaborated and concretized in transsexual narratives that express a wished-for—or triumphantly achieved—feeling of
completeness with their bodies, through a fixation on the literal meaning of the phallus and an inability to mourn its
inherent absence (it can never satisfy, for it symbolizes a much deeper castration). Such fantasies of completion are,
indeed, often found in transsexual narratives, where one feels as if “the right” parts are missing, where gender feels
“incomplete.”
The phantasy of completeness and the idealization of a phantasized absolute congruency prevent the transsexual from
feeling “good enough” and lead to an inability to take in the other as the result of anxiety over the inability to repair the
damage in the absence of the penis. This anxiety often migrates to questions around form, muscles, and the like: “Do I
have enough muscle? Enough hair? Am I masculine enough?” These questions, while taking a particular form in the
transsexual, represent a universal struggle with the drive to completeness. The drive, as described by Freud, strives to
completeness in the form of union or death. Gender identification, it must be remembered, is in essence a headstone of
desire, commemorating a failed illusion of completeness. It is not unique to the transsexual and
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yet presents particular complexities in the absence of a concrete phallus.
When gender is read through the problem of structural trauma or lack—a push toward and away from representation
and differentiation-normalcy is placed on the side of “madness.” Gender becomes a place to which inherent conflicts
around difference and disavowal migrate. Here normalcy becomes an internal prohibition against desire and subjectivity.
Anxiety for the transsexual may be a signal or a prediction of what the Other (parents, the object, the clinic) desires and
may represent the wish to completely answer the Other's desire and therefore foreclose the lack that opens the subject to
its own otherness.
While surgery does not resolve the phantasy of and desire for satiability, neither does gender outside of the
transsexual experience. Gender itself is a compromise formation, a product of identifications and renunciations. Gender is
born of the loss of a unity that could never have been and is a symbol of a fight for the preservation of unity. Claiming
one's subjective gender is dependent on misrecognition, a split between one's idealized image of oneself and its mirrored
failed image. Gender as finitude is a lived phantasy of an impossibility and a strategy for denying this divided self.
Perhaps gender, like language, contains loss, emptiness, and death by wrapping meaning around the caved shell of the
nonrepresentable. Gender is a phantasy of repairing the phantasized destruction of a unification that once was. Much like
the believer's attempt at constructing meaning from the void and his struggle with mourning the “divine source” that never
was, so does gender—through a belief in a biological source that provides a certainty of completion—reflect a struggle
with a mourned finitude that never was and a hope for reunion that can not be.
Gender identification is one's fiction. Failure is one of its inevitabilities, as it cannot capture all that is missed through
an oedipalization that embodies the drive through the Other (drive becomes gendered through the desire of the Other). In
this way, the transsexual's appeal to undergo SRS is not different from nontranssexuals' insistence upon—and
defensiveness about—their own “known” gender. Both reflect the actualpathology of
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identity and of desire. The failure of gender, as a way to betray the lack through a false sense of completeness, is more
striking in the transsexual and is harder to mourn because of an idealization and an envy of the “Other's” completeness.
SRS, as gender embodiment, can be taken quite literally or mourned for its failure as a guarantee of perfection. This
requirement for mourning the fantasies of gender and of the phallus as condition for psychic growth is universal. Its
projection onto the transsexual “condition” illuminates the symbolic equation and tenuous nature of gender and its
omnipotent structure.
Psychoanalysis can help the transsexual where technology fails. It can help to enhance transsexuals' capacity to
tolerate their body and be able to hold onto an identity that is counter to the body's “good enoughness.” Psychoanalysis
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does not help to solve anxiety over gender or discontent with one's body, or take away the wish to be complete. It can only
identify moments where we are stuck in our normativity, where we inhibit desire. Helping transsexual patients tolerate
identity without intelligibility is primary in allowing the them to tolerate their creativity.
The problematic of gender, phallus, and normativity is depicted in Middlesex through Calliope's struggle to
experiment with gender in the face of a prescribed fantasy of the finality of gender and normalcy. The clinic's treatment of
Calliope is an example of how the clinic is caught up in the phantasy of normalcy and wholeness. Calliope's struggle,
however, offers a way to think about gender identity as an existential dilemma that does not need to end with a collapse to
a binary choice of either being or having the phallus. Calliope's struggle with origins also elaborates how the demand for
certainty and the killing of suspense through gender-anchoring paralyzes transitional play with desire, creating a concrete,
fetishistic binary, making attraction the site of repudiation.
Middlesex can be read as a testimony in which we as readers bear witness to the author's and our own traumatic
struggle between knowing and not knowing—at once a wish to be entrapped by a mirror image that would confirm one's
completeness and an urgency to release oneself from its mastery. Cal's subjectivity, and that of the reader/witness,
emerges from a place of absence, misunderstanding, and misrecognition, a place of unknowns
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that has no origin. It is only at this place, where thoughts cannot be grasped, that a subject can unfold. Gender, as an
unconscious registration of trauma, is a mark of such subjectivity at which one arrives quite accidentally, unintentionally,
and often reluctantly. As an expression of unconscious desire, gender rests between its signifiers, wearing and shedding its
shape in a constant movement. The ability to make meaning from absence lies in the willingness to give up identifications,
to make sense of one's own desire. It is only in the shadow of death, the place of no meaning or prior knowledge, that such
movement can exist, and where desire can survive.
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Article Citation
[Who Cited This?]
Gozlan, O. (2008). The Accident of Gender. Psychoanal. Rev., 95:541-570
Copyright © 2015, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing.Help | About | Download PEP Bibliography | Report a Problem
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