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3.3 - What Does A Transsexual Want - The Encounter Between Psychoanalysis and Transsexualism

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3.3 - What Does A Transsexual Want - The Encounter Between Psychoanalysis and Transsexualism

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11

What Does a Transsexual

Want? The Encounter
between Psychoanalysis
and Transsexualism
Diane Morgan

B ack in the 1970s and early 1980s Freud's question 'What does a
woman want?' was interpreted by some feminists, notably Kate
Millett, as proof of his inability to understand a woman's needs. His
refusal to hear how women were articulating their wishes was taken to
illustrate further the patriarchal resilience of the psychoanalytical
institution. A deaf ear was being turned towards the demanding voices
of the woman while the law was being laid down elsewhere (in the
form of castration and subsequent penis envy). The woman was
mystified, turned into an enigmatic conundrum as a way of avoiding,
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

thereby perpetuating, real political issues of (s)exploitation and

discrimination. By way of contrast, Freud's question was understood
by other feminists, notably by Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose and
Sarah Kofman, to be open-ended, liberating, as evidence of the non-
deterministic - descriptive rather than prescriptive - advantages of
psychoanalysis for feminism.
The traditional complaints made against Freud are too well known:
he is seen as defining female sexuality as inferior to male sexuality - the
clitoris is a shrivelled-up version of the penis; as perpetuating the myth
of female castration - the girl is represented as having to come to terms
with the fact of her castrated state (Freud, 1977: 321 and 376); he is
presented as subjugating women to male authority and its institutions -
the girl has to give up her illusions of ever being able to become a boy,
relinquish her hold on the pleasurable clitoris and resign herself to
vaginal procreation. His theories are seen as determining women

Whittle, Stephen. Reclaiming Genders : Transsexual Grammars at the Fin de Siecle, edited by Stephen Whittle, and Kate More,
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sciences-po/detail.action?docID=4659885.
Created from sciences-po on 2021-01-21 07:31:57.
220 • DIANE MORGAN

biologically and as slanted according to his male prejudices - that is, his
starting point is that the girl envies the boy his 'far superior equipment'
(Freud, 1991: 160). Psychoanalysis works with and for society by
providing it with normative prescriptions about how women should be
and must become.
What this account leaves out, so the counter-argument ran, is that
psychoanalysis, rather than confirming society's assumptions, actually
unsettles its certainties by revealing the sickness and pain at the centre
of so-called civilization. It searches out the victims of the normalizing
processes of repression and allows that grief to be enunciated. Instead
of ideologically supporting the system, it focuses in on where that
system breaks down. As Jacqueline Rose says in her essay 'Femininity
and Its Discontents':

What distinguishes psychoanalysis from sociological accounts of

gender . . . is that whereas for the latter, the internalisation of norms
is assumed roughly to work, the basic premise and indeed starting
point of psychoanalysis is that it does not. The unconscious
constantly reveals the 'failure' of identity. Because there is no con-
tinuity of psychic life, so there is no stability of sexual identity, no
position for women (or for men) which is ever simply achieved. Nor
does psychoanalysis see such 'failure' as a special-case inability or an
individual deviancy from the norm . . . Instead failure is something
endlessly repeated and relived moment by moment throughout our
individual histories. It appears not only in the symptom, but also in
dreams, in slips of the tongue and in sexual pleasures which are
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

pushed to the sidelines of the norm. (Rose, 1986: 90-1)

There is a psychopathology of everyday life; symptoms are not at all

seen as just the domain of stubborn and sick women, branded as
hysterical because they will not fit into a society considered ideal,
because it favours male domination.
At the end of the 1925 essay 'Some Psychical Consequences of the
Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes', Freud concludes:

all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition and of

cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and
feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity
remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content. (Freud, 1977:
342)

Psychoanalysis can be seen as undermining essentialist theories of

sexuality (based on the assumptions that men and women are binary
opposites, that one can be designated as known qualities, whose nature
are obvious to the eye) and this allows psychoanalysis to be presented as
a theory and practice that give an account of patriarchy and the
exorbitant demands it places on individuals, both women and men.
Gender is regarded as a social construct - not as a biological given,
forever there and determined. In the 1933 'Femininity' paper, Freud
warns us of the misleading preconceptions we tend to have about the
self-evident and absolute nature of sexual identity. I quote at length:

When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is 'male
or female?' and you are accustomed to make the distinction with
unhesitating certainty. Anatomical science shares your certainty at
one point and not much further. The male sexual product, the
spermatozoon, and its vehicle are male; the ovum and the organism
that harbours it are female. In both sexes organs have been formed
which serve exclusively for the sexual functions; they were probably
developed from the same [innate] disposition into two different
forms. Besides this, in both sexes the other organs, the bodily shapes
and tissues, show the influence of the individual's sex, but this is
inconstant and its amount variable; these are what are known as the
secondary sexual characters. Science next tells you something that
runs counter to your expectations and is probably calculated to
confuse your feelings. It draws your attention to the fact that portions
of the male sexual apparatus also appear in women's bodies, though in
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

an atrophied state, and vice versa in the alternative case. It regards

their occurrence as indications of bisexuality, as though an individual
is not a man or a woman but always both - merely a certain amount
more the one than the other. You will then be asked to make
yourselves familiar with the idea that the proportion in which
masculine and feminine are mixed in an individual is subject to quite
considerable fluctuations. Since, however, apart from the very rarest
cases, only one kind of sexual product - ova or semen - is nevertheless
present in one person, you are bound to have doubts as to the decisive
significance of those elements and must conclude that what
constitutes masculinity or femininity is an unknown characteristic
which anatomy cannot lay hold of. (Freud, 1991: 146-7)

