Ego Psychology -vs- Homosexuality in 'One Nation Under God' ~b/w~ What's Lacan got to do with it?

The other night I watched Teodoro Maniaci & Francine Rzeznik's 1993 documentary One Nation Under God which is about the "ex-gay" movement, a rather bizarre conjunction of the religious right's sexuality panic and some really pathologizing psychobabble soundbites and even nastier meat-fisted behavioristic aversion therapies. "Psychoanalytic" soundbites though, and to be precise distinctly American formulations of analytic thought which derive it seems largely from what is called Ego Psychology. And one of the things that anyone who reads much Lacan will figure out is that he loves to heap scorn upon Ego Psychology and does so for many years, tackling along the way many of its basic ideas and generally (this is a huge reduction of his issues) faulting it for being stuck in the Imaginary in various ways, this perhaps being a consequence of its focus on the ego. Basically the way the story told by Ego Psychologists ('psychoanalysts'?) played heavily on a developmental sequence that had become somewhat rigidly monumental since Freud's initial observations of it (perhaps as codified by his daughter Anna to a large degree - Lacan being quite wary of "Anne Freudianism" too) and so the idea was that symptoms, thought explicitly as pathological in a way that (again) connects more to American cultural values I think than to Freud's own practice, were a product of the child not going through the stages in just the right way. As if there were a just right way to become a desiring subject. Even here we see how unlike Lacan's thinking this is, that we are split subjects is because there is no just right way, no guaranteed or homeostatic relationality as such - not simply with others - but with ourselves - relationality always fails. Language and body are always at odds. Etc. So the Ego guys proposed that the analyst would act as a sort of surrogate parent, a strong ego, with which the suffering person should identify with so as to embody similar qualities, strength of ego being the grand accomplishment aimed at in much of what I've seen. Beneath his amazingly snarky and devastating critiques of Ego Psychology, I can't help but feel Lacan's horror at a clinical practice whose ethos might be stated as "Be like me, and be well." As if we all desire in the same ways or could. And how could this hope to stand up to even a gesture at its normativizing assumptions? When one adds in all the talk of defenses (a cold war metaphor? a way of discounting all disagreement?), mother blaming (are you a CBI mom? "close-binding intimate mother" - careful your boys'll all turn out fags!) lesser father blaming (distant, remote, unproductive relationship, etc) and recognizes that in the States, this form of "psychoanalysis" was tied right into the APA and hence falls under the Psychiatric ISA and is thus intimately involved in decisions about people's institutionalization in looney bins, the Arkham Asylum, etc. … 

the gates at Arkham Asylum

It is very hard 

to see

Ego Psychology

positively 

it seems

to me. 

So, back to the documentary… Martin Duberman gets a good amount of screen time and has some interesting things to say. Here is my (hopefully) accurate transcription of some of his dialogue (not presented in the same order necessarily);

"I did spend ten years of my life in psychoanalysis trying to cure myself of my homosexuality."

"There was nothing else available in the culture in those years. (…) I was a thorough believer, I was very much imprisoned by the going psychoanalytic model and that model told me that, I was, the mild word was a 'character disorder' but often I was simply described as 'diseased', my 'condition' and it was always called a 'condition', was pathological."

"The good news according to the psychoanalytic model was that my disease could be cured, that is, if I presented myself for psychotherapeutic treatment and if my determination to change was strong enough to overcome this faulty family configuration that I happened to have been born into it didn't work for anybody that I knew personally, and I don't think it works for anybody who I don't know either." 

"In terms of the therapeutic process and how I was supposed to be cured, what Carl, who was the man I was in therapy with (…) What Carl would say, first of all, was that my innate heterosexuality had been blocked through unfortunate childhood experiences, and so what I had to do was, unblock them and sort of re-do my childhood, central to that would be forming a good relationship with Carl so that he could become a substitute father, the good father that I had never had when actually growing up in my own family."

"The assumption of therapy in general in those years was that everybody is innately heterosexual. The only time there is a homosexual outcome is when there is some disturbance in the family configuration."

Duberman is just the right age to have seen what all of this was like during the period of Ego Psychology's hegemony, though we also see in the accounts of various aversion therapies that the Behaviorist paradigm was sharing or taking power as well in psy-I.S.A.. But showing people gay porn and then poking them with a cattle prod somehow fell out of favor over time. (But thank God for the religious right or we wouldn't even be able to beat our kids!)

These comments also further contrast Lacan's position to Ego Psychology as the latter asserts an innate heterosexuality, and clearly seems to be depending on a "natural" correlation of anatomy, gender presentation and sexual behaviors none of which would Lacan support in my view. & how is it that we get from "Come to Daddy" to "Be like me and be well"? Oh, I guess that is obvious. My bad. 

"Jacques just refused to call me Daddy"
~ Rudy Loewenstein

A scan of the wikipedia article on Ego Psychology is sort of amusing and when one reads through its primary tenants and aims one can so easily imagine how Lacan might have responded to each point, and it's never good. Ego Psychology reads like normativity as therapy, or "straighten up and act right" as an ethic. But beware the final paragraph about Lacan's criticisms, it is poorly written and not that accurate. But, curious factoid (for those who don't know); Lacan's own analyst, whom he disliked, Rudolph Loewenstein, is one of the main egos in Ego Psychology.

So, one thing which this documentary provides evidence of is how this conception of "treatment" is entirely pathologizing through and through, functioning as a way for the "analyst" as arm-of-the-law to punish perceived deviance of whatever sort. Charles Socarides is shown in the film saying "Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness, which has reached epidemiological proportions." Bad Analyst Behavior (it could have been a reality show back then). Anyway, all of this ties back to that post about structures and diagnosis.

It's on Netflix if that helps.

Enjoyment, rather, JOUISSANCE… How many flavors?

HEADNOTES

i. There is no lit review or anything even sketched out here. I know what Žižek and others mean by "perverse enjoyment" and so am just running with that for now just to see what shakes out when I try (though obviously the lit review would have to happen sometime)

ii. This is all very tentative still and will undoubtedly need reformulation and clarification

iii. I am throughout depending on my reader already having a grasp of Lacan's notion of psychic structures. If you lack that, you probably need to read this post first to see how I symptomatically misunderstand these things. 

Perverse enjoyment is participatory but passive, right? 

