Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
14. Just Call Me a Slur
76 Plays15 days ago
In this twist on the "theory and practice" format, Helen introduces Sarah to Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini's Gender Without Identity, a contemporary work of queer psychoanalytic theory. Then, the two dive in to a case study concerning a young child and his parents who want a therapist to "straighten out" his effeminacy.
We made a new discord! You can join that by clicking here.
Check out our Patreon at https://patreon.com/OdiumSymposium and our website at https://www.odiumsymposium.com.
Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Episode Setup
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi all! In this episode, we have a twist on the theory and practice format.
Case Study: Effeminacy and Conversion Therapy
00:00:04
Speaker
After an introduction to some contemporary ideas and psychoanalysis, we dive into a case study concerning a young child whose parents are worried about his effeminacy and are hoping the therapist will help straighten him out.
00:00:16
Speaker
We see how the clash between liberal psychoanalytic principles and the reactionary desires of parents of queer children plays out in the clinic.
Supreme Court Ruling and Conversion Therapy
00:00:24
Speaker
I started prepping this episode before the recent United States Supreme Court ruling that determined that bans on conversion therapy would have to face harsh scrutiny lest they infringe on the free speech rights of therapists.
00:00:36
Speaker
In the shadow of that ruling, prepping, recording, and editing this episode has made me think a lot about what needs to be done to protect queer children both around the world and in my own community.
Philosophical Musings and Podcast Business
00:00:48
Speaker
I encourage you to do the same. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:01:06
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you. I'll suck you in your goddamn face. And you'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:01:23
Speaker
some level of masochism.
00:01:27
Speaker
hi everyone i'm helen i'm sarahra this is odium symposium a podcast about the production of bigotry yeah so this week we have a little bit of podcast business first we have two new subscribers to thank thank you to tae thank you yeah thank you so much and thank you to gaydog Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you both for becoming Odium Connoisseurs.
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, and if you want also to become an Odium Connoisseur, you get early access to episodes. You can go to patreon.com slash Odium Symposium and sign up.
00:02:00
Speaker
Yeah, we would love to get to the point where we're doing a bunch of bonus episodes, and we are going to do a bonus episode. But mostly, it's just to be nice to us. Also, you can specify a message when you sign up, and we'll read it on air. And if you already have signed up, actually, you can send us a message and...
00:02:17
Speaker
We'll read it on air. I am actually telling Helen about this for the first time just now, but the podcast is kind of in dire financial straits because Helen, we lost our Raytheon sponsorship. We lost the Raytheon sponsorship. Yeah, it turns out that if you are sponsored by a company, they expect you to mention it on the podcast, which I think is kind of fucked up and bourgeois, but.
00:02:41
Speaker
Okay, so it has nothing to do with the fact that we've been openly promoting communism on this podcast. No, no, no, no. Yeah, they they wouldn't care about that. No, they don't care about that at all. Capitalism has the ability to to subsume critiques of itself. Yeah.
00:02:54
Speaker
Also, we are going to be launching a discord soon. It's going to have members only sections maybe, but it's going to be open to anyone who listens to the podcast. Yeah.
00:03:05
Speaker
We'll put an invite link for that in the description. Yeah, so come hang out with us on Discord, and you don't even have to pay us money. But you do have to buy a quarter zip. Okay. That's right.
00:03:16
Speaker
All right, enough preamble. Let's get into the episode. We have kind of a lot to cover today. We've talked a lot about, like, what are the podcast, right? Who are precursors, who are inspirations, who are our... credit you know, predecessors, but also peers, right? Like, who are we thinking about ourselves as being in the in the mold of? Barry Weiss, obviously. Of course. But we've talked about things of this nature, inb Bed with the Right, Knowledge Fight, these kinds of podcasts that look at...
00:03:43
Speaker
bigotry by sort of directly examining these bigoted texts, but also trying to understand broader cultural context of these movements. So I'm going to suggest another sideways inspiration for this podcast, which is Critical Role.
00:03:57
Speaker
So our fog of war mechanic is kind of like dungeon mastering, if you think about it. Oh, really interesting. So we need to release this in video form so that people can see us reacting to each like yeah bit as it comes in, leaning into the roles.
00:04:13
Speaker
So this episode is going to be kind of like ah a bit of a theory dungeon crawl at times. I'm so excited. i have no idea what the fuck you're talking about, Helen. I don't know what that means.
00:04:23
Speaker
So basically, I started thinking this is going to be a theory and practice episode, but then I didn't give you the theory to read.
Gender Theory and Psychoanalysis
00:04:30
Speaker
So we'll see why that is later. The book we're going to start with is published in 2024.
00:04:36
Speaker
It's called Gender Without Identity by Anne Pellegrini and Avgi Sakadopoulou. So a little bit of background about those two authors. Anne Pellegrini is a professor of performance studies at Tisch School of the Arts.
00:04:50
Speaker
and Social and Cultural Analysis at and NYU. And they are the director of and NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Avgi Sakadopoulou is a psychoanalyst.
00:05:01
Speaker
And she's actually written a book that I've also seen around, I have not read, Sexuality Beyond Consent, Race, Risk, and Traumatophilia. So we're not going to talk too much about that. But we are going to engage a little bit with this concept of trauma-at-ophilia, which is something that she invented.
00:05:15
Speaker
And basically, the idea is, in psychoanalysis, There's often a focus on, I mean, in therapy more broadly, there's a focus on trauma, but from the perspective of something that you need to try to cure and sort of get rid of and move past by fixing in order to have the sort of healthy life for the patient.
00:05:38
Speaker
And her idea is that, well, trauma can be a thing which structures like core aspects of your identity or core aspects of your life. And just the fact that something originated from a traumatic experience doesn't necessarily mean that it in itself is bad.
00:05:54
Speaker
And so rather we should think about how to like integrate these different aspects into someone's life in a way that works for them without necessarily thinking of it from a framework of let's eradicate trauma.
00:06:06
Speaker
So she talks about this as a traumatophilic idea. There's an episode of BoJack that is basically about this concept. Oh, which episode? Wait, isn't like every episode about BoJack kind of about this? Every episode of BoJack is to some degree about trauma.
00:06:19
Speaker
But there's a particular episode where a writer character, Diane, is trying to justify writing a novel about... like a food court detective, it's YA novel, it's fun, and it's not the heavy trauma-informed memoir that she was originally going to write. And part of the reason that it's so hard for her to move on to this different project that doesn't incorporate her trauma is that she has this concept that her trauma ought to be good damage somehow it ought to build her up it ought to be incorporated into the beautiful personal artifact that she becomes and the specific thing that is used as a metaphor here is this japanese art form involving broken pottery that is reassembled using gold and some kind of glazing technique i don't remember the detail
00:07:11
Speaker
but it ends up with like gold filling the cracks and it looks very beautiful. And it turns out that that metaphor as one for her life is kind of bullshit.
00:07:24
Speaker
I would say she takes it even further in a lot of ways in this book and that she and Pellegrini take it further in in how they talk about it in the context of gender. But we'll get to that. so Here's how the book opens. I think there's some interesting context to start with.
00:07:39
Speaker
We didn't set out to write a book. We were forced to by repression. Or to be more precise, we were driven to complete this volume out of sheer determination to do something about the repression we were met with during the summer of 2022. The process of this volume coming into being mirrors some of the very processes we theorize in its pages.
00:07:59
Speaker
It is in the nature of the human being to treat experiences that are difficult, painful, even traumatizing. Out of that treatment can arise self-theorizations, in this case, psychoanalytic theorizations, that are not efforts to cope with or to survive trauma, but that, to the contrary, take up the energies roused by trauma to invent something new.
00:08:20
Speaker
Yeah, so what they're referring to here with the we didn't set out to write a book is the They wrote this paper, which forms the first chapter of the book, which we'll get to in a minute.
00:08:32
Speaker
And it was submitted for this prize that it actually won. So the International Psychoanalytic Association, after a lot of back and forth and a lot of politics, was a big international, I mean, old psychoanalytic academic group.
00:08:45
Speaker
They formed a sexual and gender diversity studies committee, basically to address the fact that psychoanalysis has sort of a serious problem when it comes to sexual and gender diversity and how it's treated. I've seen little hints of that here and there. Yeah.
00:08:58
Speaker
This paper won the prize. It called the Tiresias Prize. Part of the prize was that the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee wanted the papers to be published by the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. So it wasn't quite that like winning the prize meant you got published, but it was kind of they were working towards like, OK, we'll submit it and seriously consider your paper for publication.
00:09:17
Speaker
They submitted the paper. It was accepted with some recommended revisions. And I mean, this is how academic papers go. You accept the publication, but then there's some suggestions they want you to consider.
00:09:28
Speaker
There is a difference between saying, you know here are some suggestions we want you to consider versus here are some changes you have to make in order for this to be accepted, right? So it can be accepted with revisions in that way, or it can be accepted and then here, consider these changes. And so they were going back and forth in a couple of rounds, then they had finalized what the paper was gonna look like.
00:09:44
Speaker
And so then when they sent in what they assumed to be the final thing, they included this acknowledgments. This project insists on welcoming queer subjects, patients as well as candidates and analysts, who have too often been treated as problems for psychoanalysts rather than as offering opportunities from which to think our metapsychology anew.