Although Freud is not willing to leave the final word on sexual

difference to science, he is content to use its findings - in Kofman's

words - 'to shatter the pseudo-certainties of popular opinion' (Kofrnan,

1985: 112). Sexual identity does not meet the eye and instead of
masculinity and femininity being considered as discrete categories, he
makes use of scientific research to reveal a sliding scale of difference:
the difference between the male and the female is one of dosage, 'a
certain amount of one more than the other', it is quantitative rather than
qualitative.1 As Kofman puts it:

Anatomical science . . . makes it possible to question popular opinion,

the immediate certainty of a decisive opposition between the sexes:
because the science of anatomy mixes up sexes and genres, it is
troubling (parce qu'elle mile les sexes et les genres, elle trouble) . . .
{ibid.: 110)

Here it is anatomy that troubles gender rather than the gender troubling
assumptions about sex.2 However Freud proclaimed himself unwilling
to pursue this line of research and laid out his position very clearly in a
letter to Carl Muller-Braunschweig written in 1935:

I object to all of you (Horney, Jones, Rado etc.) to the extent that you
do not distinguish more clearly and cleanly between what is psychic
and what is biological, that you try to establish a neat parallelism
between the two and that you, motivated by such intent, unthink-
ingly construe psychic facts which are unprovable and that you, in
the process of so doing, must declare as reactive or regressive much
that without doubt is primary. Of course, these reproaches must
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

remain obscure. In addition, I would only like to emphasise that we

must keep psychoanalysis separate from biology just as we have kept
it separate from anatomy and physiology, (quoted in Mitchell, 1975:
130-1)

Freud is right to call his reproaches to his errant disciples 'obscure', not
immediately understandable, as fifteen years previously, in a sequence
of footnotes added to the 1905 'Three Essays on Sexuality', Freud was
indeed evidently intrigued by the revolutionary experiments taking
place in the realm of biology. Despite being sceptical about their long-
term significance, he describes the work of Steinach, who carried out
pioneering research into the organic determinants of 'homo-erotism
and sexual characters in general' (Freud, 1977: 58):3

By carrying out experimental castration and subsequently grafting

sex-glands of the opposite sex, it was possible in the case of various

species of mammals to transform a male into a female and vice versa.
The transformation affected more or less completely both the
somatic sexual characters and the psychosexual attitude (that is, both
subject and object erotism). . . . In one case this transformation of sex
was actually effected in a man who had lost his testes owing to
tuberculosis. In his sexual life he behaved in a feminine manner, as a
passive homosexual, and exhibited very clearly-marked feminine
sexual characters of a secondary kind (e.g. in regard to growth of hair
and beard and deposits of fat on the breasts and hips). After an
undescended testis from another male patient had been grafted into
him, he began to behave in a masculine manner and to direct his
libido towards women in a normal way. Simultaneously his somatic
feminine characters disappeared, (ibid.: 58-9)

Freud closes this 1920 footnote with the following reassurance, but also
warning, to his readers:

It would be unjustifiable to assert that these interesting experiments

put the theory of inversion on a new basis, and it would be hasty to
expect them to offer a universal means of 'curing' homosexuality.
Fliess has rightly insisted that these experimental findings do not
invalidate the theory of the general bisexual disposition of the higher
animals. On the contrary, it seems to me probable that further
research of a similar kind will produce a direct confirmation of this
presumption of bisexuality. (ibid.: 59)
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Five years earlier, in 1915, Freud had also made clear that psycho-
analysis was not at all interested in criminalizing homosexuals in
'separating [them] off... from the rest of mankind as a group of a
special character' and subsequently felt the need in effect to distance
himself and his movement from eugenicist crusades to forcibly correct
imagined inversions of nature through surgical intervention (ibid.: 56). 4
However, this research is still compelling in its implications and does
force us to question how far the body impinges upon the psyche
orientating us sexually and behaviourally.
In the 1904 text of the 'Three Essays', before such research had been
carried out, Freud was far more confident that psychoanalysis need not
concern itself with such scientific speculation. Interestingly for us the
case in question appears to be one of transsexuality avant la lettre in
spite of the fact that Freud reads it as one of bisexuality:

The theory of bisexuality has been expressed in its crudest form by a

spokesman of the male inverts: 'a feminine brain in a masculine
body'. But we are ignorant of what characterises a feminine brain.
There is neither need nor justification for replacing the psychological
problem by the anatomical, {ibid.: 54)5