The neighbor who leaves trash in my yard and wakes everyone up with his music and who I find to be an aggressively unpleasant neighbor, if given a citation by the police for something - some other neighbor perhaps called this in - and I see it all, see it escalate, see the neighbor take a drunken swing at the cop and get flattened and handcuffed and hauled off to jail… Do I not enjoy this? Is there not a smile on my face as I turn to enter my house. This would be perverse enjoyment, enjoying the spectacle of an other being subjected to the law, or 'getting what they deserve.' The concept of perverse enjoyment has a lot of reach and many have explored it since Žižek put the idea forth (at least, I believe it was him).

What interests me and what I'll come back to below in hopes of extending it otherwise is the latitude marked here between structure and jouissance. That is, the perverse subject is said to have a structure of desire which is perverse in itself and is centered around the disvowal of lack and a specific relation to the law, that of situating oneself as the instrument of its application. But this perverse enjoyment, which is passive and participatory, appears to be available to subjects without regard for any congruence with the structure of their desire (maybe, see my dithering below). Also, unlike the psychic structure of any given subject - it seems that we can identify perverse enjoyment when and where it is offered up to us by media of all sorts (witness American Idol or any of a boatload of reality shows, such as… COPS).

But if one can stand outside of the directly perverse interaction, and enjoy the cop slamming the neighbor to the ground and handcuffing him, without even having seen it happen, but simply by relishing the neighborhood gossip… and if this enjoyment is as accessible to the pervert as the hysteric, the psychotic or the obsessional. Isn't the next question that seems to beg for an answer that of whether there are other participatory and passive (or 2nd hand) types of jouissance which these psychodiagnostic categories might allow us to discern, and which might well be already operant in the social world? Is there a psychotic jouissance in this sense of the term? That it is not the specific suffering of the psychotic - the subject who has foreclosed any S1 and either has stabilized this in some sinthomatic fashion or has not. Rather, it would have to be a jouissance which figures the jouissance of psychosis such that other subjects can participate in it. Hypothetically and very tentatively here; If the 'ordinary psychotic' has managed, sinthomatically, to stabilize the registers R.S.I. through investment in something else, in placing some other S1 (master signifier) in a position of central importance and using it as the 'anchor' which stabilizes one's psyche, allowing a livable relation to the Other… then might we postulate an '(ordinary?) psychotic enjoyment' as one in which a subject sustains themselves against the Other's many demands through being all in, that is fully invested, in(as?) their sinthome? Do we not often think of artists in this way? As those who are so committed to their 'vision' that it is the center of their lives, the point of their unfailing devotion regardless of the praise or denigration of the Other. When artists of whatever sort are presented in this way, do we not take a bit of passive and yet participatory enjoyment of this stubborn willfulness which they exhibit? And I mean the whole range of jouissance here, so not merely positive responses to the artist as figure but violent rejections (con man, scam artist, my kid could pant that, etc). More than that, do we not often see this as a sign of "the artist" - that they provoke these responses?  

& what of the phobic, wherever one places phobia as structure or as shared symptomal formation of more than one structure, it would seem that there are many claimants already for phobic enjoyments; homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, etc. Though we would have to begin with skepticism about whether these are in fact truly phobic at all - which is by no means to discount that phobia, in the more clinical sense of the word, is likely present in all of these to some degree, nor is it to take the screamingly obvious jouissance out of bigotry, only to suggest that it needs a more complex analysis. & it would seem that phobic enjoyment, along the lines of perverse enjoyment, is not hard to conceptualize. In Riki Anne Wilchins' Read My Lips there is an anecdote which might help to show what might be at stake in 'phobic enjoyment'.

Wilchins writes about a sex demo of sorts, or at least a body demonstration, where she invites women, after listening to an informal lecture about sexual reassignment surgery, to don latex gloves and have a feel of what her "transcunt" (her word folks, not mine) feels and looks like. She, naturally, is quite used to her body but for others "it's a different matter."

"Several interesting things occur, the least of which is that people fall apart. For many women, this is a gut-wrenching experience. It's one thing to talk about sex-change surgery, argue about whether I am a real woman and all that jazz. It's another entirely to find your hand buried to the knuckles inside the warm, breathing body of another person…"(116)

So that is the context for the anecdote that I want to consider. 

"[One] participant discovered her friends from home were so grossed out that she had touched a transexual cunt (…) that they stopped speaking to her. She related all of this to me through tears, because these were people she had come to the festival with and had known since childhood. She was astonished to discover how transphobic they were toward me, and correspondingly quick to turn on her, as if I were contagious. What was even stranger was that her outraged friends were so deliciously and completely butch, they made me feel like I was an extra in petticoats straight out of Gone with the Wind." (117)

What is going on here that we could think of as phobic enjoyment? More than meets the eye I think. That is, the butches who diss their childhood friend as is she had been contaminated, as if Wilchins' body were a contagion as firstly enjoying (in the specific sense of jouissance) their own repudiation of Wilchins and of their friend. Had the friend initially thought that she wished to have this experience and then at the last moments said "No way, gross.." etc and run from the tent then she could, presumably have been able to find her butches and share the phobic enjoyment with them… "I almost did, but I just couldn't." etc.  & the friends could have teased her for even considering it, but then all have rested in the enjoyment of marking Wilchins as phobic object and their common repugnance and who knows, more long term humiliation of the friend just for kicks? But as it is, they still got their phobic enjoyment (times two even!) both with regard to Wilchins and their "friend."

Or I think about a story that I recall circulating in High School about some guy having 'made out' with some girl - the 'scandal' of this was that the girl in question was - for reasons that made zero sense to me - marked in the High School's caste system as somehow 'untouchable' (read: skanky, low-class, ugly, etc). So when people told the story of catching the football player making out with her it was met with peels of "ewwwww, gross" from other girls and faces of disgust from guys (some guys laughed too). The football dude was made to suffer for it and lost social standing. The poor abjected girl was still just as abjected, but now was actively offered up in school gossip for specifically phobic enjoyment. I even recall one clear statement made by another girl about the football guy which bears this out, she said something like "I can't believe he put his tongue in that mouth" with a shudder which the other girls listening all shared in. 

And is there then a distinctly neurotic enjoyment, more specifically are their jouissances specific to hysteria and obsession which again offer this passive and yet participatory option of enjoying?

If we understand hysteric jouissance through the Discourse of the Hysteric from Seminar XVII then it would seem sort of easy to picture. Any time that we see an hysteric demand directed at a master act to undermine that master's mastery, to reveal their secret investments and enjoyments of their claim to be master… this then would be 'hysteric enjoyment' of the passive and participatory sort. But, as immediately as this suggests itself to me as a way to think about the hysteric's jouissance, I also wonder if it might be too easy. That is, what is marked a 'hysteric' here is the working of a discourse and not that of a structure. My understanding of the discourses is that none of them is wedded to the structure of any subject's desire and thus that any subject might speak as Master or Hysteric or whatever. 