00:10:02
Speaker
Resting such space is not easy nor always pleasant, but it is necessary and critical to psychoanalysis's survival. May future generations of queer and trans analysts and patients never encountered what many of us who are queer identified have had to,
00:10:17
Speaker
that more than anything is the vision of our work in this paper. They highlighted those. They said, you cannot include this. We can't, we're not going to publish this with this included. Pellegrini and Sakatopoulou said, we're not going to publish it without these acknowledgements. If you are trying to say that we're not allowed to acknowledge the history of opposition to gender variance in psychoanalysis, then what are we even doing here? Like, what is even the point?
00:10:39
Speaker
Luckily for them, Marco Posadas seems cool. He working with some other people, they got together and this book got published. So that was what they said, we didn't set out to write a book was basically they had this paper and they thought, okay, this should still get wide acknowledgement. And the it was published in a book with one other paper and then some other extra material, which we'll also talk about.
00:11:01
Speaker
So that's basically the background of the publication of this book. The book is essentially three papers stapled together. The first one, which is going to be largely what we focus on for our theory portion, is called Feminine Boy Trauma as a Resource for Self-Theorization.
00:11:16
Speaker
There's a second paper, which is called like clinical encounters with non-binary genders. It's not a bad paper. It's pretty good. Mostly the paper is explaining to other psychoanalysts that when one of your patients says, hey, I want you to use they, them pronouns, you should just start doing that instead of making them argue with you about the edible complex for hours first and why it like why that is the right move.
00:11:38
Speaker
Correct. You should just start doing that. And that doesn't foreclose like fluidity or anything else. But Helen, what about the instinct towards control?
00:11:49
Speaker
What about my dominance in this patient psychoanalyst relationship? Yeah, so that's kind of what the paper is about. And then the third paper is more or less an appendix. It's somebody else's work that we are are going to talk about as well.
00:12:05
Speaker
The work of a guy named Jean Laplanche. So basically, they there's a bit of a preface. So they talk a little bit about, okay, what do we want to do in this paper? They have this metaphor of the minotaur.
00:12:19
Speaker
They're saying, in the past, when psychoanalysis has been sort of interdisciplinary, or thought about bringing other ideas into the field, it is... Like the Minotaur. Now, psychoanalysis love these like Greek mythology comparisons, right? In fact, the Tiresias Award, we should say like Tiresias is this figure in Greek mythology who was a a prophet and he gets turned into a woman and then back to a man and has this whole gender journey. And and this is really like people love talking about this in specifically like queer psychoanalytic circles. So that's why it's called the Tiresias Award.
00:12:50
Speaker
Psychoanalysts are fucking nerds. Let's be honest. yeah Yeah. And we say that Affectionately-ish? Sometimes. When we don't like psychoanalysts, I should say, it's not because they're nerds. It's for other reasons. The nerdiness is endearing.
00:13:06
Speaker
yeah Yeah. And those reasons have already shown up in our narrative. Yeah. And in our other episodes about psychoanalysis, which has been a ah villain of our podcast before. So, right, they have this this little passage, much like the minotaur, the mythological monster who is not sacrificed as ordained, but is kept alive by a constant stream of youths sent to him for his consumption.
00:13:27
Speaker
Psychoanalysis is kept alive in part by metabolizing the tributes of interdisciplinary contact. So basically, they're like, sometimes some ideas in psychoanalysis need to die. But instead of doing that, we bring in this new theory and then we kind of metabolize it into psychoanalysis. so we we don't let go of the things that we really should let go of.
00:13:45
Speaker
And that's bad. And so as we talk about bringing in queer theory into psychoanalysis, it's not, we we want to avoid that. Okay. I'm not sure we really need to bring the Minotaur myth into this, but sure. I just, yeah, I, yeah.
00:13:57
Speaker
That's I didn't have you read the whole passage, but it's just kind of like a cute little moment. And then this is, I think, a more revealing sort of what do they want to do? What brought about this project? This is, I think, for them, because not only do they talk about this a little bit more at length throughout the book, but in interviews, they bring up this story a lot as sort of a or an important episode in Anne Pellegrini's life.
00:14:19
Speaker
For a long time, we have been preoccupied with an experience that one of us, Pellegrini, had with a lesbian-identified student in an undergraduate classroom. The course, taught in the late 1990s, was Introduction to Lesbian and Gay Studies.
00:14:35
Speaker
what might today be offered under the expanded name Introduction to LGBTQ Studies. The tilt of the class was social constructionist, and I, Pellegrini, had just finished a multi-day series of lectures on The Will to Knowledge, the first volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.
00:14:53
Speaker
I paused for questions and comments. A lesbian student's hand shot up. In retrospect, it was more like a fist in the air. I get it. I get it, the student said somewhat impatiently. Heterosexuality and homosexuality are socially constructed in recent historical inventions.
00:15:07
Speaker
Fine. But what I want to know is what made me a lesbian. The arm came down, but the challenge hung in the room. I remember saying something like this. You're right.
00:15:18
Speaker
Prior to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you might not have been able to think of yourself as a lesbian, but that still cannot tell us why that category and not some other one that was also available in your current moment grabbed you.
00:15:31
Speaker
Why that name and not another? Okay. So they're starting to notice some tensions. They're saying we have all this gender theory, which notices historically, these identities coming to being.
00:15:44
Speaker
But there's a gap between that understanding and understanding the individual, right? Like, Well, it's all about to be quite simple. Trannies and lesbians and so on were born that way.
00:15:57
Speaker
So this is in fact like one of the central things they're trying to discuss is this exact concept. Now, one of the interesting things they say is later after this episode, that student came to identify as trans.
00:16:09
Speaker
And so he's not a lesbian anymore. He's a trans guy. And so they have sort of like, they're like, this underscores the question even more. There is a real question.
00:16:19
Speaker
What made me a lesbian, right? Why this word and not another? Because in fact, another word would later be chosen. And so how do we narrativize that? How do we understand that? What do we do with that? So here is kind of the conclusion of this like introduction section.
00:16:35
Speaker
really this is sort of the thesis of not the main thesis of their technique but basically this is the thesis of their problematic the thing they're trying to respond to To put this more bluntly, we find the notion of core gender identity at best simplistic and at worst problematic.
00:16:52
Speaker
The idea that anyone is, at core, straight or gay or bi, cis or trans or non-binary, or insert your gender term here, reasserts a kind of Ptolemaic cosmology of gender and sexuality in which the true self is the centered core around which a sun of meanings rotates.
00:17:10
Speaker
we posit that anything that characterizes our sense of self precipitates through how we treat the other's incursion into us. The self is thus what gets crafted in the wake of, and in the effort to treat, that invasiveness.
00:17:24
Speaker
At stake is not essence. For example, was AP student really lesbian or really trans, but how the subject is self-theorized at any one particular moment.
00:17:36
Speaker
I am kind of suspecting, actually, that there is a bit of conflation going on here between their interest in understanding the architecture of the mind as they construct it, the architecture of the self, and and their interest in being clinicians.
00:17:55
Speaker
It does not seem actually important at all to me on a clinical level that we be able to understand what makes one a lesbian or what makes one trans. That's a question of academic or theoretical or maybe even sociological import. It's something worth talking about, but that's not actually the context in which they're discussing it.
00:18:17
Speaker
So that's an interesting point. I would say so far we can't really say right because we haven't gotten into really the meat of their argument this is a statement of a problem and i would say yeah right now with what we've gone through it's sort of impossible to really evaluate what they're saying i find some of this compelling the I mean, you're a postmodernist, Helen. You're all about the idea that there is no truth. You just want genders and identities to be scattering all around the place like like billiard balls around a table. Yeah.
00:18:52
Speaker
But yeah, I would say there's definitely some possible tensions a rising here. And they're aware of these to a large extent. And so we're going to get into that. We're going to take a little bit of a diversion. So there's this little thing here. it reasserts a kind of Ptolemaic cosmology of gender and sexuality. This metaphor of the Ptolemaic cosmology, I mean, it's really common throughout a lot of academic disciplines. People love this story of thetomaic versus the versus Copernican cosmology and the idea of a Copernican revolution. I mean, this is everywhere in science. People are always proclaiming that they have the next Copernican revolution as like their pet theory, right? So this is this is common.
00:19:28
Speaker
But they're really drawing on the work of, and and they are not pretending not to, they are drawing on the work of a French psychoanalyst who lived from 1924 2012 named Jean lelanche And they actually publish one of his papers in this book as sort of an appendix, as here's some background info that you should really, if you really want to sort of understand this and study this as a lay person, here is a good place to start with Laplache.
00:19:53
Speaker
So, of course, one of the other things I texted you a bunch while prepping this is like, this is the most Helen episode ever. So there's some theory for our theory. So we're going to get into Jean Laplache now. Oh, great. All right. It's French philosopher time. This should only take three or four hours. Deeper into the dungeon we go. So he was really interested in rescuing a version of the Freudian seduction theory, which we've talked about on this podcast before. So the Freudian seduction theory was early in his career as he's developing the principles of psychoanalysis. Freud becomes interested in this idea that neuroticism always originates.
00:20:31
Speaker
from experiences of sexual abuse in childhood. That's a little bit of a simplification, but that's basically what the seduction theory is. And this comes out of a bunch of experiences where he's talking to female patients and they are describing sexual trauma that they experienced in childhood. And it's made pretty clear to him that this is like hurtful for them.