The psyche here, at this early stage, is definitely not to be upstaged by

the biological even though, back at the turn of the century, science was
not in the position to speculate on the determining characteristics of the
feminine brain. Times have changed perhaps: for example, November
1995 saw the long-awaited publication in Nature magazine of details of
the Swaab trial, the product of eleven years of work by the
neurobiologists at the Netherlands Institute of Brain Research (More,
1996: 17). Tests done on the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis
(BSTc) in the brain revealed differences in sizes between gay men,
straight men, straight women and male-to-female transsexuals (there
were no tests on female-to-male transsexuals, known lesbians or
transvestites). For Freud such research was unimaginable until the
1920s when, as we have seen, he heard about the remarkable work done
by Steinach on the organic groundings of sexuality. His reaction
revealed him to be intrigued by its possibilities but anxious to preserve
the specificity of his psychoanalytical movement and already wary of
the uses to which such experimentation could be put.
It would seem that Freud backed away from biology and science
more decisively in the late 1930s. Whereas in 1933 he was willing to use
new evidence from biological research to deconstruct traditional
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

notions of the naturalness of anatomy, by 1935 he was demanding an

absolute (a 'clear and clean') separation of his movement from those of
anatomy, physiology and biology and he showed no patience with his
followers' dalliance with those disciplines. No parallelism or inter-
connectedness between those domains and his can be tolerated. The rise
of Nazism put an end to any dialogue, the subject became taboo.
The foreclosure of such a debate has had drastic consequence for
transsexuals and our understanding of them. Instead of transgendered
people being included as victims of Nazi eugenics, they have been
presented as the monstrous offspring of that period. In a notorious and
influential book, The Transsexual Empire, the separatist feminist Janice
Raymond tells us that:

The Nazi doctors undertook many of their experiments in the

name of science but for the purpose of supposedly gaining racial

knowledge (e.g. how did skull measurements differ between Aryans

and non-Aryans?). The doctors who treat transsexuals undertake
many of their experiments in the name of therapy but for purposes of
gaining sexual knowledge (e.g. is it possible to construct a functional
vagina in a male body?). What we are witnessing in the transsexual
context is a science at the service of a patriarchal ideology of sex-role
conformity in the same way that breeding for blond hair and blue
eyes became a so-called science at the service of Nordic racial
conformity. (Raymond, 1979: 149)

Transsexuals are an insidious tool of the patriarchal system. They

infiltrate women's circles and divide women against themselves.
Raymond continues:

All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form
to an artefact, appropriating this body for themselves, (ibid.: 104)

Her book was described by reviewers as being an 'accessible and deeply

caring book', 'solid, unflinching and scrupulously fair'. To recap,
transsexuals are deceptive parasites. Robin Morgan describes them as
'leeching off women' (ibid.: 85) who carry with them a lethal hidden
sting. Raymond continues:

Loss of a penis . . . does not mean the loss of an ability to penetrate

women - women's identities, women's spirits, women's sexuality. As
Mary Daly has noted, their whole presence becomes a 'member'
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

invading women's presence to each other and once more producing

horizontal violence. (Raymond, 1979: xix; and Millot, 1990: 42)

A male-to-female transsexual undergoes castration so as to become

a big, even more powerful 'member': 'their whole presence becomes a
"member"'. They lose the penis so as to become the phallus, or - in
other (Lacanian) words - they lose the penis so as to become The
Woman, 'more woman than all women, immune to castration';6 this
phallic woman represents an idealized and stereotypical view of
femininity perpetuated by the media. In these last remarks Raymond
is uncannily echoing the psychoanalytical position on transsexuality,
despite Freud being one of the many on her hit-list and despite Freud
undermining the very essentialism, a pure separatist feminist space, she
is trying to preserve intact. This unhappy relationship takes us on to
psychoanalysis's treatment of transsexualism.

Whereas Freud's question 'What does a woman want?' polarized

feminists according to their understanding of psychoanalysis, our
postulated question 'What does a transsexual want?' marks rather the
absence of a debate, the failure of an encounter between psychoanalysis
and transsexualism. Rather than being positioned as complex enigmas
that no speculation can determine, analysts appear to have been all too
confident of their assessments of transsexuals. Instead of an open-ended
questioning, there has been a refusal to hear and the normative - and
often final - judgement is passed on them: 'your anatomy is your
destiny, accept it!' Whereas views on homosexuality have evolved, those
held on transsexualism have been uncannily consistent.
In Freud's seminal 1911 study of the Schreber case the grounds were
laid for future readings of transsexualism. The paranoid delusion of
being transformed into a woman by God and His accomplices was the
result of Schreber's inability to accept a homosexual attraction (to his
father and in continuation to Flechsig). Schreber's phantasy of being
humanity's redeemer, it being incumbent upon him to repopulate the
world afresh, sprang from his psychosis, which had reduced the world
around him to the unreality of 'fleetingly improvised men' leaving him
to confront the Godhead head-on, in an unrelenting and totally
unmediated fashion (Schreber, 1995: 143). This is what Lacan called
Schreber's 'foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in the place of the
Other' (Lacan, 1980: 215). The patient tries to sustain a dyadic
imaginary relation to the God because the shift and displacement that
an entry into the symbolic would involve cannot be negotiated.
Language literally inscribes itself directly, in its full-blown unmediated
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

violence on the subject's body as he denies its metaphoricity and

contingency. He is too absolute in his demand for satisfaction.
The transformation of Schreber into a repressed homosexual was
questioned by Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, the English
translators of the Memoirs. This is the Mrs Macalpine who gets a
chilling grilling from Lacan in 'On the possible treatment of psychosis'
essay. She is peremptorily dismissed as forming one with the 'English
diffusionist school' for her insistence on Schreber's birth fantasy as
'primitive' and 'asexual', that is not necessarily to be thought of from
within the determining Oedipal structure - a son wanting to give a baby
to daddy (Lacan, 1980: 191).7 Lacan is absolutely resistant to her (their)
idea of Schreber's fantasmatic contact with the eternally mutable 'life-
substance' and dismisses it outright. In this he was giving a bad
imitation of Freud's reaction to the proposition that there exists an
'oceanic feeling', an originary, pre-sexual 'feeling of being one with the

