Transgender children: hopes for civilisation (2021)

Transgender Children: Hopes for Civilization

Published online, October 2021.

“Rum, women, and beer, for God’s sake!”

Transgender children and the current state of the sexual… The distinctions of “Man” and “Woman” are authentic human creations: we are the only living species to have established them in this way, unlike other species that are not caught up in the articulated language we know.

First question. Is it better to proceed in this way, for a speaking species, rather than simply relying on identification by “male” or “female”? My answer is yes. Because the survival of the human species and the procreative sexual activity linked to this survival are not imposed on humans as they are on other non-speaking living beings in the animal kingdom, for example. What we call sexuality in humans is distinct from the simple perpetuation of the species. Thus, the full range of sexual issues extends far beyond the sole necessity of seeing the next generation born.

Second question. Has this helped us organize ourselves across generations and sexual differences? (making distinctions does not always serve the worst discriminations, but also responds to the need to establish minimum knowledge necessary for life in society). The answer is yes, but only in part. Because the persistence of incestuous acts and other sexual dominations, more or less aggressive or deadly, does not reflect success; we still largely fail in our efforts.

Let us note that being alive does not escape its sexual determination, namely that we are never without place nor without function (more or less determined) in the sexual landscape. As such, sexually speaking, neutrality does not exist for human beings; there is no sexual equality simply by virtue of being alive, but there is equality in terms of culture and society, when we manage to reinforce them against what, by nature, but especially through lack of education, tends to prevent them.

What does this mean? Something persists that causes torment; this thing is of a sexual order: thus can we translate what constitutes the primordial interest of psychoanalysis in the sexual thus conceived as a specifically human field.

What should we think? Efforts must be continued; improvements are possible in the future. The solutions currently in place and recognized are not definitive; the renewal of generations will continue to enlighten humanity about its discoveries and temporary linguistic solutions.

Thus, perhaps, “man” and “woman” will not remain the self-evident categories they appear to be today, under the impetus of their effectiveness in circumscribing the sexual landscape. No one can predict this, only question it.

 

Degendered/Degenerate Generations?

Children, in France and elsewhere in the world, are growing up questioning their place and their function in the sexual landscape. They are discussing the contours, options, stakes, and possibilities of man and woman. Existing natural and cultural assignments are being called into question. As long as place was predominantly questioned, growing up with the support of contributions from feminisms, the struggle for equal rights, the questioning of patriarchy, the distribution of roles in marriage, etc., constituted essential help, a genuine option for organizing life with the reinforcement of certain more or less alternative identities, when needed, when mainstream options were not chosen. But current generations are now increasingly questioning the function linked to this place of each person in the sexual landscape; the identities known until now are no longer sufficient; other denominations have appeared, other experiences as well. Bodies, beings, families, sexes—everything, absolutely everything, today, is advancing on paths still unknown or in the process of discovery; the global experience is expanding under the pressure of identity, which we are beginning to discover as the substance of trauma, on the source side, therefore, of our torments with the sexual; continents that remained dark are becoming somewhat clearer. We have crossed, they have made us cross, a decisive step for all of humanity. Being anxious at this juncture is unavoidable; it is the result of this radical questioning of our identifications, just as anxiety or restlessness occurs during psychoanalytic treatment, for example. We know this passage. Our exploration of identity, which has begun, will not be restful; it is already very turbulent.

 

Psychoanalysts as Guardians of Civilization?

Certain psychoanalyst colleagues denounce, in the face of this situation, an “epidemic” of transgender people, while others raise the cause of children at the forefront of their criticisms. Transgender children (and transgender people in general) would be victims of ideologies that create misfortune, responsible for bodily harm supported by a few superficial considerations, satisfied with the apparent progress of modernity concealing a serious crisis of civilization.

If this “epidemic” leads us to be contaminated by some of the emotional and intellectual maturity of these transgender children (although still immature in many respects), let us rejoice! Because they will teach us incredible things. Even if this disrupts, at the margins, our reference points and undoubtedly, somewhat, our civilization.

If civilization is thereby affected, or worse, modified in its habits as it has for ages dealt with sexual difference and its consequences on life in society, with the results we know (let us simply think of the inequalities in treatment between men and women, violence against women, etc.), this is surely excellent news, because nothing at this stage promises us worse in risking a few renovations.

Other colleagues are alarmed by the medical treatments undertaken in certain transition pathways, which remain rare given the extent of questioning about sex and gender among a very large portion of today’s children and adolescents. Many, and probably most of them, remain without the need to undertake concrete changes or personal social, physical, hormonal, psychic transformations, etc., that must be lasting, but this is sometimes necessary. Also, brandishing the threat of irreversibility, of mutilation, does not at all contribute to the ethical reflection that is nevertheless indispensable when seriously examining the sexual experience of a person that will be irreversible in all respects from the beginning to the end of their life: being sexed has a definitive character, at any age. Being treated with hormones in childhood or adolescence can also constitute an authentic psychic treatment, and not merely a medical weapon or the sinister tool of Dr. Victor Frankenstein ready for all bodily transformations to satisfy his fantasies and his denial of mortality. Innumerable parameters must be assessed, but the fear, even legitimate, of certain colleagues is not a good guide at this time.