00:20:54
Speaker
Laplanche says, well, actually, we should take this a step further. Here is basically, he wants to explain how not only neuroses, but in fact, normal, quote unquote, subjectivity also arises in a sense from an invasion of the other.
00:21:11
Speaker
So this is from Wikipedia. Freud, who repeatedly compared the psychoanalytic discovery to a Copernican revolution, was for Laplanche both his own Copernicus, but also his own Ptolemy.
00:21:23
Speaker
On the Copernican side, there is the conjoint discovery of the unconscious and the seduction theory, which maintains the sense of otherness. On the Ptolemaic side, there is, to Laplanche, the misdirection of the Freudian return to a theory of self-centering.
00:21:39
Speaker
Thus what Laplanche calls Freud's going astray, a disastrous shift from a Copernican to a Ptolemaic conception of the psyche, occurred when Freud replaced his early seduction theory of sexuality as an alienist de-centering the psyche, with one centered upon the individual.
00:21:57
Speaker
The illusion of a universe that Laplanche would characterize as Ptolemaic where the ego feels it occupies the central position. Yeah, so he is doing something a bit weird here.
00:22:08
Speaker
Parts of it, I would say, i think he's kind of cooking and parts of it are a little odd. He's saying there is this traumatic incursion of the other into your ego from a very early age.
00:22:19
Speaker
And this, either going well or not, is what causes neuroses. So it's it's a bit odd. But he's trying to sort of say this is sort of the real version of the seduction theory that we should rescue out of Freud's early work and that Freud failed to arrive at because he cast away this idea. So it kind of seems like when he's talking about this invasion of the otherness giving rise to the self, he's talking more about something of a metaphorical otherness.
00:22:51
Speaker
It's maybe not the literalism that we saw in our Schoenwolf episode, where, for example, the presence of the mother's breast activates this sort of cascade of reactions that then turns into someone being a faggot at age 24. I would say that one of the strengths of Laplanche is that he's able to work at that more like metaphorical, psychological level, trying to actually understand how those things work as opposed to literally thinking that your physical experience with the breast causes you to think you have a bad penis or that your mother has a bad penis inside her.
00:23:27
Speaker
Right. Or many, as it turns out. Go listen to our Shona Wolf episode if you want some like some really deranged shit. Yeah, that's still one of the most deranged episodes we've recorded.
00:23:38
Speaker
So he then has a bit to say about gender. So the essay that is published in this book is called Gender, Sex, and the Sexual. And he opens up with a pretty straightforward thesis.
00:23:50
Speaker
Gender is plural. It is ordinarily double, as in masculine-feminine, but it is not so by nature. It is often plural, as in the history of languages, and in social evolution.
00:24:03
Speaker
Sex is dual. It is so by virtue of sexual reproduction and also by virtue of its human symbolization, which sets and freezes the duality as presence-slash-absence, phallic-slash-castrated.
00:24:16
Speaker
The sexual is multiple, polymorphous. The fundamental discovery of Freud, it is based on repression, the unconscious, and fantasy. It is the object of psychoanalysis.
00:24:29
Speaker
Proposition. The sexual is the unconscious residue of the symbolization repression of gender by sex. Yeah, again, I think we're in a situation where I've given you the thesis statement. And so a lot of the whether it's good or bad is going to rest on how it's actually cashed out in the argument.
00:24:47
Speaker
Part of what he wants to do is to make a point about the meanings of these three words, gender, sex, and the sexual. So without sharing his sort of definition, it's hard to evaluate this. So I can say there's definitely some reactionary stuff in his work. It's not it's not perfect.
00:25:01
Speaker
But sort of what he means when he says sex is dual, I mean, he's not... He's not talking about pure biology in a sense. He at length talks about a skepticism of biological sociological divide.
00:25:15
Speaker
He doesn't want to understand gender and sex as... sitting on opposite sides of that, that sex is this purely biological thing, and then gender is this purely sociological thing. So what he's claiming here is gender is this experience that the individual has that is social in nature and is related to the incursion of the other end of the self in society.
00:25:40
Speaker
And this is in a way true. And I think he, I don't know if he intends this even to be as literally read as it could be, but he is saying We produce this thing called sex, which we insist is dual. There is an erasure that happens there. There is a repression that happens there.
00:25:54
Speaker
And the residue of that repression is what he wants to call the sexual. I don't understand that at all. Okay. so let's try ah let's read a little bit more and see if if explaining some of these terms illuminates that.
00:26:06
Speaker
So he actually really wants to say like this divide between sex and gender really is latent already in Freud. This is a pretty radical claim in some ways, in a way because those concepts didn't really exist in the sense that like Freud didn't have two different words to talk about sex and gender.
00:26:28
Speaker
So what he really needs to do is explain these two different concepts and show them working in Freud under this one German word that they both used. Okay, wait, let me ask you a question about the terms here. Yeah.
00:26:39
Speaker
When he says gender is plural, yeah Does he mean that it is plural within an individual? So particular individual has multiple genders?
00:26:50
Speaker
He says it is often plural as in the history of languages and in social evolution, which to me suggests that he means it in some sense that is distinctly outside of the history of languages and distinctly outside of social evolution.
00:27:04
Speaker
yeah So by process of elimination, I'm guessing he means within the individual, but it's very unclear. Yeah, I think that's something to to pay attention to.
00:27:15
Speaker
So he expands first on this idea of like the unconscious fantasy and the object of psychoanalysis being this thing called the sexual. Enlarged sexuality is the great psychoanalytic discovery.
00:27:29
Speaker
Pretty big fan myself. maintained from beginning to end and difficult to conceptualize, as Freud himself shows when he tries to reflect on the question in, for example, his introductory lectures.
00:27:41
Speaker
It is infantile, certainly, more closely connected to fantasy than to the object, and is thus autoerotic, governed by fantasy, governed by the unconscious.
00:27:52
Speaker
Isn't the unconscious ultimately the sexual? One can legitimately ask this question. s So for Freud, the sexual is exterior to even prior to the difference of the sexes, even the difference of the genders.
00:28:05
Speaker
It is oral, anal, or paragenital. Yeah. so I think to kind of answer your question about like, it is often plural as in the history of languages and social evolution in terms of gender. He's not saying that there's these genders which exist in the individual outside of social evolution. So much as he is saying we can see changes in like, there is a multiple...
00:28:30
Speaker
There's like a multiplicity of possibilities for one's gender. And that multiplicity does change with language and it changes with social evolution, but it's not entirely contained in either of those things. It's not purely a linguistic thing, although it is related to language. It's not purely like a social evolution thing, although it is going to be affected by those things.
00:28:49
Speaker
And the repression of that into this duality that also exists, has a psychic reality that's not just a product of psychoanalysis, but is something people actually think is sort of a real duality of um of of sex, produces this unconscious, produces this sexuality. Okay.
00:29:08
Speaker
He gets really in the weeds here, and I caught a lot of stuff that I was originally going to make you read. This is why it took me so long to prep for the Freud episode. I fucking hate reading psychoanalysis, Helen.
00:29:21
Speaker
It's hard. It's bad. Yeah. It's not as bad as I was expecting when I started learning about it. Sometimes there's like valuable stuff that I can extract. but Some of this stuff is bad.
00:29:34
Speaker
He is also a nerd and he gets really into, i would say, some... like fun sophistry if you like sophistry but largely like not that important things so one of the things he wants to really emphasize here there's a point to be made here it's not entirely value oh valueless but he wants to really get into this idea of okay if the sexual is the thing that is repressed by the symbolization of sex, he almost wants to take that as a definition. He wants to say, of course, child sexuality, the sexual for the child is the thing that the adults repress. And so this is not an observation. It's actually a definition.
00:30:16
Speaker
And of course, that's the stuff that we as psychoanalysts care about is the stuff that is under the surface that's forming the subconscious. Okay, that's kind of true, but I don't know. like It's a little bit of shuffling around words and and having fun with them as opposed to really talking about what's clinically relevant, I guess. Well, it's just like the centaur, Helen.
00:30:39
Speaker
Yeah? The mighty centaur, as it shoots its bow into the targets, which are scattered all around, piercing each and yet marking each individually despite their alike treatment.
00:30:52
Speaker
You see the meaning. Yeah, perfectly said. So, right. So he wants to talk about, and and I would say also, in a way he wants to talk about this as a generalized seduction theory, but there is a little bit of an erasure here.
00:31:08
Speaker
In some accounts of the seduction theory, what we're interested in is abuse. He is talking about the incursion of the other both specifically of the parent and like, yeah, like the parents incursion on childhood development.
00:31:23
Speaker
So it's not entirely metaphorical, but he doesn't necessarily mean things that we would say are abuse that need to be fixed, right? When you find out about widespread child abuse, it's beyond, maybe there is a clinical thing. How do you help this adult who is dealing with this trauma? But there's also like ah another question, which is,
00:31:40
Speaker
How do we stop that from happening? Right. And and here, so it's it's a little bit odd to make a metaphor out of abuse in this way. So I would, I don't, you know, I want to point to that. It's not super relevant for what we're going to talk about. so we don't want to spend too much time on it. But I think it is important to say, like, he is saying something a little bit different than Freud, I think, when he's talking about the seduction theory.