external world as a whole'. Freud confessed that he found this idea

'strange' and a 'bad fit' with the psychoanalytical conception of the
psyche. However, unlike Lacan, Freud did at least speculate what this
bizarre notion might possibly mean for psychoanalysis, how psycho-
analysis might reconfigure it into something more comprehensible for
its mode of systematization (Freud, 1985: 252-3). As yet unaware of
Lacan's scorn, Macalpine and Hunter go on to suggest that Schreber's
psychosis was concerned with the origin of life: 'Whence life?'; 'Where
do I come from?' (Schreber, 1995: 143). The same far-reaching
questions are also asked in the Heine poem, called 'Questions', which
Freud partially quotes in the 1933 'Femininity' lecture - however, this
time like Lacan, Freud trims its preoccupations down to the question of
what a woman is, limiting us once again to Oedipal, sexualized relations
and thereby ignoring Heine's preoccupation with insoluble enigma and
ambiguous cross-dressing (Freud, 1991: 146).
Battling against the odds, Macalpine and Hunter's is an attempt to
win some recognition for the specificity of transsexuals. Their analysis
was published in 1955 when the first publicized cases of 'sex change'
operations were coming to people's attention (Schreber, 1995: 405). As
psychiatrists they apparently felt the need to explain and justify their
involvement in these cases, why they were lending their support to their
patients' demands for surgical intervention - which others, even from
within their discipline such as Charles Socarides, view as 'a sanctioning
of the transsexual's pathological view of reality' (Socarides, 1979: 373).
The opinion seems to be that if, after careful screening, help is given to
transsexuals, if they are helped towards what they think they want, the
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

professional is conniving with their madness, their deformed way of

looking at the world. Although there is no question of Macalpine and
Hunter suggesting surgery for Schreber - anyway he feels that it is
already taking place - they do try to illustrate how they understand
Schreber differently from the psychoanalysts and hostile psychiatrists:
his so-called 'homosexuality' should be seen as being of a different
order from a situation where man qua man desires sexual relations with
another. In Schreber's case homosexuality arises only inasmuch as his
birth sex as male would follow him to his apparently desired designation
as woman. But this would not necessarily be a problem if he desired a
man as a female - that is regardless of his birth sex s/he would then be
heterosexual in orientation. One question which inevitably arises is what
does this mean for a heterosexual male-to-female to desire a man as a
woman? Psychoanalysis answers that this still means that s/he is
homosexual (i.e. still a man) and, most disappointingly, the femaleness

cashes out for them merely as passive homosexuality (Freud, 1979b:

182). The very equation passivity = female, which Freud repeatedly
tried to trouble in essays such as the 1931 'Female Sexuality', comes back
in his and other psychoanalytical readings of transsexuality.8 What
Macalpine and Hunter suggest as being of primary concern to Schreber
is not his sexual orientation but instead his sexual identity per se: what is
he, male or female?9
Lacan reads transsexuality as a psychosis. It is an inability to enter
the symbolic, to take up a series of positions within the symbolic realm
of language. Instead of asking 'What am I, male or female?' the question
should run as follows:

'What am I there?', concerning his sex and his contingency in being,

namely that, on the one hand, he is a man or a woman, and, on the
other, that he might not be, the two conjugating their mystery, and
binding it in the symbols of procreation and death. (Lacan, 1980: 194)

For this analysis transsexuals are not flexible enough; they refuse the
contingency of sexual difference and obstinately stick to their story
about being essentially one or the other or masochistically plague
themselves with their indecision. Lacan makes the influential statement
that transsexuals attempt to circumvent the FACT of castration -
whether in the form of a fait accompli or as a threat - and gain quick
access to the phallus. The male-to-female, for example, undergoes
castration to avoid its threat, aims to be the Father's object of desire so
as to steal the phallus from him and maybe even venture back the way
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

he came; the female-to-male still refuses to believe that she is lacking

and battles on in her impossible quest to compete directly with the
Father and usurp his authority. Lacan associates these formulations of
transsexual desire as the abolition of sexual difference:

one is condemned to lacking both (sexes) when, in the hope of

reaching them more easily, one wishes to ignore the symbolic
articulation that Freud discovered the same time as the unconscious
. . . (ibid.: 191).

Macalpine and Hunter, the former ridiculed by Lacan, the latter

suppressed completely, persist in their differing analysis. Far from
denying sexual difference, Schreber is seen rather bewilderingly to
belong to both sexes as well as to neither. They explain:

He was as much both (sexes) as he was neither. Thus he says 'that I

have to imagine myself as man and woman in one person having
intercourse with myself and 'playing the woman's part in sexual
embrace with myself. (Schreber, 1995: 402)10