Perhaps what is specific to neurosis which might help us to think this issue more clearly is doubt, the doubt of the neurotic. The hysteric doubts the words and meanings that are given to account for her body her experience etc (I'll go the traditional route here and make the hysteric her and the obsessional him - though often I reverse this). The obsessional might be said to be doing the same thing… backwards… that is, trying again and again to capture being in meaning and then doubting that it is enough, that this "capture" (in language) is really his at all - after all, likely it is just a reiteration of what some dead master already said and thus not authentic to this subject and thus further evidence that meanings must be doubted requiring more meanings more knowing. As I write this, I'm reminded of the Discourse of the University and I wonder if it might not have some links to the obsessional structure. Both the agent in the discourse and the obsessional seem to wish to be taken as masters of a sort but both are haunted by the master that they must repress, for both it seems that the production or more and more knowledge, more S2s, is a continual need and that it serves to keep the master repressed and out of sight.

In Good Will Hunting, there is a scene where some guy in a bar is belittling Ben Afflect's character (sounds fun doesn't it) in this hyper-intellectualized fashion and Matt Damon's character in turn attacks the attacker. He does this through undermining the guy's criticism by showing that it is not that guy's at all, but one found in a book which Damon can cite and, if memory serves, also disputing the guy's understanding of the very criticism that he had made. This looks rather like what we have been discussing as obsession getting its comeuppance. The initial belittling comments, had they fully succeeded would perhaps have been one instance of obsessional enjoyment, but then Damon's rebuttal would restage the same sort of scenario in that Damon asserts a greater mastery than the guy he is debating with while also presenting himself as above or outside the material at hand and able not only to see where some scholar's work has been used, but used incorrectly. Then, to the extent that we viewers of this scene enjoy seeing Affleck made to appear dumb, and then the guy who made Affleck appear dumb to be made to look worse. Would this be obsessional enjoyment? The very reiteration of it perhaps suggestive of the word obsession, an endless re-staging?

But what about hysterical jouissance? Can we rest with the dynamics that the Discourse of the Hysteric provides or does that risk losing sight of the crucial disjunction between language and body? That is, if I challenge a professor's mastery and reveal it to be a sham by virtue of addressing them in the hysteric's discourse - it would seem that the specific content of my discourse might not be concerned with the language/body issue at all, but simply about the posture of mastery that they are performing. Here I am reminded of the course I took with a professor at Uni Mainz, one Müller-Wood, who it seems to me often spoke with this pretension of great knowledge that, it was implied, would prove the truth of the many bald assertions (quite essentialist in character at times) but which she never actually would produce when questioned - tending instead to show some affect (of the 'how dare you question me' sort) and to evade the question or the request for her implied knowledge or sources. My questions to her were at times constructed with the Discourse of the Hysteric in mind, and often enough they seemed to work as that discourse is said to work. But again, this does not seem to be about  my contesting the ability of her language (concepts, theories, etc) to capture my body (experiences, etc) and yet it is still working the way the hysteric's discourse works it seems to me. (This point is perhaps extraneous to my endeavor here to delineate other modes of 2nd hand enjoyment, but might be important for those using the discourse of the hysteric or trying to connect it to specific feminine subjects or feminine discourse - if such a thing can be shown to exist - I am not saying it cannot, only that I have yet to be completely convinced). 

If we instead try to maintain the body/language disjunction as crucial to hysterical enjoyment, can we retain the framing provided by the Discourse of the Hysteric in addition?  That is, to mark hysterical jouissance that can be enjoyed 2nd hand as that which presents a hysteric challenging a master's ability to enchain her in his language as if without remainder. So when I read Susan Stryker's introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader and she speaks of an event...

"As I stood in line, trying to marshal my thoughts and feelings into what I hoped would come across as an articulate and eloquent critique of gay historiography rather than a petulant complaint that nobody had asked me to be on that panel, a middle-aged white man on the other side of the auditorium reached the front of the other queue for the other microphone and began to speak. He had a serious issue he wanted to raise with the panelists, about a disturbing new trend he was beginning to observe. Transsexuals, he said, had started claiming that they were part of this new queer politics, which had to be stopped, of course, because everybody knew that transsexuals were profoundly psychopathological individuals who mutilated their bodies and believed in oppressive gender stereotypes and held reactionary political views, and they had been trying for years to infiltrate the gay and lesbian movement to destroy it and this was only the latest sick plot to. . . .

It was an all-too-familiar diatribe—a line of thinking about transsexuality that passed at that time for a progressive point of view among many on the cultural left. At some point, in a fog of righteous anger, I leaned into the microphone on my side of the room and, interrupting, said, “I’m not sick.” The man across the auditorium stopped talking, and looked at me. I said, “I’m transsexual, and I’m not // sick. And I’m not going to listen to you say that about me, or people like me, any more.” We locked eyes with each other for a few seconds, from opposite sides of the auditorium filled with a couple of hundred gay and lesbian scholars and activists (and a handful of trans people), until the man suddenly turned and huffed out of the room." (1-2) 

I enjoy this. YMMV. Imagining this scene and the dynamics involved and so on and so forth, there is undoubtedly jouissance in my response to Stryker's words, “I’m transsexual, and I’m not sick. And I’m not going to listen to you say that about me, or people like me, any more.” [Snap!] And in this instance it seems to me that Stryker is objecting to this 'master' who is very clearly proposing to delimit and constrain the meaning of her embodied life, and that she challenges him precisely on that point - the inadequacy of his meanings. My enjoyment here is hysterical I think - in that "2nd hand", passive and participatory way that has been the concern of this post to tease out. [n.b. this is not to say anything at all about Susan Stryker's experience and whether the jouissance she surely experiences in this moment of confrontation is of any particular 'kind.'] 

Two things have been held in abeyance throughout my discussion. One of them might wreck the apple cart or perhaps only shake it really good. The 2nd of them links this with my earlier post about the structures of desire and the criticisms I offered there of psychodiagnosis used as a tool of pathologization.  Let's begin with the potential monkey wrench.

It is commonly said that, neurotics fantasize about what perverts do. Ok, why is that an issue? My concern is that … I might be over-stating the case when I assume above that perverse enjoyment is open to subjects of any structure. Maybe, in the same way that what is usually thought of analytic technique is really the technique of the clinic of neurosis, perverse enjoyment is an option for neurotics but not necessarily for perverse or psychotic subjects. Certainly I do not think that perverts fantasize about what either psychotics or neurotics do. & I have no clue what psychotics might fantasize about or how fantasy even operates for them. 