00:32:01
Speaker
I mean, if he's not necessarily connecting it to abuse, it's not clear to me in what sense it is the seduction theory at all. Right. So I would say it's a bit misleading to call this the seduction theory. And there is this investment in reading what he wants to advocate for as already existing in Freud.
00:32:19
Speaker
i find this move very questionable. Maybe Laplanchians, who have read a lot more of his stuff, have answers to that. Okay. Okay. I would love for Laplanchians actually to get in our mentions and start arguing with me. that I would have a great time with that. So please do that if you want to. Absolutely. That's Helen's dream.
00:32:34
Speaker
Exactly. There's nothing she wants more in life. So now we get onto his stuff about gender. Okay, so let me give you an example of the kind of thing he's talking about, though, with the parents' incursion. So he would say, you know, maybe...
00:32:46
Speaker
He does actually talk about the assignment of gender at birth as something which like has this like social relevance. So this is an example of the incursion of the other, right? Before you have this conception of your body or whatever, like the doctor at the moment of your birth says...
00:33:03
Speaker
you are a boy or you are a girl, that is pretty clearly an incursion of the other onto your psychic life. But it also happens in a more diffuse way because it's not just that one moment, but it's also the way that everybody's going to treat you from that moment on. And then it can also be more complicated by the fact of maybe your father really wanted a boy. And so he's going to treat you differently, even if you are also being treated as a girl because of this other incursion, right? So he's saying we should pay attention to this kind of thing as...
00:33:32
Speaker
formative for this is what constitutes at least part of what constitutes the, the sexual for children. As you're talking about this, I am thinking about how with intersex people, his thesis of the sexual being the unconscious residue of repression of gender can be like understood in a pretty literal way. I mean, the doctor looks at you and says,
00:34:00
Speaker
This child, which has, say, ambiguous genitals, something like that, is a boy, is a girl. And then standard practice often is for the doctor to go in and do surgery and adjust you physically to fit that.
00:34:15
Speaker
yeah And in that sense, sexuality, which is claimed to be like this purely physical thing, is actually displayed as a direct residue of these concepts of gender intruding into the self.
00:34:31
Speaker
Right. So he actually starts to touch on some of these ideas. So he starts to talk about gender. Again, it's a little bit of a mixed bag, but here we go. The third term is gender, which was first introduced in English, but which came to be translated or transposed into different languages, and in particular into French.
00:34:48
Speaker
The notion of gender is currently enjoying such success among sociologists, feminists, and especially among feminist sociologists, that it is supposed to have been introduced by them. In fact, it is now established that the term was introduced by the sexologist John Money in 1955.
00:35:05
Speaker
John Money, not a friend of the pod, and later reintroduced with well-known success by Robert Stoller, who in 1968 created the term core gender identity. He thus integrated the term into specifically psychoanalytic thought.
00:35:20
Speaker
Yeah, so he's making this point that in fact, gender does have this repressive quality. So let's do a little bit of a fact check here.
00:35:31
Speaker
So was the term introduced by sexologist John Money? Sort of complicated. in order to do a fact check, we need to bring... Your best friend and best tool co-pilot, Helen is a huge co-pilot fan. Yeah, I asked Claude. no I asked the third theory book for our theory and practice episode. Oh my God. Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Jell-Peterson.
00:35:57
Speaker
Helen, you're going to fucking kill me. What is happening? You were just like, I've got all this French kindling around my apartment. I need to unload this onto Sarah.
00:36:07
Speaker
Jules Jell-Peterson is in French. Okay, whatever. okay we're not going to get too much into history as a transgender child. I just, yeah, I wanted to ground this in a little bit of historical reality because this French psychoanalyst is making some claims that are not quite true, but are largely, they're not terrible, but let's, you know, I wanted to bring in somebody who knew what she was talking about to to tell us about this.
00:36:29
Speaker
So essentially, close enough to not true to justify bringing in a third book. Exactly. There's about to be a fourth book, Sarah. I hope you're ready. Okay. This is my punishment. This is my revenge.
00:36:41
Speaker
What did I do to you? For making me watch Dark Knight Returns. That's so much less cruel. I'm so much less cruel than you, Alan. How is this cruel? Okay.
00:36:55
Speaker
You hate me. No, i don't hate you. and don't even hate the French. It is true that the word gender in this context emerges in the fifty s with sexology and with the treatment of intersex patients. And he actually doesn't really...
00:37:14
Speaker
mentioned that it's about the treatment of intersex patients. He just says, oh, sexology, you know, sexologists are researching sex and they create this notion of gender and then it gets taken up by feminist sociologists.
00:37:25
Speaker
But really it does have to do with this story of repression that he's telling. So the one thing that, i mean, Jules Jules Peterson does say, look, people often do credit this to John Money. John Money is a little bit overemphasized historiographically here.
00:37:40
Speaker
But what is this concept of gender that's being created? What is it meant to do, right? Because in a lot of people's minds, gender and this idea that you have a different gender than sex is something which originates from a progressive point of view.
00:37:51
Speaker
But she wants to make the case that actually there's something else going on that we should pay attention to. Although gender has come to be associated with cultural malleability and feminist political projects, as far as its conditions of emergence are concerned, it is better described as a medical device mobilized to face the potential conceptual collapse of binary sex.
00:38:10
Speaker
As Jennifer Gurman explains, feminists in the 1970s who popularized the term gender outside medicine churned to the work of sexologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. especially Money and his colleague Robert Stoller, to leverage the category against patriarchal definitions of sex as biologically determined.
00:38:29
Speaker
Yet at the same time, as she points out, it has become something of perceived wisdom that gender was the invention of feminism. In reality, however, even the analytic separation of sex and gender was actually
Queer Childhood and Psychoanalytic Challenges
00:38:41
Speaker
a product of Stoller's work in the nineteen sixty s For money installer, of course, the distinction between sex and gender was never meant to undermine sex or advance feminist projects.
00:38:52
Speaker
On the contrary, the concept of gender was meant to save the sex binary from imminent collapse by offering a new developmental justification for coercive and normalizing medical intervention into intersex children's bodies.
00:39:05
Speaker
Gender would make non-binary morphology into underdevelopment, allowing medicine to claim that sex assignment was merely as normal completion. Yet from the 1970s on, feminist and, later, queer and trans projects seem to have increasingly lost sight of the conservative historical context of gender as invention.
00:39:23
Speaker
Work at the Crossroads of Trans and Intersex Studies by Sharon E. Priaves, David A. Rubin, Jemima Repo, and Paul Bri-Pasadio has only recently begun to revisit the significance of gender's historicity and to revise its misattribution to politically progressive projects.
00:39:42
Speaker
Okay, so to be clear, like Jules Gil-Peterson and certainly us are not saying non-binary genders are reactionary in any way, right? We're not playing the disco Elysium game of are women bourgeois, right? I'm not trying to talk about like the reactionary or progressive status of like an individual's gender. The point is just to say...
00:40:02
Speaker
There is a problematic to talk about here, which is this invention of the core gender identity as something that's going to rescue the fact that sex is not binary. Right. And then it gets taken up by these progressive movements. But there is something to still pay attention to here.
00:40:17
Speaker
It's a little unclear to me what the disagreement with Laplanche is here. These seem to be very much aligned. Yeah. Here's the tension that I wanted to bring up with Laplanche. Laplanche is saying there is this psychological thing, gender, which is multiple, and then it's getting suppressed into sex.
00:40:37
Speaker
But he sees this as something which is happening psychically in the individual. And then he's bringing in this you know invention of the concept of gender, But he wants to really say, already Freud was talking about gender, right? We have this word gender, which is invented by the sexologists, but Freud was already talking about this concept and there is this multiplep this multiple thing happening. And that's true, that there, in some sense, we should say, like, there is gender variance that predates the introduction of the word gender by doctor, by sexologists in 1955. He's not trying to point to a conservative historical context around the word gender. He just wants to locate this concept of gender earlier in history and in particular with someone that his work is descended from, which is the same phrase. So that's one thing he wants to do. And the other thing he wants to do is talk about it as repressing something that's psychically happening in individuals, but he's not paying attention to the physical repression that's happening with intersex patients.
00:41:36
Speaker
right So he is not really paying attention to the fact that the stakes of this are not, not that psychic stakes are nothing, right? But there's a real repression here, which he is kind of ignoring, and then talking about this other repression, which is also has some reality to it.
00:41:49
Speaker
um But I think that not paying attention to the fact that it's in the context exactly of intersex patients is a little bit of a of a lacuna. The other book that I'm not going to have you read anything from...
00:42:01
Speaker
that I read in prepping for this, but which I recommend if you, especially when Jules Gil-Peterson talks about work at the crossroads of transit and intersex studies that is kind of revitalizing this question and looking in this. And I think this book does a really good job with this. And it's just so far afield from the practice we're eventually going to get to.
00:42:20
Speaker
that I can't justify making you read it. Hermaphrodite Logic by Juliana Gleason. It is a history of intersex liberation. That's the subtitle, History of Intersex Liberation. And it's about...
00:42:31
Speaker
sort of ah beginnings of these medical projects to correct, quote unquote, intersex patients, and then the development of that and then development of liberatory projects, and where that is getting today. There's a lot of overlap with trans studies. I think it's important to have these kinds of things which do focus on intersex patients as something that's different than than trans studies, right? Like there's, these are different phenomena.