The mastermind engineering these scenarios is akin to the ghostly third

person, the listener, described in 'A Case of Paranoia running counter to
the psychoanalytical theory of the Disease' (Freud, 1979a).11 For
Macalpine and Hunter, psychoanalysts are unable to read this complex-
ity in the case of transsexuals as they are too blinded by their 'adherence
to the doctrine of libidinal wish-fulfilment as the basis of psychiatric
symptom formation' (Schreber, 1995: 405), that is: they can only
understand Schreber's abhorrence of Flechsig as repressed homosexual
desire (for the father) since the unconscious knows no negation.
Freud's abandonment of the case of Schreber to the very people he
claims are his oppressors (Flechsig, and before him, his father) is the
reading given by Niederland (1984), Schatzman (1973) and more
recently, Lothane (1992). In My Own Private Germany, Eric Santner
also goes over the stakes of Schreber's difference with Flechsig
(Santner, 1996). Flechsig was appointed to the position of professor
of psychiatry at the University of Leipzig in 1882 despite having very
little psychiatric experience - he had built up his reputation with his
ground-breaking work on nerve fibres and the localization of nervous
diseases. Lothane noted that his appointment marked a historical shift
of paradigms in the history of psychiatry towards extreme medicaliza-
tion. Schreber found himself in the hands of someone who was
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

convinced that 'the most direct way to penetrate to the knowledge of the
lawful relations between illnesses and brain anomalies' was through
brain dissection and for this reason he hovered around the beds of those
nearing death in the psychiatric clinic of the University Hospital (ibid.:
71).
Santner reads the Schreber case as deconstructing the symbolic
structures informing authority, uncovering the instability of institu-
tional foundations and the violence that at once allows them to lay down
the law and produces its own deviance. Santner focused on why Freud
could not take on board this aspect of Schreber's implicit critique of
power and position:

Freud's study of the Schreber material was conducted at a moment in

the history of psychoanalysis when the symbolic authority of that new
institution was being strongly contested from within the ranks as well

as from without - at a moment of institutional stress . . . that made

Freud particularly sensitive to the nature of Schreber's investiture
crisis even though Freud never explicitly addressed it. (ibid.: 17)

In 1911, when Freud was writing about Schreber, he was also grappling
with the dissenting voices of Adler and Jung within his own movement.
He was busy trying to tighten the rules governing psychoanalysis and to
explicate the party line to achieve consolidation. Unfortunately for
Schreber and ultimately transsexuals, by so doing he sells out to the
most louche forms of psychiatry.
In his open letter to Flechsig, written after the memoir, Schreber
attempts to understand the 'soul murder' he still feels was practised on
him by the psychiatrists independent of his psychotic delusions. He
carefully surmises in the form of what he calls 'a mild reproach' that:

you, like so many doctors, could not completely resist the temptation
of using a patient in your care as an object for scientific experiments
apart from the real purpose of cure, when by chance matters of the
highest scientific interest arose. (Schreber, 1995: 34)

The legacy of Schreber's treatment by psychoanalysis has been that

today's transsexuals are greeted on the one hand with the formulaic
judgement of repressed homosexuality tending to psychosis and, on the
other, with the prospect of being dependent on scientific research into
brainsex or genetic determinism. Faced with one institution that refuses
to think outside of Oedipalized libidinal drives and another that
Copyright © 1999. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

presumes to deal with psychosomatic crises as solely the result of

organic malfunctioning, transsexuals have been trapped.
Just before he embarks on the interpretation of the Schreber case,
Freud makes the following remarks:

It will be an unavoidable part of our task to show that there is an

essential genetic relation between [Schreber's transformation into a
woman and his favoured relation to God]. Otherwise our attempts at
elucidating Schreber's delusions will leave us in the absurd position
described in Kant's famous simile of the Critique of Pure Reason - we
shall be like a man holding a sieve under a he-goat while some one
else milks it. (Freud, 1979b: 167)

There are, I suggest, several intriguing points to make about this

passage: first the reference to the 'genetic' relation, the genesis of the
relation between Schreber's sex-change and his particular relation to

God. The connection between these essential components of Schreber's

nightmare possibly arises from the biblical condemnation of any
tampering with the body. Indeed, as the performance artist, Orlan,
whom we will come to later, states:

Psychoanalysis and religion agree in saying 'Thou must not attack

the body'. 'One must accept oneself. These are primitive,
anachronistic concepts. We react as if the sky would fall on our
heads if we were to tamper with the body. (Orlan, 1996: 91)

To push our argument further: the 'genetic' relation as it regards

transsexuality is what psychoanalysis does not even seem to want to
know about, or to fight about. By contrast, Orlan, who describes herself
as a 'woman to woman TS' declares:

My fight is against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed,

nature D N A (which is our direct rival as artists) and God. (ibid.: 16)

Lastly, Freud's reference to Kant is also strangely apposite. The

analogy with the goat does not just refer to a case of mistaken sexual
identity - the goat, presumed to be milkable, therefore female, but
which is actually male - but also the section of the first critique from
which it is taken treats the relation of truth to knowledge. Kant points
out that one can have knowledge of an object without necessarily being
able to give the truth about it, that is, one's knowledge of an object
might not be convertible into a truth about it if it is not exclusive
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enough to differentiate that object's content from other objects'

contents. Kant concludes that there is no truth (general criterion) of
the matter of knowledge (Kant, 1781/1993: B82-3). I suggest that
psychoanalysis's refusal to know, its refusal to debate scientific research
into the organic causes of transsexuality, can be attributed to its
attachment to this truth. The very institution whose founder taught
that the truth is a lie, 12 wants to hold on to its truth, its generally
applicable law for treating the abstracted, hollowed-out object, which is
the transsexual it can deal with. Kant's section on logic is all about
knowing what are the right questions to ask: one person is trying to milk
the he-goat and another is holding a sieve in expectation because
someone has asked the wrong question. This has led to a series of
absurd and ludicrous answers.
Catherine Millot, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, published Horsexe in
1983 (it was translated in English into 1990). This book thinks it has the