Now perhaps this problem is not as significant as it might seem in that it is said that the vast majority of human subjects are neurotic with perverse or psychotic subjects being relatively rare. If so, perhaps this mapping of different modalities of jouissance might still have some theoretical purchase and thus use. But it makes me uneasy to a degree, as if one loses sight of that fact (the possible neurotic specificity of '2nd hand' enjoyment) then do we not run a risk quite similar to assuming all people are straight (because gays and lesbians and such are but a small percentage) or assuming everyone is cisgendered (again due to the small sample size of those who are not)?

But, without dodging the challenges that the last two paragraphs pose to this theorization of mine, I think that there are very good reasons for considering these modes of jouissance that I have been trying to elaborate here. Very simply put, these are as follows;

1. Given that psychodiagnostics is a tool for analysts to use in the clinical relation and one that is, even there, entirely suppositional and only to be judged adequate if the treatment works to lessen the suffering of the analysand… Perhaps it ought to be largely retired from lacanian scholarship in the cultural sphere where none of the subjects discussed is being analyzed at all (in the clinical sense of that term) and so to claim, as I have seen and read before, things like Joan of Arc was hysteric, or John Wayne is an obsessional, etc would be invalidated on the grounds that one cannot make that ascription with any certainty outside of a robust clinical experience with Joan or John. But, it would seem to me that while others' enjoyments are no more obviously measurable, that in a clear enough context there are moments when the enjoyment that is presented can be discussed in one of these ways - and that this would be possible without making unjustifiable assumptions about the psychic structure of people (pathologizing) or filmic or literary characters (silly, but also common). 

2. Formulations like "phobic enjoyment" offer similar extensions and applications to "perverse enjoyment' and thus allow one to specify this 2nd hand enjoyment  and the ways that it can act to sustain cultural biases and so forth (recall the Wilchins' example above, where the phobic response of the butches to their 'friend' serves to abject Wilchins and the friend who touched her). [In fact, might phobic enjoyment often go hand in hand with what I wrote about as the Discourse of the Abjector?] We might also imagine the range of these brought into play when discussing the points of identification that viewers or readers of films or texts experience.

Works cited___

Stryker, Susan. "(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies." In Stryker and Whittle eds. The Transgender Studies Reader. Routledge, 2006. (1-17)

Wilchins, Riki Anne. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Firebrand Books, 1997.

Rebecca L. Stotzer, "Violence against transgender people: A review of United States data."

"Violence against transgender people: A review of United States data." ~ Rebecca L. Stotzer, in Aggression and Violent Behavior 14 (2009) 170–179

What a lovely name for a journal, Aggression and Violent Behavior. 

Not saying we don't need such a journal... 

just sayin'

This is almost all quote poaching as I have no skills to critique the methods here and am more interested in the implications of the diverse findings. & by interested I mean disgusted. Also outraged. Also, unsurprised (at the Human, all too Human). Bold is extra disgust/outrage/etc. If you are curious about the sources that are embedded in these quotes or the article itself, it is available here.

"Numerous studies have demonstrated that transgender people experience high levels of violence from strangers and known others alike, and that they often face a lifetime of repeated victimization."(171)

"The number of gender non-conforming people in the United States is unknown"(171)

"One qualitative study paints a picture of what life is life for transgender people. Wyss (2004) interviewed seven transgender high school students and asked about their experiences at school. This study discusses the 'full-contact hallways' that seven gender non-conforming youth encounter in high school. Their descriptions of the physical violence are particularly informative considering the details that the youths describe. Many report that not just other students harassed them, but that people they even considered friends would either help or join with assailants during physical attacks. Two of the students were set on fire in school, one after shop class. There were also constant threats of sexual assault, or coercive sex, or physical assault, both verbal threats and notes left in lockers. The hallways were also the place to be grabbed or fondled by anyone in the school."(171)

"Not only is sexual violence occurring with a high level of frequency, but this violence starts at an early age. One study found that first rapes often occurred in the early teens, with a median of 14 years old for FTMs and 15 years old for MTFs (Xavier et al., 2007)."( 172)

"The FORGE (2005) report found that young gender-nonconforming persons were particularly vulnerable to sexual violence, with the majority of incidents occurring before the age of 12, and that number steadily declining with age. This claim about younger transgender people being more at risk was also found in Wyss' (2004) study on high school-aged transgendered youth. Wyss, through a mix of surveying and interviewing, found that 86% of respondents had experienced some type of sexual violence, often perpetrated by other students, because of their gender identity."(172)

"Perhaps one of the most disappointing findings from self-report surveys are the findings that the largest percent of perpetrators of sexual violence are people who are known to the victim, including partners and family members. "(172)

"Additional details about the perpetrators of these crimes comes from Xavier et al. (2007), who found that acquaintances were the most  common perpetrators of sexual violence (48%), followed by complete strangers (26%), father or stepfather (16%), a former spouse or partner (14%), current spouse or partner (12%), and a brother or sister (12%)."(172-173)

"Within the transgender community it is common knowledge that interacting with authorities invites a certain level of possible victimization, or revictimization for transgendered people. (…) However, an interesting finding that might elucidate the lack of reporting to authorities was the fact that victims reported that 4.9% of incidences of sexual violence were perpetrated by police, and in 5.9% of cases the perpetrators was a social service or health care provider."(173)

"Reback et al. (2001) also found that 37% of the perpetrators of verbal abuse were police."(175)

"...the average number of crimes over the last decade from just these 20 NCAVP chapters alone suggests that there are an average 213 hate crimes with anti-transgender motivation reported to Anti-Violence programs per year in the United States."(175)

"Organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report collect information based on news accounts, police reports and other sources. Their report claimed that there were 27 murders of transgender people in 2002 and the first nine months of 2003 alone (Moser, 2007). In addition, this report suggests that at the time it was written, of those 27 cases, arrests had been made for only seven cases."(175)

"Another source of information about murders of transgender people is a report titled '50 Under 30' from the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GPAC). The report related stories of 51 transgender and gender non-conforming individuals under the age of 30 who were murdered in the United States between 1995 and 2005. In collecting // information about these murder victims, they also attempted to gather some basic demographic information as well. They found that most victims were people of color (91%), most victims were poor and lived in major cities, most were biologically male but had some variant of a feminine presentation (92%), few murders received media coverage, all the assailants were male and used extreme levels of violence, and most of the murders were not investigated as hate crimes (71%), and most assailants go free."(175-176) 