00:42:54
Speaker
But again, she has this sort of historical thing. She tells a lot of the same history. She then tells a lot more history of intersex liberation movements in the 90s. And but she has this one line that I think is really interesting to think about in this context and that will be relevant for us moving forward.
00:43:08
Speaker
So there's this line, writings from those subjected to childhood intersex surgeries show us one childhood sex assignment does not look like the next. right? And so this is, I think, something that also Laplanche is a little bit missing with his generalized seduction theory is there's this idea of the incursion of the other, but sometimes that looks like a doctor declaring something, and sometimes it looks like non-consensual surgery, and those are very different.
00:43:33
Speaker
So that's the end of the Jules Gil-Peterson, Juliana Gleeson side quest. Okay, okay. CD dot dot slash. Yeah, we're about to finish up La Planche. Okay, so there is some good stuff in La Planche. I don't think it's all bad. I think there is some good theory to rescue here. i think we should pay attention to this fault line of the like theoretical stakes. And sometimes he gets a little bit involved in exactly this thing you brought up earlier of we're interested in how do these things work on a theoretical level is different than sort of the real personal stakes or the clinical stakes. Like how do these play out in the clinic? There's something similar happening here.
00:44:08
Speaker
he has this really interesting quote from Freud, ah how psychoanalysis can't tell you what a woman is, but rather how one comes into being. So he's really trying to read this kind of dynamic reading of Freud. And so some of that is really good.
00:44:21
Speaker
He gets a little bit more into, and this is, I think, where you really start to get the conflict with the Jules Gil-Peterson approach. So he he finishes this kind of general thing. Here are the three terms. Here's the idea. And then the second half of his essay is this.
00:44:34
Speaker
I now come to my second part, which is the history of the gender-sex-sexual triad. By history, I mean purely and simply the infantile genesis of this triad and the human being, the little human being, a genesis that psychoanalysts must not hesitate to approach.
00:44:50
Speaker
I think he just says out loud all of the tensions that I was kind of reading into the earlier parts. He says, we're going to talk about the history of gender and sex. And by that, I mean the history in the child. But who is the child, right? There's not a child. There's many children.
00:45:03
Speaker
And these concepts also have a history that is like the real history of people using them and them changing. And so... So there's some interesting stuff here. There is this understanding that taking is given the split between sex, biological, gender, sociological is not really correct and ignores some reactionary tendencies and things which hurt real people.
00:45:28
Speaker
but he doesn't quite know how to go far enough. I would say he's making a bit of a Ptolemaic move here. Sarah just rolled her eyes at me, but that's okay. This is where Pellegrini and Saketopoulou are sort of starting.
00:45:39
Speaker
They want to include queer theory. They want to do like a critical queer studies reading of La Planche to better understand how to treat queer and trans patients. And they don't want to do this game of locating everything in Freud. They want to work like in an interdisciplinary way That is not the minotaur way of just, oh, all of this was already in Freud, so let's consume all of it and show how Freud already knew everything. So they start off from this place of saying there's a real focus in psychoanalysis today on queer children.
00:46:11
Speaker
And if we're going to talk about this, we need to talk about queer children, but we need to understand why that focus is here. And one reason people say is queer childhood is this hot topic in psychoanalysis because there's all these trans rights activists who are trying to shove queer children as like the topic everyone's talking about.
00:46:32
Speaker
Like that's not it at all. Another reason people say is Oh, because all of a sudden there's a bunch of queer kids and we don't know what to do with it, right? Like, you know, back in the day, children weren't queer, but now there's all these queer kids and we have to know what to do with it.
00:46:45
Speaker
And they've read their theory. So they also know, yeah, that that's not true either, right? Like queer kids aren't a new thing. So they have an answer for If queer childhood is becoming such a heated topic, it is because it is the domain where otherwise revered psychoanalytic ideas prove unhelpful, at times even harmful.
00:47:05
Speaker
We could say then that like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, queer childhood forces a reckoning. as it reveals that some of psychoanalysis's foundational ideas lead both our metapsychology and our clinical praxis astray.
00:47:18
Speaker
To put it bluntly, queer childhood confronts psychoanalysis with where we have come up short. Indeed, atypical genders require us to urgently revise the role psychoanalysis has described to biology and psychic life, as if biological sex were gender determinative, to rethink the libidinal alongside gender, as if gender and sexuality were wholly distinct,
00:47:40
Speaker
and to become more discerning about when action should be understood as acting out, as if all action in the domain of gender transition is to be conceptualized as unbridled discharge.
00:47:51
Speaker
They basically say the reason it's such an issue is because there's a problem with psychoanalysis, and because we don't know what to do with trans kids because we keep fucking up, like, as as as a discipline.
00:48:04
Speaker
they are aware of different kinds of reactionary tendencies that look look different in different contexts. So I'm going to have you read this one other little excerpt. It's a little bit later.
00:48:16
Speaker
To us, etiologically and teleologically driven treatments are both cruel and dangerous. We see interventions that work towards sparing the patient from being trans or from having to transition as highly unethical, and in fact, eugenicist.
00:48:32
Speaker
It is no exaggeration to point out the deadly meliorism of psychoanalytic treatments that seem more interested in eliminating transness than in helping patients live and flourish despite the real harms of discrimination trans people so often face.
00:48:45
Speaker
Gender polymorphism is not a symptom to be resolved any more than gender typicality is. I mean, yeah, cooking. Yeah, this is cooking. I think there is some good stuff here.
00:48:57
Speaker
At the same time, it does tell you a lot about psychoanalysis for this to be a bold statement. In a way, this is more than anything like a statement of moral principles, right? They're taking it as given, and I think that they should, that trying to cure or fix trans and queer patients is eugenicist, that the framing of, oh, they they talk about this a little bit at length elsewhere, but already you can see it here. These interventions that work towards sparing the patient from being trans or from having to transition. I mean, we're very familiar with this language in and out in outside of psychoanalysis as well of, oh, you know, I don't want to stop you from transitioning, but I want you to have an easy life. This is something that both, you know, gay and trans kids are are familiar with hearing from, you know, family members or people who think they're being supportive, but are just straight up want to erase.
00:49:45
Speaker
your queer identity. Yeah, I heard that myself. In this context, they say, okay, what evolved politically is an argument that queer kids are born this way. And i didn't want to clip their whole thing here, but this is basically their claim, right? Like in this context, and to defend against these reactionary tendencies and to defend against the widespread use of conversion practices, this argument emerged of saying people are born this way.
00:50:12
Speaker
I think it's interesting they don't really talk about what we've seen, which is that's partly true, but also the born this way argument partly does emerge out of sexology, right? Like it is not emerging from these progressive groups. It is sort of being appropriated by progressive groups out of highly reactionary sexological attempts to reinforce a gender binary.
00:50:36
Speaker
This is not really explored in their argument, even though I think it makes their argument against the born this way dichotomy significantly stronger. But here we have sort of a longer argument, which I think also explains why they don't like this binary choice between what they call the born this way, warped this way dichotomy. So either you're born this way and therefore unfixable, and so therefore we shouldn't do these things to to fix you, or these are acquired, but then therefore possible to eliminate. They also want to talk about why is this stuff clinically relevant? Why as psychoanalysts do we care about making sure that we have a more nuanced understanding of how these things emerge? So this is where we start to really get into like the specifics of their argument versus just generic, like here's something we want to respond to.
00:51:24
Speaker
This binary choice, acquired and therefore possible to eliminate versus immutable and therefore fixed, has also seeped into the culture of psychoanalytic theorizing. We can hear it humming beneath anxieties over social contagion and rapid onset gender dysphoria.
00:51:41
Speaker
and in work that sees transness as a deviation from normal gender caused by trauma, as if atypical genders are those bent out of gender's proper shape. The only alternative to seeing diversity as a warping of normality has seemed to be a doubling down.
00:51:56
Speaker
True homosexuality and true transness are innate, and the existence of queer children proves it. We want to offer a way around this impasse, It is possible to retrospectively discuss what factors may have played a role in someone becoming gender non-conforming or sexually queer without this meaning that their difference is a problem to be fixed.
00:52:15
Speaker
We believe that the field is in dire need of analytic ideas that don't capitulate to the notion that the only way to counter the pathologizing of sexual and gender non-normativities is by imagining them to be innate.
00:52:26
Speaker
Nor is it humane to regard variant genders and sexualities without the resource of psychic complexity that psychoanalysis routinely affords to normative subjects. Thinking about gender as encompassing processes of becoming as opposed to ontological ones is clinically important and theoretically exciting.
00:52:43
Speaker
Being able to formulate clinical hypotheses about how someone's gender, and normative or not, came into being can illuminate possible developmental paths that could, in turn, clinically support the flourishing of our atypically gendered patients.
00:52:56
Speaker
One of the reasons such patients oftentimes rightly do not trust our field is the rampant transphobia within psychoanalysis. But another important factor is that even clinicians who do not work toward eliminating atypical gender may become beset by so much anxiety in working with genderqueer patients that affirming the patient's gender and or are noting the trauma at his occasion through discrimination, violence, policing, etc.,
00:53:18
Speaker
are the furthest they'll go in their explorations. This attitude impoverishes what we as a field can offer our queer and trans patients." Okay, I'm not done with the excerpt, but I got to pause here because this is making me mad. Okay, my prior question about like why is this important for them as therapists to understand is ostensibly being answered here.