answers to transsexuality, but actually presents the reader with a

scenario hardly less unseemly than that described by Kant. Completely
unabashed, she quotes from Janice Raymond, the author of The
Transsexual Empire mentioned above, to set the scene for her account of
transsexuals: Male-to-female transsexuals feel themselves superior to
'Gennys' (genetic women) as they are not hampered by the burdens of
menstruation and reproduction. 'The future is theirs!' (Millot, 1990:
14). Millot is complicit with Raymond's nightmare vision of infiltrating
psychotics raping women's bodies {ibid.: 15 and 16). She suggests that
'transsexuality might appear to be one of the latest expressions of
Malthusianism' (ibid.: 14). Here we are back in the world of fascistic
projects of social engineering. She goes on to state that transsexuals
have an image of women that is 'wholly conformist' (ibid.) though, in
order to cement this monolithic account of these deviants, she has to
travel to the TV/TS bars of Rio, dig out the Skoptzy sect, pack in
anecdotal comments and apply a thick covering of Lacanian glue.

Transsexuality, and above all male transsexuality, triggers in women

the dream of understanding the conspicuously elusive essence of
femininity, a question which confronts women with what is alien to
themselves. Transsexuals who claim to possess a female soul
imprisoned in a man's body are perhaps the only ones who can
boast a monolithic sexual identity, one that admits of neither doubts
nor questions, (ibid.: 15)

This scene of the genetic woman drawn to the male-to-female

transsexual in her search for the ultimate answer to the elusive question
'What does a woman want?' irresistibly reminds me of the moment in
Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (written in 1936 and chillingly clairvoyant
about the fate of 'inverts' - gays, TV/TS and Jews - under fascism)
when the lesbian Nora goes in desperation to visit the transsexual
figure, Doctor Matthew Mighty O'Connor, in her quest for knowledge.
'His' response to her imploring question is: 'I tuck myself in at night,
well content because I am my own charlatan' (Barnes, 1950: 139).
Rather than passing over from one discrete identity to another, the
transsexual body reworks the divide, spans the divide, destabilizing
conventions and expectations rather than just attempting to conform to
them. Even the doctor's room exudes sexual ambiguity, being described
as a 'cross between a chambre a coucher and a boxer's training camp'
(ibid.: 116). Fascinated with their horror it is the onlooker who petrifies
the lengthy process that is transsexuality - remember, a transsexual

wants to become the sex that s/he is, that is, the becoming is the opening
of a process: however, all the eager onlooker wants to see, yet no
further, is The Operation itself- the hacking off, the sealing off and the
tacking on. 13 What is so special about being a woman or man that it
merits that? The transsexual must perceive there to be something
special to do that. One can imagine the disappointment when the
answer can be heard: 'I am my own charlatan'.
Parveen Adams's article 'Operation Orlan' (1996) also builds on the
horrified fascination with The Operation. It cannot be denied that
Orlan's surgical performances are gruesome. However, what I find most
insidious about this piece is the way transsexuals are used to advance an
argument about art and representation.14 The argument runs as follows:
the artist, Orlan, proclaims herself to be a woman-to-woman transsexual
and she is right to; transsexuals, however, want to change from one sex to
the other so as omnipotently to deny sexual difference and become The
Woman. This assertion is then confirmed through a footnote to Millot,
who is drawing on Raymond. She continues:

[the transsexual] urge to refiguration involves a wish not to become a

woman, but to become The Woman. That is to become the phallus
through castration. Clearly Orlan works differently. (Adams, 1996:
144)15

In that last sentence - 'Clearly Orlan works differently' - lies

transsexual is convinced that he will be complete' {ibid.). Mark the

assurance of the generality - this is knowledge plus truth and we are still
milking he-goats.
In the recent Orlan conference catalogue, Adams's article is preceded
by a piece by the transsexual Sandy Stone. Stone worked for the
progressive Olivia Women's Record Collective back in the 1970s and it
was about her that the following remarks were written (quoted with
approval by Raymond, who is used by Millot, who is used by Adams):

I feel raped when Olivia passes off Sandy, a TS, as a real woman.
After all his male privilege, is he going to cash in on lesbian feminist
culture too? (Raymond, 1979: 103)

Here, twenty years later, she is still being called The phallic Woman out
for the absolute. In this Orlan catalogue Stone writes:

From the trans perspective . . . How do we reconcile our performa-

tive wanderlust with the reality of an oppressive structure of
knowing, the issue of which is invariably injustice? (Orlan, 1996: 51)

Stone explains the transsexual dilemma: they are trapped between the
desire to explore the possibilities of the performative gender bending
and the need to fight for basic rights (for example equal opportunities,
the right to privacy) for which they need to present a coherent,
essentialist identity without ambiguity. It was exactly because of this
conjunction of fantasy with the political that Rose encouraged feminism
to engage with psychoanalysis. Unfortunately it does not look as if the
same care and rigour will be applied to a debate between psychoanalysis
and transsexualism.

