Presented by Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D.

At a time of unprecedented legislative attacks on LGBTQ+ people, with gender-affirming care for trans youth being banned in multiple states, psychoanalysts are increasingly confused about how to approach gender complexity. Is gender a core part of the self that just needs to be discovered and granted recognition? Is it the scar tissue of an individual’s trauma or the outcome of a traumatic intergenerational transmission? And what do its origins have to do with how we work with trans individuals?
Arguing for the importance of abandoning the fiction of “core gender identity”, Saketopoulou urges us to relinquish the fantasy that there is something true or authentic about any gender. Gender, as she will discuss, is something all subjects (not just trans and queer subjects) acquire. Trauma, she proposes, may sometimes have a share in that acquisition. Conceptualizing trauma alongside diverse genders and sexualities is not about invalidating transness and queerness, but about illuminating their textures so that clinical work may enable the flourishing of queer and trans patients.