"I got raped at 18 because they wanted to set me straight. I went to the police and the police said to me, ‘he who lays with dogs should expect to get fleas,’ that's what I got. So from that moment on I knew the police were never gonna help me.” (Interviewee in Moran & Sharpe, 2002 p. 279)"(176)

"There are indications that prosecutors are not alone in being unable to effectively do their jobs in regard to transgender people, and government attempts to consolidate a system of measurement to help clarify and standardize this process have failed. After being dropped from initial hate crime laws and early workplace anti-discrimination laws in the 1990s, in 2007 both the House and Senate passed versions of a hate crime law, called the Matthew Shepard Act, that would have mandated the FBI to count transgender hate crimes in the United States as they counted those based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and disability. The bill would have also provided federal resources to jurisdictions that needed help investigating and prosecuting any hate crimes that they felt they were unprepared for, including those based on gender identity. However, because this bill was attached to Defense spending in the Senate version, later at-tempts to reconcile the language of the House and Senate versions proved unsuccessful, and this bill has effectively died. This means that currently there is no federal system for collecting statistics measuring the violence against transgender people, or laws that clarify the relationship between gender identity and violence. Thus, discrepancies in how transgender people are categorized, how data are tracked and stored, and how it is presented will continue."(177)

"Stotzer (2008) re-analyzed data from five years worth of reports of hate crimes against trans- gender people made to the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, and found suggestions in the crime details that the reasons for hate crimes against transgender people are far more complex than just possessing non-normative gender-identities. There was evidence of intersections of gender identity, race, class, and education as causes for the crimes of violence against transgender people. "(177)

"When combining all three forms of violence reporting it becomes clear that among transgender people, known others are physically and sexually assaulting transgender people at high rates, and strangers are physically and sexually assaulting transgender people, but also harassing them and causing other types of violence and abuse. These acts of violence are not single incidents, but happen across a lifetime, and often a single individual experiences multiple acts of violence or intolerance on a daily basis."(177)

"Self-reports have offered the highest level of  // details about the prevalence of hate crimes, suggesting that the majority of transgender people will experience violence in their lifetimes, and that risk for violence starts at an early age. "(177-178)

"Policy is often based on 'official' sources such as law enforcement crime statistics; however, transgender victims of violence are almost absent from the law enforcement view of crime. Yet, without adequate statistics on the victimization of transgender people, it is unlikely that these issues of violence will move onto law enforcement's agenda."(178)

"What is beginning to emerge from these multiple sources of data are the increased risks of variety of types of violence, though in particular sexual violence, faced by transgender people. This risk starts early in life and continues throughout the lifetime. Transgender people appear to be victimized by strangers and people they know, including their families and loved ones, with equal frequency. In addition, it appears that this violence occurs at home, at work, and in public places. Although transgender people face these heightened risks and horrific instances of violence, the transgender movement is still growing and flourishing. However, in order for effective laws and policies to be enacted, and for effective social service organizations to be implemented, research that addresses the serious methodological failings of these three data sources must be addressed."(178)

Nong Tum, portrayed in the film Beautiful Boxer
(Uekrongtham 2004) is both kick-ass
(in the most literal sense of that term)
and a Kathoey from Thailand. She aint got
much to do with the violence in the USA
that this report talks about, but
her ass-kicking skills seem
worthy of evoking nonetheless.

Foreword by Stephen Whittle, from The Transgender Studies Reader (quotes interspersed with my babble)

The Transgender Studies Reader

Edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle

Routledge, 2006.

This began as quote poaching, then I started rearranging the quotes and seeing interesting things in the new juxtapositions, and that led to some dictation and some thinking and wandering and much else. 

Also note - and cut & paste that nifty trans symbol, ⚧

"Increasingly we presume that language, as another predeterminant of humanity, overrides the determinant of biological sex: that is, a person is the gender they claim to be, regardless of sex status. But the language of sex and gender is inherently limited. As trans people challenge their exclusion from language, and therefore from basic human rights, sex itself is increasingly becoming an unsafe foundation for the legal foundation of the order of human life."(xiii)

"Having a sex is apparently a prior determinant of being human, but as such it begs the meaning of what 'human' is."(xiii)

Does sex need laws?

I'm not sure what that question is about. I heard it. So I wrote it. (dictation)

One can object to the question in so many ways and sidestep imagining any answer. 

One can tarry over the terms and the options of relating them. So many inflections, contexts, would have beens… 

The safest course is to understand it as you like and/or walk away.  

To say what sex "means" so as to consider the question as such ties one back into laws of various orders, yet we know it is not a free-for-all - as much as that fantasy is available in the culture - that is to say, whether one is born into a body that accords with their desire, or not, does not seem an issue of choice in the usual sense of that term.

At a tangent from that - but again (dictation) - I just heard it, 

…Neither is who you want to fuck.

Perhaps we need more space simply for not knowing?

Is it just the largely contingent emergence of law-like behaviors that have outgrown their utility but which sprang from out of greater potentialities at some point in the past and those potentials are now needed once again? 

Too utopian? all that foggy ancient wisdom potential once the b-movies move on it?

Sorry, I am not terribly in control of the throughput just now. After the above, I slept reading this sleeping this and now this, here. 

Kinda the beginning of Swann's Way, but less dreamy perhaps - doesn't everyone have that? that thing where you are so deep into the text that your sleep is an extension, your thought perhaps clopping along at the characteristic pace of what you'd been reading? 

Where could I stand to pronounce on what is or is not legitimately of the human?  I laugh at me for thinking it.

As to the limitations to our language for sex and gender, and he could have added orientation and expression etc etc (both terms seem to provoke endless internal descriptions and exponential external ramifications)… yes, of course. 

But how to be alert to and differently responsive to the places where it breaks down so frequently with negative consequences for bodies, lives, etc.? That is the question that needs answering. 

⚧ 

"For the trans person’s understanding of the self, the question becomes whether gender, at the heart of self-understanding, can be theoretically recuperated. It is all very well having no theoretical place within the current gendered world, but that is not the daily lived experience. Real life affords trans people constant stigma and oppression based on the apparently unreal concept of gender." (xii)

"This new politicization forged a determination to change the world, by every means possible, for the next generation of trans youth. Significant changes have indeed taken place. At the very least, where once there was pure ignorance and prejudice of trans issues, we now see informed prejudice and discrimination, which is more easily addressed through the courts and legislature."(xii)

One is placed regardless of how they would place themselves. If that accords, so easy not to even recognize it happening. Indeed, would it not simply seem to be how things are if what you thought was what everyone else asserted? Ought I to have said 'how things were'? it is what I first typed (is that dictation?) (yes, it's dictation)

The first of these quotes seems to argue that, viable or not, recuperable or not, unreal of not, gender remains a social mandate.

