Humanity needs the wanderings of the sexes and the meanderings of genders (2016)

During this difficult period, I led a supervision group for the helpline operators of the association SOS Homophobie. What these men and women had to hear, support, and endure surpassed the imagination, insulted all republican values, and defied the decency and civility required for living together. Calls were more numerous than usual, and harsher. Rage, discouragement, and anger fueled all our meetings throughout the year. Since President Hollande made the very personal choice to turn Marriage for All into a social debate in the worst possible way (putting a campaign promise back into play, disqualifying it, and throwing it to the wolves rather than honoring his program—just like other unkept promises regarding access to ART or the free change of legal status), we witnessed a social dislocation that struck us. Without the commitment and audacity of Christiane Taubira, these activists and I would have had an even harder time holding on.

After the law was passed, we (supporters of progress) thought we were, at least for a time, rid of the anti-egalitarianism of La Manif Pour Tous (LMPT) and its affiliates. Three years later, it is resurfacing! In a—not at all comic—irony of history, the LMPT is at it again, calling for a demonstration the day after Existrans, with the desire to influence the upcoming primaries and next year’s presidential elections.

In a France allergic to the issue of community, sexual minorities, and foreigners, what else will we have to witness? A surge of false ideas?

The LMPT, like the Pope, is ignorant of the rich sexual diversity of humans that we must cherish. They ignore it by acting as if questions of sex and matters of sex should be governed by culture, tradition, or models, when it is quite the opposite, and has been for a long time. As Lacan simply expressed on France Culture in 1973: “There are social norms for lack of any sexual norm; that is what Freud says.” Are we going to have to waste more precious time explaining this to those who do not want to hear, who refuse knowledge?

The psychoanalytic experience is not a panacea for dealing with gender, nor is it a widely acclaimed possibility. This is a pity, for no other experience knows how to open up possibilities as it does when sexual truth is flushed out at every removal of a psychic obstacle. But it is not a political weapon; it can only say a few words from time to time about what it encounters; it does not serve as an example or a survey.

On October 15 and 16, everyone knows what they can hope to choose and what to renounce: a struggle for the future and the celebration of diversity at Existrans, or a conservative struggle and the rejection of sexual differences at the LMPT.

What I would like to express here from my reflection, shaped by my experience of psychoanalysis as both an analysand and an analyst, is the conviction that we are facing—with the LMPT, the Pope, or even the set of Le Grand Journal on many recent occasions, and the National Assembly which proposes to modify the change of legal status but does not make it free—a phenomenon of repetition. This does not reflect a single idea worth discussing but signals that something is insisting on the side of refusal, in the very place where we could observe, under other conditions, progress appearing. Instead, in political ranks as in most major institutions—including research and teaching—we encounter that good old “resistance,” which Freud had to elevate to the rank of a concept because it already gave him such a hard time. Its manifestation signals that a vital point has been touched, that a psychic conflict linked to the sexual has been reached, and that one must not weaken in order to break the resistance: thus, and only thus, can a gain in freedom and therapeutic progress be hoped for.

But psychoanalysis also teaches us that we must not nag the symptom too much, at the risk of strengthening it without managing to make it open up to the truth it conceals. So, on the weekend of October 15 and 16, everyone knows what they can hope to choose and what to renounce: a struggle for the future and the celebration of diversity at Existrans, or a conservative struggle and the rejection of sexual differences at the LMPT.

Gender and genders are the only happy path to continue thinking about sex and the sexes at the beginning of this 21st century. More than a hundred years after Freudian discoveries, many psychoanalysts of our time know this and experience it every day. Perhaps they have to make themselves heard on occasion, not to speak in the name of psychoanalysis, but to testify to their experience and what it teaches them?

The immense suffering and difficulties caused by the refusal of progress in social mores are among the worst things human beings inflict upon themselves in their societies.

I know that the ideas defended by the LMPT are anti-republican, but above all harmful to subjective freedom and the respect for differences in a society of equals. I know this through personal conviction, but I also encounter it in my clinical practice. The immense suffering and difficulties caused by the refusal of progress in social mores are among the worst things human beings inflict upon themselves in their societies. This kills, sometimes justifies wars, and maintains the blindness of those who want to believe at all costs in some kind of superiority capable of relieving them of the questions that haunt them.

Yet we know well that sexual ambiguity does not deserve to be merged or erased, for we then deprive ourselves of the creations and inventions of tomorrow; we destroy the future. Humanity needs the swerves of gender and the wanderings of the sexes to live its sexual condition. Wanting to eradicate these rough edges, our differences, which can coexist, is a waste of time that poisons and destroys lives. Just because our loves seem to diverge on many points and resemble each other on others does not mean that we cannot all be recognized by law, with strict equality as citizens.

We have barely begun to know what we know about matters of sex and the richness that sexual differences can teach us since Freud, to let ourselves be lectured by preachers of doom.

Vincent Bourseul