00:53:40
Speaker
if It is not being answered here, to be clear. They are saying that we need to provide these alternative theorizations basically so that psychoanalysts will stop treating their trans and queer patients like shit.
00:53:55
Speaker
Yeah. They can stop treating their trans and queer patients like shit without so theory buttressing their their method of doing so. Yeah. They don't need that. That's not a real thing.
00:54:09
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Oh my God. this is Sorry. i'm I'm actually getting like pretty mad. This fucking passage right here. But another important factor is that even clinicians who do not work toward eliminating atypical gender may become beset by so much anxiety in working with genderqueer patients.
00:54:27
Speaker
that affirming the patient's gender and or noting the trauma, blah blah blah, blah, blah, is too difficult for them. You fucking babies. You soft little bitches. Are you kidding me? Oh, I have anxiety. i can't treat my queer patients like human beings. What is wrong with you? You need a fucking justification for that? Fuck you. Yeah, so I guess to continue with my D&D critical role analogy, do you know what a mimic is, Sarah?
00:54:56
Speaker
Yeah, actually, I saw an Ogloff comic about that today. It's a creature which pretends to be, say, a treasure chest. And when an unwary adventurer approaches it and opens the treasure chest, what they find is that it's actually a creature that just has a bunch of teeth and is about to leap on them.
00:55:15
Speaker
So i lied. This is the practice. Oh my god. In fact, I was going to leave this a reveal a little bit later, but you're already mad enough that I think I should reveal it now.
00:55:25
Speaker
The second half of this essay is a case study. Oh no. Oh no. Yeah. Oh, okay. I'm going to finish the excerpt now. Yeah.
00:55:37
Speaker
On more than one occasion, we have found ourselves with patients who describe difficult traumatic events in their lives, such as extreme parental intrusiveness or sexual violation. In the privacy of the consulting room, some such patients need to explore whether there may be links between these experiences and their genders.
00:55:55
Speaker
Any effort to do so is understandably fraught with tremendous shame and exorbitant anxiety. But when patients feel safe, i.e. that the analyst will not seize on the link to question the patient's gender, it becomes possible to explore memories, affects, and experiences that are otherwise unreachable.
00:56:13
Speaker
Yeah. So i think there's a lot to talk about in this long excerpt. I think absolutely you're right. There is something which is not really being answered here. There's more... No, they give an answer.
00:56:25
Speaker
It's just a bad one. Yeah, that's a better way of putting it. I would say this last piece, there's something there about... I've had exactly the experience, not exactly this, but I've had the experience in therapy of...
00:56:42
Speaker
wanting to talk about something gender related to therapist and having a therapist who like giving an affirming answer just like won't really get into it.
00:56:56
Speaker
Basically, it was an issue of, you know I was having a ah block around like being able to come out to some people in my life. And all the therapist could say was, you'll know when it's time. which was a totally unhelpful answer to me. And very much, I think, stemming from this idea of, oh, you're sort of born this way. This is innate. You'll know, right? Like, you'll just know.
00:57:14
Speaker
And this is sort of like, okay, this is why I'm in therapy, though, is that something's not working, and I kind of want to talk it out, and I need you to be able to, like, get in the weeds with me about it a little bit, right? Yeah, I'm not in therapy because I have intuitive certainty about how to proceed with my life. Yeah. So I would say when I started reading this book, I was really excited for it for kind of these reasons, because I had had this bad experience in therapy and I wanted to sort of tackle this idea.
00:57:39
Speaker
At some point around here was really my turning point with, I don't know if I like this book. Unfortunately, i can't find the original paper copy that I read. and marked up anywhere in my stuff. It like got lost in the move, I guess. So I kept track if like, this is exactly where things fell apart for me.
00:57:57
Speaker
I would say one other thing that I don't like in this passage is when they say this binary choice has also seeped into the culture of psychoanalytic theorizing. As we've explained, it originated in sexology and in psychoanalysis. Stoller was a psychoanalyst. So it didn't seep in, its sort of seeped out.
00:58:19
Speaker
So there is a, again, similar to La Plange, kind of a lack of history here, even though they do actually cite Jules Gil Peterson's history of the transgender so child like at several points and recommend it as a text and it's in the bibliography of the book. So they've read it, but they're still not really, I think, owning up to the psychoanalytic origins of some of these ideas, even as they want to talk about the problems in psychoanalysis. Yeah.
00:58:45
Speaker
Okay, it's not totally ah bad. They're aware that there's some political context they need to be aware of. Here is the next short little excerpt. Wait, hang on.
00:58:56
Speaker
The listener might have an objection at this point. and say that in that last part that they actually do offer an explanation for why psychoanalyst might need some theoretical underpinning for how gender identity and such is formed, which is that patients who have difficult traumatic events in their lives might want to explore whether there may be links between these experiences and their genders.
00:59:20
Speaker
I mean, you can do that without having a theory, though. You can just say, like, we don't know much about this. Yeah. But we can talk about it. So in fact, like what I'm perceiving happening here is that they are going to create a web of bullshit just to have the web of bullshit for its own sake. That's, that's to be clear where I see this going.
00:59:46
Speaker
What? That's crazy. God damn it. Oh, yeah. Okay, this was pretty well set up because I really thought that psychoanalysis was going to like, you had selected it as the hero for the episode and it was going to like ride off like a knight to kill some villain. And no, the deception was immaculate.
01:00:09
Speaker
Yeah, I'm so glad. So they're aware of this political context. i'm going to have you read this excerpt and then I'll give a little bit more context as well and sort of summarize a little bit more of what they're saying. It is important to remember that we practice psychoanalysis and live in cultures that still harbor genocidal fantasies of a world with as few gay, lesbian, trans, and queer people as possible.
01:00:31
Speaker
And indeed with as few gay, lesbian, trans, and queer analysts and candidates as possible. For this reason, we are advocating for a psychoanalytic stance that marvels and learns from the persistence with which non-normative subjects appear before the analyst, determined to sustain being who they understand themselves to be despite considerable pressure and hostility from without, such as our attitude about the child whose clinical treatment we will soon discuss.
01:00:56
Speaker
Okay. They are saying there's political context we have to pay attention to here. We can't, you know, there's reasons why people are reticent to share these traumatic experiences or to explore these links. And it is because both within the analyst's office and also more in broad political scene, if we have these conversations about how trauma can inflect queerness or how a traumatic experience could cause someone to be queer, quote unquote,
01:01:21
Speaker
we might be accepting these reactionary models that it's something that can be cured. But for them, their commitment is really trauma is, you know, it's traumatic experiences are bad, right? In the sense that it's like bad that this traumatic thing happened to you. But if we're not, if we're committed to this idea that it's not something to be cured, then it having mobilized this other queer identity doesn't lead you into saying you should do conversion practices and at times they are like very very like i've cut all of this from the thing but they are like really really adamant that they like at no way want to advocate for conversion practices they really say it's like it's way more like the most important and like or be sure of is that we're not doing conversion practices right and like this is like secondary
01:02:04
Speaker
But it's still necessary to be able to have these conversations. And I would agree with you. Like, that doesn't really answer why you need this theory. Anyway, this was the part, the thing where the child is clinical treatment, we will soon discuss, was originally where I was going to do the reveal. but But I got mad too early. You got mad too early. But I'm glad you got mad because this is part of where I was really worried. I had this worry going into this episode that...
01:02:25
Speaker
This wasn't really going to be odious enough. You weren't going to find it odious enough, and then I was going to sort of have to defend this choice. So I think you've already put your finger on a lot of the problems that we're going to explore and this book.
01:02:39
Speaker
So, right. I also think it's important to notice here, there is a... elision between the persistence with which non-normative subjects appear before the analyst, determined to sustain being who they understand themselves to be, despite considerable pressure and hostility from without, that persistence is something which we could think of as like being a property of a broader class of subjects, queer children, who will persist and continue to exist.
01:03:12
Speaker
But the analyst actually has to worry about an individual subject, like like the clinical patient. And there, I think, persistence is a a lot more problematic. And so that's the lack of their ability to separate those. Because at the beginning, they're saying, you know we want to learn from the persistence with which non-normative subjects appear before the analyst. You could interpret that in the first reading of being a sort of more general claim about the broad category of people. But they're saying, this is our attitude about the child whose clinical treatment we will soon discuss. so They really mean persistence in an individual. And I kind of want to just mark, like, let's pay attention to how that idea evolves throughout this case study.
01:03:48
Speaker
Especially for our non-queer listeners out there. I want to give you an example of how taking this sort of marveling at persistence toward the individual thing can end up being problematic.
01:04:02
Speaker
In grad school, I went to a support group that was led by two therapists. one of them trans, one of them a cis lesbian woman. And the cis lesbian woman at one point told me that I was brave for going out in women's clothes.
01:04:19
Speaker
And that is when I stopped going to that support group. Now, was she marveling at my persistence? She certainly was. Was it absurdly cruel thing to express?
01:04:30
Speaker
Yes, it was. Yeah. There's a lot in here that definitely reads like they're aware that the original audience of this paper is highly reactionary psychoanalysts.