Notes
1. This line of thought leads straight to the discovery that the difference
between femininity and masculinity is one of (hormonal) dosage. See the
reference to Eugen Steinach's pioneering work in the 1920s below.
2. In Kate More's interview with Judith Butler, the author of Gender Trouble
rejects any dialogue with science. Biologists are seen to want indubitably to
'prove* a 'putatively pure sense of anatomy' proper to the female or the
male. Butler regards such lines of enquiry as '[cauterizing] the ambivalence
in the constitution of sex* in the name of 'logical', 'factual* certainty (see
More, 1997: 4, 136). More's question about whether recent scientific
experiments (especially the results of the Swaab trial, see below), are to be
doubted or not and whether they are 'predicated on difference rather than
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the content of that difference', that is to what extent they are legislating for
female and male modes of behaviour, is most apposite. Instead of rather
stereotypically and hence dismissively characterizing those 'men of
science, who have hard knowledge' (ibid.), science seen as an extension
of patriarchal oppression, such scientific investigation throws up as many
questions as it settles. For instance, Julian Huxley writing in 1923 on 'sex
biology and sex psychology' - on the work being carried out by Steinach,
Voronoff and Sand on endocrinological determinism - muses:
What then has our rapid survey led us to? The actual origin of sex is lost
to us in the mists of a time inconceivably remote. Its preservation once
in existence, and its present all-but-universal distribution seem to be
definitely associated with the biological advantage of the plasticity which
it confers. Later the primary difference between male and female - their
power of producing different sorts of reproductive cells - leads on to
secondary differences. These differences may be biologically speaking
non-significant, mere accidents of the primary difference. Or they may

be in the nature of a division of labour between the sexes . . . Or, finally,

they may concern the more efficient union of the gametes; such
differences may merely affect the ducts and apertures of the
reproductive system and be more or less mechanical; or they may
concern the use of these systems, in the form of still mechanical
instincts, or they may be concerned in some way or other with the
emotional side of the animals, and consist in characters or actions which
stimulate the emotions of the other sex (Huxley, 1923: 117-18).
Even if at the level of 'primary' differences certain laws, albeit 'plastic*
ones, appear to be laid down, all is up for grabs at the crucial 'secondary*
level.
3. Steinach's work on the ductless glands made evident the physiological
significance of the gonads for the differentiation of the sexes. However
impressed Freud was by such amazing experiments, which could
apparently change one's sex or bring back to life one's masculinity or
femininity through hormonal 'rejuvenation*, Freud resists the dominion of
the 'organic'. In 'Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and
homosexuality' (Freud, 1979b: 205), Freud stakes out the residual terrain
of the psychic. Still in relation to homosexuality and the implications of
Steinach's research, he, about the same time, recognized that a three-
tiered understanding of sexual 'identity' was necessary. He differentiates
between sex, the 'physical sexual characters'; gender, the 'mental sexual
characters'; and sexuality, the 'kind of object choice'. Steinach's work on
sex glands appears to go a long way to explaining what constitutes one's
overall sexual identity - he seems to master the mysteries of biological
sex, whereas psychoanalysis is left with making inroads into sexuality.
Psychoanalysis's task becomes that of 'disclosing the psychical mechan-
isms that resulted in determining the object-choice and with tracing back
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the paths from them to the instinctual dispositions' (ibid.: 398-400).

Sandwiched in between these two domains is gender - 'masculine and
feminine attitude'. Here biology leaves the field open for psychoanalysis
thanks to the paucity of its understanding: masculinity reduces down to
activity, and femininity to passivity, an equation that Freud finds
wanting (ibid.: 399-400).
4. Despite the wish to distance himself from any ethically dubious
applications of such experiments, Freud did succumb to their charms in
1923. Fighting with cancerous death, Freud allowed himself to be
persuaded by von Urbantschitsch, one of Steinach's disciples, to undergo
a 'rejuvenation' operation (see the Gay, Schur and Jones biographies of
Freud). Freud hoped that a bolstered manhood, acquired through the
ligature of the spermatic ducts, might increase his chances of staving off
the onslaught of disease - he was disappointed. Such experiments are not
unrelated to the eugenicist ideologies Freud elsewhere seems to be anxious
about. Apart from its origins in the enforced sterilization of the insane and
the criminal (see Kammerer, 1924: 68), such 'rejuvenating' operations

provide the tempting prospect of prolonging the richness of the race stock.
In The Theory and Practice of the Steinach Operation (1924), P. Schmidt
announced the vision of artificial selection apparently proffered by
Steinach's research: 'the measures of rejuvenation afford us the possibilities
of preserving or even of prolonging the life and working capacity of some
men of peculiar value to mankind'. Such operations seem to pave the way for
the worst medicalized excesses of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, the gesture
of absolute rejection of such work because of its 1930s legacy would be
inadequate. Steinach's research also opens up the field of hormone
replacement therapy for menopausal women and presents sex as a matter
of choice: 'The most important "decision" in the life of a creature, the
"decision" whether it has to go through life as man or woman no longer
appears so much a matter of chance. A decision can be made within the
individual himself, he has the potential to develop towards either sex' (see
Steinach and Loebel, 1940: 94-5). Any refusal of dialogue with science
based on one aspect of its application is naive, reductive and irresponsible.
5. Socarides begins his 1970 article 'A Psychoanalytical Study for the Desire
for Sexual Transformation ("Transsexualism"): The Plaster of Paris Man'
by citing this and the previous passage from Freud. The founder of
psychoanalysis provides Socarides with the seal of approval for his
subsequent treatment of transsexuality as a symptom of 'the delusional
system of paranoid schizophrenics', unable to come to terms with their
homosexual desires.
6. From Raymond's book we can seamlessly slip into C. Millot's Horsexe
(1990: 42).
7. Macalpine and Hunter would have found allies in Deleuze and Guattari,
who also rejected the restrictive 'Oedipal nursery', the repetitive 'family
romances', of psychoanalysis. Their espousal of 'intense becomings,
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passages and migrations . . . becoming woman' in Anti-Oedipus (1984:

84^5) corroborates Macalpine and Hunter's interpretation of the Schreber
case. Their celebration of psychotic proliferation thwarts attempts to tie
the case down to a standard one of repressed homosexuality. They suggest
that such a reductive reading just touches the surface: 'We are statistically
or molarly heterosexual, but personally homosexual, without knowing it or
being fully aware of it, and finally we are transsexual in an elemental,
molecular sense' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 70). For the beginnings of
an account of Deleuzian transsexuality see D. Beddoes, 'Deleuze, Kant and
Indifference' in Ansell Pearson, 1997: 38-40.
8. See, for example, Freud, 1977: 383-4.
9. It is important to note that Macalpine and Hunter's attempt to think the
difference between transsexuals and homosexuality is shared by today's
transsexual theorists who are thinking their difference with queer theory -
see, for example, Prosser, 1995: 483ff.
10. Compare with Deleuze and Guattari's affirmation of the schizophrenic in
Anti-Oedipus:

It becomes nevertheless apparent that schizophrenia teaches us a

singular extra-Oedipal lesson, and reveals to us an unknown force of the
disjunctive synthesis, an immanent use that would no longer be
exclusive or restrictive, but fully affirmative, non-restrictive, inclusive.
A disjunction that remains disjunctive, and that still affirms the
disjointed terms, that affirms them throughout their entire distance,
without restricting one by the other or excluding the other from the one, is
perhaps the greatest paradox. 'Either . . . or', instead of 'either/or'.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 76)
11. 'The patient's lover was still her father, but she herself had taken her
mother's place. The place of the listener had then to be allotted to a third
person' (Freud, 1979a: 154). Dr John Randall also attempts to close down
the complicated circulation of transsexual desire and read it as basically
indicative of homosexual panic. However, one of the cases he cites in
'Transvestitism and Transsexualism' (Randall, 1959: 1448ff) defies such
simplicity, soliciting the distinction between homo- and heterosexual
orientation, probing the limits of the TV/TS distinction. It is mind-
blowing in its complexity:
With one notable exception, the female patients were homosexually
orientated. These 12 women had experienced homosexual attachments
and the wish to take the male role in sexual intimacy with a Lesbian
partner was the predominant and expressed reason advanced by those
who wished for trans-sexualisation. The sole heterosexually orientated
woman was both transvestite and trans-sexualist; she presented the
unusual pattern of heterosexual seduction by a male transvestite (not
her husband). At first revolted by the deviate practices into which she
was initiated, she became conditioned to experience orgasm in such
acts, and attempted without success to secure her husband's co-
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operation in similar behaviour. Depression supervened and she made

three unsuccessful attempts at suicide. She is an attractive woman and
has one child, (ibid.: 1450)
How should, can, we read this case history?
12. See the entry for 'truth' in the General Index to the Standard Edition of
Freud's works. 'Truth, a lie' encapsulates the Cracow/Lemberg 'joke', in
Freud, 1976: 161.
13. See Hemmings (1996) for a good analysis of an often-repeated fetishization
of the transsexual operation by reductionist theorists.
14. Adams repeats Raymond's crime as analysed by Carol Riddell: 'The
Transsexual Empire is a dangerous book. It is dangerous to transsexuals
because it does not treat us as human beings at all, merely as the tools of a
theory' (Riddell, 1996: 184).
15. Adams's article explicitly engages Orlan against transsexuals. Orlan claims
to be 'female-to-female transsexual'. In this Adams states that Orlan is not
only 'exactly right' as far as her performances are concerned, but she also
apparently demonstrates her sophisticated superiority to those other,

megalomaniacal, transsexuals who aim to abolish sexual difference with

their will to power. Transsexuals are aiming for the 'triumph of
completeness' (Adams, 1996: 145), they are misguidedly essentialist,
whereas Orlan's performances demonstrate in graphic detail the 'emptiness
of the image' (ibid.), that the 'image is a mask and that there is nothing
behind it' (ibid.: 153). Not only is this reductionist reading of
transsexuality highly problematic, but Adams's absolutist understanding
of Orlan is also open to question: how sure can, should, we be about what
Orlan is doing? What are her motives? Is she a sadomasochist? What is her
relation to the cosmetic industry? Is what she does art? (see B. Rose, 1993).
I would suggest that a crucial aspect of Orlan's work is the ambivalence she
provokes: there is attraction, a wanting to see what she is having done to
her; we are fascinated, yet we are also repulsed, dreading what is offered up
to us for our perusal, unsure about what it is that is happening in front of
us and how to situate ourselves in relation to it. By contrast, Adams is just
too sure of herself, of the 'f-to-f Orlan and of her knowledge about what
those other ('power-craving', 'psychotic') transsexuals actually want.

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