Gender (and sex) would then be one of the things that those subjects supposed to believe, believe in. & as difficult as it is to combat the beliefs which are supposed by subjects, themselves merely suppositional - I'd argue that this is a better situation than one where we had compelling evidence that all but a few of 'us' do in fact believe. It's better as what supposes subjects are supposed to believe is largely a fantasmatic construction based upon the this or that person's grasp of the cultural dialogue about whatever (sex & gender, in my example)… & thus a construct that is only as strong as the individual who supposes such other believing subjects own need for this belief. 

Is that clear?

Probably not.

Ok, the idea is an development of Lacan's concept of the subject supposed to know, i.e., the analyst. Analysands, of necessity impute knowledge to their analysts (at least neurotics do, not sure this applies to every structure). The end of analysis, if it goes well, requires the fall of the analyst, the moment when the analysand recognizes that it is they, the analysand who has done all the work, all the analysis, and is the only one who can declare that things are over, that the symptom has been interpreted, etc. None of that supposed knowledge was the analyst's at all, it all belongs to the analysand. So far so lacanian…

Žižek is the one who develops this into the subject supposed to believe. My example will be yard mowing, I think I took this specific example from Levi R. Bryant who used it  years ago on the Lacan listserv, but I like it so much because of certain personal experiences with 'yard nazis' in the Chamblee part of the greater ATL. Anyway, let's say you live in a housing development sort of neighborhood and you really do not like mowing the yard, in fact you find it a waste of time, after all the grass hurts no one when allowed to grow, so what's the big deal? But you nonetheless believe that the neighbors are all deeply invested in lawn lengths as falling between certain parameters which your own grass has woefully exceeded. You note that your grass is the longest of any yard's on the block and you conclude that all those other subjects (everyone else in your hood) believe there is a length for grass which is simply too long. Grumbling you mow your yard under the imagined pressure of the neighborhood, though in theory every single local resident might feel exactly as you do. 

Great theory. Likewise, it can be very useful in explaining why people do certain things - say with regard to the stock market. 

But… when I lived in Chamblee, though my ex supposed the subject of the hood to have certain feelings about the yard, I didn't give it much thought at all and in time the landlord was given a letter of complaint by one of our neighbors about the height of our grass.

That fact is maybe funny at this point though, right?

But that, as that quote I keep tossing around goes: "Over the last decade, more than one person per month has died due to transgender-based hate or prejudice, regardless of any other factors in their lives. This trend shows no sign of abating" (Gwendolyn Ann Smith, p90 - in Beemyn & Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People) …or as Whittle puts it above "life affords trans people constant stigma and oppression" - the only strategy that makes any immediate sense against this is education, or dare I say consciousness raising. 

Yes, I too am squirming at that.

So, while I am in no way suggest that an strategy of educating people should be in any way diminished, just as I don't think that symptoms of unconscious desire can be explained away as irrational or counterproductive or whatever (as this addresses only the conscious ego), so too, educating - perhaps especially when it's motivations are to 'raise consciousness' seem very likely to produce in some of the 'astudied' formations of desire that are reactive, built upon the Imaginary and expressed through aggressivity. 

The Discourse of the University 

Calling those who are to be 'educated' the "astudied" is also a Lacan quote, or pun, neologism… which emerges in Seminar XVII when he is discussing the Discourse of the University. Across the top line of the discourse we see S2, knowledge in the position of the agent, the operator of the discourse. The agent as knowledge addresses an other who is the object cause of desire. In one scenario, consider the teacher (filled with "positive" intentions) speaking on behalf of all that they know (that people are just people no matter where you go, that being gay or straight of bisexual or asexual, intersexed or transgendered or transsexual or genderqueer or of any height or weight or race or ethnicity or by approximation to ideals of beauty - that none of this should matter) and aiming to convince the student, or students, thus the (objet petit a)-students, those who the teacher wishes to usher into hir own libidinal attachment to this set of beliefs. The lower level of the graph shows us something else… 

Below the agent is S1, the master signifier - that thing you reach when you keep asking yourself why you believe ____ to every given answer… You reach that which you believe because you just do (damn it!). (& I suspect that when it comes to things like transphobia or homophobia, misogyny, racism, etc… that while some of these have visible 'superstructures' of Imaginary and Symbolic contents - that what makes them so often expressed through violence is the very same thing that makes them difficult to change simply by presenting arguments - these would of course be unconscious investments). But here, in the University Discourse, though the agent will stage, launch and purport to defend the content of their speech with logic and stats and reasoning and examples, the motive will ultimately be otherwise. There will be a belief that is believed simply because it is believed, a belief which can't be uttered and owned as the agent's own without it invalidating the working of the discourse itself. & then, on the right hand side, regardless of how the other responds to the discourse, to the extent that they do respond, the excess, the waste product of having been interpellated by the discourse here produces a deepening of the split within the subject ($). 

Things start getting relatively hairy at this point. That is, in my use and my understanding (undoubtedly both open to critique) none of these discourse models is transparent within a given sample of speech or text. Lacan is careful to distinguish discourse from speech at the beginning of the seminar. But just a statement can mean differently in differing contexts, so too the same utterance could function within multiple discourses. And just as, for Freud - unlike the grocery store line 'dream handbook'  with its many X means Y claims about 'symbols' and so forth - an element of the dream text has no determinate meaning in advance of its interpretation in the context of the dreamer's own associations… what precise S1 is repressed in this or that Teacher's discourse when they are speaking as the agents of knowledge is going to have to vary from person to person. Just the same, the product of the Uni Discourse, the deepening or furthering of the split within the subject ($) might be experienced as alienating and painful - furthering one's sense of being unable to put one's suffering into words - or it might come as a relief, as when - after countless doctors and no answer to what ails you, a diagnosis is finally given. A 'diagnosis' of one sort could serve to anchor a claim that your suffering is absolutely and utterly not your fault, thus freeing you from guilt or stigma, but how many of us notice that this also denies us any agency? That these new signifiers which are the meaning of our suffering are not open to our agency, they require our submission. 

All of this makes me wonder again at the "new style" of Master signifier that Lacan speaks of in Seminar XVII. 

&, at the same time, whether there might be a way to saturate the culture with images and narratives and concepts which would not be prone to being experienced as a University Discourse at all. & looking at Whittle's thoughts above, where he writes "where once there was pure ignorance and prejudice of trans issues, we now see informed prejudice and discrimination" I find myself asking whether - given the understanding that is afforded by the subject supposed to believe, whether there might be a way to target that? 