 

Ambient Noise, Time to Think

Of course, we are witnessing the deployment of various theorizations and arguments that fully serve as fantasies, such as this dated explanation recounting the error of Mother Nature in having put the right person in the wrong body. This explanation and others exist; they are not at all satisfactory from a psychoanalytic point of view, but are very useful to many children or families needing support in the questions and difficulties they encounter.

Similarly, the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is very troublesome and equally unsatisfactory. All adolescences are genuine dysphorias, in every respect. The comforting ease of medicine in welcoming and diagnosing so readily situations completely ignored or rejected not long ago raises questions and concerns. Does the effort to depathologize and depsychiatrize trans issues sometimes risk being absorbed by new formulations capable of reforming their deficient foundation: the prefix “dys” is far from representing positivism.

Many questions must be addressed; disagreements will be numerous, but they can be confronted in a benevolent manner toward the people being supported. What is less acceptable is the abuse of intellectualism and the symbolic authoritarianism characteristic of many positions taken by psychoanalysts or groups of psychoanalysts, when “denial of anatomy,” “communitarianism,” “decivilization,” etc., are enumerated as so many arguments in discussions that do not fundamentally exist, because only sweeping judgments, religious recitations, and other contemptuous marks of supposedly well-established knowledge are heard.

 

Duty of Protection, Requirement of Support

These children must be protected, but from what? From the disqualification of their symptom by caregivers and other experts confusing reception with evaluation (including by far too many psychoanalysts and doctors too happy to diagnose them hastily between psychosis and dysphoria). From discriminations induced by the refusal of the strangeness perceived in the other, which gender trouble activates in everyone. From overly convenient diagnoses that reinforce the assignments of subjects summoned to conquer an identity of separation to leave their supposed morbid alienations. From adults who no longer remember. From all those who refuse the evidence, still mistreated to this day, of our bisexual psychic constitution (which is neither a sexual orientation nor an identity) supported by early psychoanalysis, and so often forgotten because it is an actor of sexual trouble in the unconscious. From anathemas hurled, struck upon children, families, by adult educators or parents charged with speaking the truth of sex, or worse, the “true sex.” From discourses of healing and other fabrications of dubious fictions aimed at reassuring majority positions. From certain sexual minorities (which transgender people are not), too interested in relaunching at low cost the essentialism of their crushed identities, rather than getting back to work and guaranteeing hegemonic positions (some feminists, psychoanalysts, political leaders, or activists). From National Education when it wants to “take questions into account,” respond to needs. From all those who refuse this human evidence: the sexual fact does not define us; it summons us; we respond to it, even stammering, just as speaking beings have been managing this in a slow transition-evolution for several millennia.

 

An Awakened Psychoanalysis

To this day, the field of psychoanalysis has not welcomed gender with humility or genuine interest, but with mistrust, as an enemy. Why? Because it touches on sexual truth. Our experience of sex is as limited as it is elusive; of sex we know only the night. Gender, a pure effect of psychoanalysis in the social realm, underscores this aporia of human experience and of psychoanalysis itself, and illuminates it—this is inadmissible for some. Although this opens a new path where our sex can be chosen for lack of being decided, and this psychic operation is a highly psychoanalytic maneuver, colleagues grind their teeth, refuse, sulk. There is reason to rejoice; many throw a tantrum. We are patient; the tantrums will eventually pass and the frustrations will be acknowledged.

Nevertheless, will psychoanalysis be able to welcome this invitation to the effect of castration—so difficult does it seem to admit the loss and relaunching of previously acquired knowledge—that gender extends to it, or will it risk disappearing as a social practice, fetishizing itself to the core like a sad silk stocking after the night? Refusing this castration would here be clearer than saying no to it while asserting oneself, but this would prompt us to question a perverse positioning of a certain psychoanalysis at this juncture.

To the denial of reality feared by everyone, perhaps we must, in conclusion, suggest that we are currently witnessing a significant advance, a signifying effect and not the decline of language: a piece of the Thing is bitten further than our practice of language had driven it into its invisible flesh; we continue to approach the real of sex that escapes us by practicing it through language and listening… This is what is happening: meaning is being processed by what did not yet have any, and through the lifting of a denial weighing on the reality of sex in its supposedly all-imaginary qualities. Where the organization of a denial of anatomy, of reality, of castration, etc., is denounced, what is revealed in treatment is, so to speak, the opposite of what the concert of bad prophets and Phallus-bearers of psychoanalysis promise us as if they hoped for it. Sex is indeed returned to its reality, to the Imaginary therefore, between specular and non-specular representation where some formulations, of what of sex in the Real eludes our appreciation, come to support the psychic creation of new sex through analysis, in the transference.

Yes, the subject of the unconscious is affected at the risk of wavering. Yes, language is touched to the point of being modified at the margins. Yes, our experience of the sexual is modified. Yes, our culture is questioned at the risk of the new. Exactly as what allowed the emergence of psychoanalysis and constitutes its interest for humanity still today. Do we desire this to continue?… then let us get to work, rather than polemicizing and politicizing these questions.