Bear with me, I am struggling to make this make sense for myself as well. 

That is, rather than a Uni Discourse scenario, where I would be trying to make you invest in the beliefs and positions which underpin the many things I am concerned about (already a rather suspect aim, no? even if I am promoting peace and love…) that instead, I ask myself what is it that contributes to certain beliefs (the people phobias and isms mentioned above) being believed - supposed (imputed to) - some them ('everyone', 'most people' 'right wingers' 'vegans' etc) and how that impression might be altered. Essentially - to stick with the trans context (but it could be applied to any I suppose) How to make it appear that regardless of what phobia or fear or rage or whatever you may feel in your black little heart, that everybody knows that is totally wrong because everybody knows that trans people are people just like every other kind of people are people. 

Or who knows, maybe that's just a shoddy containment strategy, after all, what white person doesn't know to not use the N-word and does that in itself prove that there is less racism? 

Nope.

But, perhaps it does equate to "informed prejudice and discrimination" and thus to not sucking quite so thoroughly? 

⚧ 

"I am part of the cultural crisis of the new millennium."(xiv)

"It is now possible, simply by 'telling' or theorizing my own life and the lives of other trans people, for me to build an academic career based on the fascination of the 'Other' with people like me. It is their obsession that has given us the opportunity to use the power of the media to tell our stories, to theorize our lives, and to seek equality and justice."(xii)

Irony here too in lots of ways, too many to compass. But the central one being that the academic activism against Othering is to some degree facilitated by that very Othering. 

Does that mean they might be able to cancel out eventually? 

That was probably a dumb question.

On the grumpy side, if - as seems so amazing obvious - one's sex/gender/whatever - is so tightly wrapped up in one's subjectivity that relatively minor infractions of the ordering principles assumed to depend upon it leads all too often to explosions of dangerous affects - rage, violence, etc.. in light of this, it seems unlikely that it will be, in any sense of the word, easy, to make large scale alterations to.

But then it is also pretty easy to point to significant changes and developments and so forth as well. 

& this seems to lend itself to various narratives which, at the extreme, are utopic in character. & that troubles me as I'm just too much of a curmudgeon to invest in a time share in Utopia without a lot of skepticism being work through first. Though I suppose that I needn't take that narrative seriously in order to recognize that positive social changes have occurred. 

I may be doing Whittle a small disservice here in that he sets up the one line above, "I am part of the cultural crisis of the new millennium" with some care, and does not deliver this line with the sort of I am trans hear me roar, vibe that it has when floating alone and out of that context.

But, I wanted it to resonate like that.

I wanted, dear (largely hypothetical) reader, for you to feel some crisis. If, that is, you were not already.

⚧ 

"Frequently, many non-trans theorists have used trans identities to support constructivist arguments. But increasingly, trans people are questioning whether the deeply held self-understandings they have can be entirely due to nurture and environment." (xiii)

"...the formal psycho-medical theories are falling rapidly by the wayside, and nothing has appeared in their place except some very limited evidence of biological differentiation that is so problematic that it cannot yet be said to have any proof value." (xiii)

Not sure where to step. There is a tension between these two quotes that I can sketch in big dumb strokes but it feels like it needs a definitive question to cut through it somehow. Both concern the body, or almost the bodies of the body - the empirical body of science, the imaginary body of ego identification, the erotic body of drives and merger, the raced, sexed, aged, coded bodies that are all ours, each of us, specifically, particularly, to the culture, etc.

I've aired my concerns about biological explanations for transgender phenomenon, how they might have some benefits and aid in some efforts for recognition but that they also open the door to scary places - places where something would be fixed or prevented or 'hygienically' cleaned-up and corrected. 

But, to spend much time concerned over such things now is also foolish. The "limited evidence" at the moment "is so problematic that it cannot yet be said to have any proof value." If such evidence were to arise… then one can start asking how much the trans persons' agency has been taken away by the scientific account of cause.

More interesting to me, though still not the intervention between these two quotes I was hoping for, if one has a "deeply held self-understanding" going back to the moment when one was operating in language but hardly only just… does this in itself argue for a nature, rather than nuture argument? I'm not trying to adjudicate the answer based on whether this is or is not a valid supporting claim, just wondering about the somewhat catch-all character of "deeply-held understandings."

I guess as so many of my deeply-held understandings have been proven limited, if not wrong, through the years.

Also here is the recognition that the default assumption of mental illness of one kind or another is on the outs - though it seems to me that many trans people still have to reckon with it's lingering effects.

Then there is the business about the 'non-trans theorists' which, if I deserve the mantle theorist, I'll surely also rate non-trans or cis-gendered. Though whether I'll be caught making a constructivist arguments (not usually my thing) is less obvious. I get that trans people can quite legitimately feel like objects of convenience for theorists of all sorts, but I'm holding out for the possibility that I, as a non-trans person, might eventually have something meaningful to say (this issue deserves a post of its own, and to refer to a number of other writers about this question). But I will note that I am somewhat nervous about that issue - given that Patricia Elliot writes of the many criticisms she has be treated to - and I read her book thinking about what a great job she did of not being potentially offensive.

⚧ 

"In recent years, embracing the trans community and its culture has led us to an exciting position at the cusp of one of the most significant social and political changes in the postmodern world. The struggles of trans people could have significant impact on all of our freedoms, depending upon who wins the war of ideologies surrounding the meaning of gender and sex."(xiv)

"But the questioning that trans people present to others’ identities is a growing challenge to all who place their confidence in the binary rules of sexed lives: man/woman, male/female, masculine/feminine, straight/gay."(xiii)

Doesn't the mere existence of trans people suggest that there is so much about being human that most humans do not have even any ideas about? 

Likewise, in other areas of thought, when an idea (the ether wind) for example finds it's experimental invalidation (the Michaelson-Morely experiment - though it was intended to measure the ether wind's direction and speed, not to find that it was not there at all) there might be some squawks about it, but it tends to get dropped (witness: the theory of the humors,  phrenology, neuroscience… ok, joking about that last one, sort of…) and yet copious counter evidence to the conceptual adequacy of our conceptions of sex and gender, male and female, masculine and feminine are all over the place and yet… The terms are no sensed by most as discredited and untrustworthy. 

Why not?

⚧ 

"The work of trans academics and theorists is increasingly moving trans people away from the discredited status of being mentally disordered, towards having expert knowledge of those who struggle to maintain the current strict gender regime, referred to by Kate Bornstein (1997) as 'gender defenders'."(xiii)

"The empirical and sociological analyses undertaken have shown that it is only by understanding and accepting that linguistic barriers still exclude the vast diversities of trans and non-trans identities, that we can possibly begin to accept that gender, like race, simply does not exist other than as an idea that has gained immeasurable power within the economies of social discourse."(xiv)

. . . so like money? that is, Whittle mentions "the economies of social discourse" and characterizes gender as something that does "not exist other than as an idea that has gained immeasurable power"… How different is that to the money form itself? 

Here is much of a paragraph from a piece I wrote on Žižek's "How did Marx invent the Symptom" which is the last chapter of Mapping Ideology (Žižek ed. - and to which my page references refer) and also included in The Sublime Object of Ideology. & here is that entire text from back in July 2011 (while I was basking in the lovely heat of New Orleans), it's gonna be rather thick with missing context (sorry):

Users of money understand that currency is simply paper (and coins, metal), that it gets old, wears down, etc. Yet “in the social effectivity of the market we none the less treat coins as if they consist of an immutable substance” (303). Žižek evokes the notion of disavowal and stages it for this case as “I know that money is a material object like others, but still... [it is as if it were made of a special substance over which time had no power]” (303). Žižek opines that Marx never solved this problem, that of the “sublime material” or the “immutable body” of money (303). “This immaterial corporeality of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object” though Žižek insists that we must recognize how the “postulated existence of the sublime body depends upon the symbolic order” that its very immutable nature is “sustained by the guarantee” of the symbolic (303). 

(…) 

But the same blindness is present in every act of exchange in which we “misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of exchange: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of private production through the medium of the market” (304). Given this “the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic” (305). Žižek dubs this “the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’” (305). As such “a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence” is what we must see as ideological (305). This in a sense, turns the conception of false consciousness ‘on its head’. “'Ideological’ is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’” (305). At last the symptom enters the discussion here as Žižek offers a “possible definition” of it as “a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject” as when, by virtue of analysis and interpretation the subject brings this knowledge to consciousness, the symptom dissolves (305). 

…OK, I know that might have come from out of left field, but let's play substitution games for a bit and see what happens.

Users of the ideas sex and gender understand that these things are not simple binary terms, that there are intersexed bodies, that gender attributes are culturally specific and mutable, they understand that these concepts are increasingly out of sync with the bodies and subjects around us and that they're wearing out. Yet, in the social effectivity of symbolic exchange we none the less treat assigned sex or gender as if they were the unmediated and inescapable evidence of those concepts as bodily substance. So then yes, this is a disavowal, "I know very well that feminine is a culturally specific set of beliefs about what characterizes the female, and that this concatenation of ideas is largely contingent, but still… [it is as if, when I read a body as female, I know it through and through, I know it as "feminine".] This would make of "sex" or "gender" something quite like a "sublime material" or an "immutable body" beyond the anatomical. This immaterial corporeality "Gender" (or is it "Sex"?) of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object (read: objet petit a) though the postulated existence of the sublime body depends upon the symbolic order, such that its very immutable nature is sustained by the guarantee of the symbolic. (…)

[To be clear, the Symbolic is not immutable at all - and Žižek knows this very well - he is referring to the way in which subjects treat the Symbolic, how it works within a discursive situation for example, or in fantasy - as the big Other. It is this Imaginarization of the Symbolic which leads us to credit it so thoroughly, as an Other without lack, a Symbolic where every answer could in principle be found, a fantasy world where "the truth (really is) is out there". Object a's place as sublime within fantasy or social discourse is sustained by that, but they (the object and the Symbolic) are not of the same stuff, the object is not Symbolic but Real.]

(…)

But the same blindness [that philosophy has to the unconscious] is present in every act of gendering in which we systematically misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of gendering: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of bodies through the medium of the categories language has as yet allowed for. Given this the social effectivity of the gendering process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic. Gender then, pace Žižek, would display the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’. As a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence. None of truly know what the hell sexual or gendered 'identity' is truly all about, but we can master the linguistic terms well enough to use them and navigate social discourses and even to find lovers, so to the extent it continues to "work" (at all) we treat it as a guide to essence as, all to often, we believe there is one and thus wish to speak of it. It is this that we must see as ideological. This in a sense, turns the conception of false consciousness ‘on its head’. A gender identity (of any sort) is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a social being but this being itself in so far as it is supported and socially-constituted by the ‘false consciousness’ that the historical moment and current state of the Symbolic and Imaginary allow when attempting to think Sex or Gender. Gender then appears as symptom,  a possible definition of which might be, a formation whose very consistency ("I am a man") implies a certain non-knowledge (of what being a "man" or "woman" or whatever would truly entail) on the part of the subject, as when, by virtue of an analysis yet-to-come and its interpretation the subject might bring this knowledge to consciousness and dissolve gender as symptom so as to assert it (or something like 'it') as sinthome, as the support needed for subject in order to be able to live, love, work, play without unnecessary suffering. 

⚧ 

Stephen Whittle

I'll let Stephen Whittle's text have the last word as I have been rambling so much above. There are a few things in the passage below that catch my eye. The 1st of these is the injunction to claim "the transsexualism of the self"… and my curiosity is as to whether this might be something that the non-trans person might also have a share in. I rather hope so. Of course there is also a bit of the manifesto here as well, and I do love manifestos when they're well done… even as I shy away from many utopian futures foretold. 

Anyway, this Foreward is a great read and raising many interesting questions that I didn't even allude to. Also, if you are curious about who this Stephen Whittle is, here are two links to find out [one and two]

"The public articulation of a trans voice and trans consciousness has not only influenced sex and gender studies, but it also impacted on trans people themselves, and has provided a collection of materials that coherently explain their own experiences as genuine. Amongst other things, it has created new ways in which to be an activist, as well as new ways of being trans. It is now possible:

• to acknowledge and fight the injustice of transphobia, and to be trans publicly in order to truly represent transphobia’s victims;

• to be in charge of what we do to our own trans bodies, and to take risks in the art of our bodies;

• to become queer, by refusing gender ascription and by claiming the transsexualism of the self;

• to turn away, ultimately, from the relative safety of queerness and go beyond that to claim a unique position of suffering; and finally,

• to welcome the rage afforded by that experience of suffering, a suffering that is part and parcel of being trans.

Teaching transgender theory is itself an activist process as well as an explorative process. The field is expanding exponentially along with the cultural changes that accompany it. It also poses a daunting problem—in order to hear the voices of trans people, as justice demands, one has to acknowledge the limits of sex and gender and move into a new world in which any identity can be imagined, performed, and named."(xv)