01:04:41
Speaker
And that also made me angry, but I think for reasons that are just like, okay, you had to include this because you know that you're writing for an audience that like this isn't going to be obvious to.
01:04:52
Speaker
If in the course of an analytic treatment some sexual or gendered identification does shift, it is because the analytic work galvanizes new self-theorizations. Footnote, we italicize self here to stress that we are speaking only about transformations that proceed from processes that unfold in the subject and that embroil their unconscious life, as opposed to issuing from the analyst's wishes or desires.
01:05:16
Speaker
however well-meaning or therapeutic the analyst understands them to be. To be clear, however, even those shifts are not about the uncovering of some natural or essential truth about the subject.
01:05:28
Speaker
All gender formations are psychically meaningful appearances with material and psychic consequences. To say that gender is an appearance is not to say that gender is illusory or can be changed at will, but that gender is, rather, about how something psychic appears phenomenally.
01:05:45
Speaker
Yeah, so they want to do this analysis and say, look, we understand that both normative and non-normative genders and sexualities have a formation, have a process of psychic formation.
01:05:57
Speaker
if we don't think people are born this way, then we can talk about early childhood to psychology. We can talk about child psychology. and we can talk about psychology more generally and try to understand that formation. They want to stress here that an analyst might think of changing identifications, right, a patient who identifies one way and then switches and then switches again, and, you know, as several times as being somehow delegitimizing. And that does happen, right? Like if you, you could have, you know, certainly there is the reactionary psychoanalyst who would hear the story of the student who is like first a lesbian and then a trans guy saying, oh, well, look at how this sort of inconsistent identification is happening.
01:06:36
Speaker
And this is a sign that's not real. And so they want to say, look, these are real in the sense that this is how all gender and sexualities are formed. they The analytic work is is creating these new kind of self theorizations.
01:06:49
Speaker
And that doesn't necessarily mean that we're sort of finding this essential truth about the subject. Really, these are all phenomena that appear out of the patient psychic reality.
01:07:00
Speaker
They also appear to be attempting to argue essentially that conversion therapy doesn't work. That the analyst is not genuinely capable of changing the subject's gender or sexual identification in some way.
01:07:17
Speaker
And you can kind of see how they're going to trip into some bullshit here because, for example, They talk about sexual or gender identification as coming from analytic work galvanizing new self-theorizations.
01:07:33
Speaker
I don't know. like I know enough people who started taking estrogen, and when they took estrogen, their orientation shifted. Oh, yeah. like that's It's a well-known phenomenon. My gender identity changed after I started taking estrogen.
01:07:48
Speaker
Like it's not all about analytic processes. Yep. And they're clearly constructing the theory where that's really the only explanation. But there's two things here, right? There's analytic work is galvanizing it, but then also the theorization is happening in the self. And in the footnote, they're actually insisting that analysts shouldn't be doing that theorizing for them. The theorizing has to come from the self, even though there's this analytic work galvanizing it Right.
01:08:15
Speaker
Right. So we haven't quite seen this yet, but you could see how that kind of thinking would lead to a kind of egg prime directive sort of idea. Maybe you should explain for the listener what the egg prime directive is, and then you should take a definitive stance on it for the sake of discourse.
01:08:33
Speaker
Okay. No, the the egg prime directive is this idea that gets bandied about mostly in Twitter and other online discourses. But the Prime Directive is taken from Star Trek, is a plot device in Star Trek, which is you've got this crew of people traveling through space, but they're not supposed to interfere with the natural development of a planet and its culture.
01:08:58
Speaker
And this is the prime directive. And pretty much the whole show deals with ways in which this doesn't work. But that's okay. That's fine. Let's put that aside. and let's just uncritically take that idea.
01:09:09
Speaker
an egg is a trans person who hasn't realized they're trans yet. Do eggs exist is also a huge thing of debate. and And in fact, their work would say no, eggs don't exist because it's new self theorizations that are happening. There's no core gender identity.
01:09:27
Speaker
But the egg prime directive is basically you're not allowed to ever tell someone, hey, I think you might be trans because you're interfering with the natural development of their gender. Well, when you put it that way, it sounds stupid, Helen. So I will let the listener infer my stance.
01:09:41
Speaker
They're not fully doing egg prime directive stuff. They're aware that there's an asymmetry. They talk about Laplanche's model of gender. In fact, the next chunk of the paper is like kind of a summary of a little summary. And then towards the end, there's a longer summary of Laplanche's stuff that we're not going to talk about because we already covered Laplanche.
01:09:59
Speaker
But they're saying, look, the thing that distinguishes what they call minoritarian from sort of dominant sexualities or genders is not formation by this puncturing of the other or formation by these kinds of experiences. Rather, it's how those are received by everybody around them.
01:10:16
Speaker
Quote, the self-theorizations minoritarian subjects invent in their effort to negotiate that invasiveness are often turned against them. So... Okay, so they're aware that there's this asymmetry in the way things are reacted to.
01:10:31
Speaker
And so how are they going to sort of square this circle? How are they going to come up with a an actual clinical practice? How would you actually address this kind of situation in practice?
01:10:43
Speaker
So we're about to actually just launch into the case study, but they sort of end with this idea of what they call patient affirmation. We here deliberately blur the adjectival and noun meanings of patient to speak of a kind of affirmation that, contrary to its wild variances, neither simplistic nor rushed.
01:11:01
Speaker
Patient affirmation follows rather than leads the patient, adopting the ethical stance of affirming not the patient's identity, but the patient's right to have their own nonlinear process, which may or may not be legible to the analyst or to other adults.
01:11:18
Speaker
In our opinion, it is often the analyst's therapeutic response to this self-theorizing process that needs improvement. Patient affirmation
Effeminacy, Gender Identity, and Miscommunication
01:11:26
Speaker
is thoughtful and makes use of the slowness of the process.
01:11:30
Speaker
without that amounting to a cautionary slowing down that is forced upon the patient, as, for example, the watchful waiting approach that gender exploratory models demand.
01:11:40
Speaker
So just a quick gloss on this gender exploratory models, what they're referring to is something which is gaining a lot of ground, especially in the UK, but...
01:11:52
Speaker
worldwide of what's called gender exploratory therapy, which explicitly claims not to be conversion practices, but I think under any normal definition of conversion practice pretty obviously is.
01:12:03
Speaker
Essentially, the thing they are exploring is what if you were cisgender? What if you just tried being gay? You have a kid who says, hey, I want to use different pronouns. I want to cut my hair shorter. I want to wear different clothes.
01:12:16
Speaker
So you say, aha, let's explore that in some exploratory therapy. And then you just do what they call watchful waiting, which is like, well, let's wait and let's see how things pan out. Because maybe that won't persist, right? Maybe yeah if we just wait long enough, you'll go back to sort of normal cis, you know, happy identity. And so it's... You just stall them and wait for them to be bullied into repressing.
01:12:41
Speaker
That's the gist of it. Exactly. And so what they're saying is, look, You know, we don't want to rush patience. These puns, like, they always get to me. Patient affirmation, right? They're like, oh, we mean patient as in, like, affirming the patient, but also patient as in, like, we're not rushing the patient. Yeah.
01:12:58
Speaker
Huge jack-off motion from Sarah on the video feed. We really should do video episodes, but we're not going to do video episodes. It sounds like a nightmare to edit. I think they're pointing to something real here, which is... Yeah, we should have something which affirms the patient, which accepts that these things aren't necessarily going to be neat and clean, which isn't saying the fact that you aren't coming in day one and confidently saying, right? What they want to say is, if a patient comes in and says, hey, I think I might be trans. I don't know. Let's talk about it. I want to explore this thing.
01:13:25
Speaker
You shouldn't respond. And I mean, and they're right. Like the thing that needs... improvement is the analyst therapeutic response. You shouldn't respond by saying, oh, because you're not coming in day one and immediately saying confidently and openly, this is my identity, like that delegitimizes your claim. Like you should be patient and understand these things take time.
01:13:43
Speaker
And they want to distinguish that from gender exploratory therapy. They're saying, we're not saying to force the patient to slow down. We're saying you, the analyst, be patient. I would still kind of bristle at this a little bit on the basis that like things which focus on how slow the process should be in some sense, are very suspect to me.
01:14:03
Speaker
I am not aware of any trans person who has ever been rushed into transition, especially by a psychoanalyst. I just don't think that that happens. And in fact, patience, in a sense, is the most typical weapon of transphobes for a few reasons. One is that the process of the irreversible changes of puberty, which are very harmful, only has to be given time to play out.
01:14:34
Speaker
trans children have a sort of natural enemy waiting for them which is 13 years and so transphobes are very aware that if they just shove people off if they just make them wait then they'll experience these changes and ideally they will no longer be trans through some magical means yeah The second reason is that the suffering of not having genuine treatment while trans, of not being able to socially transition, etc., is so extreme that trans people often kill themselves.
01:15:12
Speaker
and so It is part of the transphobes repertoire to put people off of treatment literally because it causes there to be less trans people because they fucking die. That is how turf organizations and turf ideology operates.
01:15:28
Speaker
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly that. Yeah. I don't see anything that's like clearly objectionable in this excerpt. It's like definitely not as bad as the previous excerpts that made me mad. I can see how it would play into that kind of thing, even though it is explicitly disclaiming them. Yeah. But it's not like textually there.
01:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so that's the end of the theory chunk of this. Because now we're going talk about their actual case study and their explanation of how this should play out clinically.
01:15:59
Speaker
So some of these excerpts are a bit longer, because they're very verbose. And they're very verbose in the theory section, and you notice that I summarized or just cut a lot of stuff. Here, they're sharing clinical details that are kind of relevant. So it's also, i want not only to show the relevant clinical details, but their I think their choice of what details are relevant is part of what we need to really analyze here.
01:16:22
Speaker
Alana came to see me at the recommendation of Dr. P, a psychologist who was treating Alana's older son, Henry. Dr. P had helped with Henry's history of severe anxiety, which had been fueling his serious school refusal, a problem previous treatments had failed to impact.
01:16:39
Speaker
As far as Ilana was concerned, Dr. P had restored Henry to normality, a word that she used several times in our initial meeting to explain to me how, under my colleague's care, Henry was able to attend school again.
01:16:52
Speaker
This therapeutic success had resulted in her solid trust in Dr. P's opinion and methods. yielding a positive transference that had mounted to a near-hagiographic idealization. When their younger son, Ori, began to struggle and Dr. P. confidently recommended me, Alana was determined to follow his guidance to the letter.
01:17:10
Speaker
Before we even met, she developed an idealizing transference toward me that involved the expectation that I, too, would be equally effective in treating Ori. Per Alana's description, Ori, the youngest of eight siblings, suffered from being too effeminate.
01:17:23
Speaker
His girly presentation disturbed Alana and her husband. both deeply religious people who found their child's demeanor to contradict their family values. Ori brought unwelcome attention and potential for shame to the family. His delicate mannerisms, feminine presentation, and high-pitched voice were seen by the parents as creating a quote, mountain of other problems, including severe anxiety and social difficulties, end quote.
01:17:47
Speaker
These problems, Ilana explained, included a tendency to want to isolate not playing sports with other boys, being overly worried about others' impressions of him, and an inclination to become preoccupied with matters that should not concern him, such as fashion.
01:18:03
Speaker
I privately wondered if this array of symptoms might relate to this young child's anxiety about his gender presentation, feelings of shame about his femininity, and fears of being unwanted.
01:18:13
Speaker
So quick little thing just, there's in parentheses here, but when it's talking about me and you know I talk to the therapist and stuff, this is all Abhi Sakadopoulou, the psychoanalyst author. Okay, Helen, I just realized that I listened to an episode of a psychoanalysis podcast where the authors of this were being interviewed and I posted about it. And I would like you to read the two posts that I made about it.
01:18:39
Speaker
Oh my God. I remember these posts. These are back in December of last year. And I can't believe... oh my god, and you didn't name the... Okay, sorry. Let me read the posts. I'm listening to a podcast with two cis hosts interviewing two cis co-authors who wrote a book about how trans people are and none of them are saying anything untoward and it sucks to listen to.
01:18:59
Speaker
Non-ex people talking about the nature of the ex is just terrible vibes even when done well. The four of them are a bit congratulatory about their own wokeness and sensitivity toward the topic too, and they seem to have no idea that they're starting from a negative level of legitimacy about the topic.
01:19:14
Speaker
Yeah, so we've noticed where four cis people in a room talking about them would help a lot. And Pellegrini is a they them. OK, well, I was wrong about that. So that's fine. But I would agree that that is largely the vibe of a lot of this.
01:19:30
Speaker
Yeah, I do think it's funny that you specifically didn't name them because you didn't want me to find out what the topic was, presumably because you might have done an episode about the podcast about them.
01:19:41
Speaker
The reason I didn't name them or the podcast is because we were going to do the Shone Wolf episode next, which was about psychoanalysis. And so I didn't want you to find out that I was thinking about and reading about psychoanalysis a bunch. That's really funny. This is a really funny like this is the first time I think this has happened with our fog of war where we both kind of like bumped up on the same thing and we're like, well, I can't tell. you know, I can't tell Sarah about it. And you were like, I can't tell Ellen about it. And now Yeah, we have separately found this strange thing.
01:20:16
Speaker
Yeah, the podcast is ordinary on happiness, by the way. Getting back to this excerpt. One thing that kind of is strange to me here is they don't explicitly state that the thing that they are being asked for is conversion therapy.
01:20:30
Speaker
Which is strange because it seems pretty clear that that's what's being asked for. And I would also say we're already seeing the beginning of this unnecessary psychoanalytic bullshit.
01:20:41
Speaker
When they talk about Ilana had a positive or Ilana had an idealizing transference towards me because of her experience with with Dr. P. Transference is this psychoanalytic idea of like projecting your relationship with one person onto another, right? Onto the analyst. right When you're with the analyst, you're projecting your relationship with your father or your relationship with your mother or or whoever it is that you're talking. you know There's someone who is the analyst is filling in for, and that's transference.
01:21:07
Speaker
That happens. That's maybe something worth talking about here. That's not really what's going on here. You're just talking about, she's just talking about reputation. She's saying, i had a good you know i i came in with a good reputation because this person had had a good experience with analysis before.
01:21:22
Speaker
You don't need to bring transference into this. It's pretty plainly parents asking for conversion therapy. She then explains this Dr. P reached out to her, obviously, because he made the referral. And he said, look, here's my read of the situation. Ori is trans.
01:21:37
Speaker
The parents are are repressing this, preventing him from coming out. He needs help coming out. Now, a note on pronouns. They're going to continue to use he, him. And so because we're talking about this child with he, him, so because they're talking about Ori with he, him, I'm going to continue to use he, him.
01:21:54
Speaker
They will address why they made the choice for he, him later. And so we'll talk about that. But basically, they then talk about a little bit of the context of this. They say, okay, this other therapist said, or he needs help coming out.
01:22:09
Speaker
His parents clearly wanted him to be made normal so he could live in the religious community. And so the therapist is saying, you kind of are in this bind. So they do notice this, but they don't use the word conversion therapy in this context. It's a little strange.
01:22:22
Speaker
And then they give a little bit more context of like their experiences with these sorts of cases in New York City, where Avdi Sakadopoulou is a practicing analyst. Parental attitudes toward boyhood femininity have seen a tectonic shift in the past 15 years.
01:22:36
Speaker
In New York City, tectonic shifts are like extremely slow, by the way. It's kind of part of their nature. yeah they They just want it to mean like a wild swing, but it doesn't. In New York City, where both of us practice, fewer and fewer parents are requesting help straightening out their children.
01:22:54
Speaker
Most seek help about how to best support their children, which oftentimes involves parents asking therapists to diagnose relate what relates to gender and what relates to early forms of sexuality that first become detectable as gender.
01:23:07
Speaker
Psychoanalysts get caught up in this too. The issue of whether a child is proto-gay or proto-trans is one of the most frequent and complex clinical questions currently preoccupying psychoanalysts treating children with atypical gender presentations.
01:23:21
Speaker
However, the question, is this child really trans or really gay, treats gender and sexuality as stable ontological essences, as if, with the right protocols or diagnostic probes, one could conceivably discern another's true gender or sexuality.
01:23:37
Speaker
The gay versus trans distinction is problematically premised on the well-established analytic falsehood that sexuality and gender are separable from each other. Yeah, so kind of an interesting point to make here.
01:23:50
Speaker
They're saying, look, we don't often get parents who are like, fix my kid. In New York City, it's more common that parents come in with this anxiety of, can you tell me whether my kid is gay or trans? And they're saying, look, we shouldn't be in the game of deciding those two things.
01:24:05
Speaker
I think both it's weird to place this here because that's not what's happening in this case. They do want to talk about this case as being different from these types of cases. So they're not trying to say like this is a, you know, they're they're saying this is becoming more of an atypical kind of case to happen.
01:24:21
Speaker
And I also think there's a little bit of a slight misanalysis of what's happening when they talk about parents being anxious. about, you know, is my child really trans or really gay? They go on to talk about, oh, a lot of the parents are worried about like getting, you know, protecting their kids at school or getting different sorts of, you know, how to how to help support them in this journey.
01:24:39
Speaker
But there also is wanting your kid to just be gay and not be trans and that they don't really examine and that some of their theory is not equipped to examine because they don't want to make recourse to this idea of core identity.
01:24:55
Speaker
So it's hard for them to talk about how these identities work structurally because they want to reduce all of those identities to like pure self-theorization. But yeah.
01:25:06
Speaker
To them, i suppose, again, because their audience is so reactionary, all of this is a brave defense of patients' rights. This claim that actually the patient has the right to their own process.
01:25:23
Speaker
And I mean, that's better than trying to convert the patient. But it seems to me that it is perfectly fine to just defend the patient's self-identification.
01:25:35
Speaker
Yeah. And really, they just want to say that, no, this should be like, ah process-oriented thing because all of this is so unstable because of all this complex ontological nonsense, but they have a direct moral responsibility to protect their patients.
01:25:57
Speaker
And it is not at all clear to me that that is actually being incorporated into what they're saying. Yeah. So they do actually acknowledge like, okay, it is a phenomenon that happens where parents want reassurance, right? They're not seeking an answer, gay or trans. They're seeking reassurance that the answer is gay, not trans.
01:26:15
Speaker
But they're saying, you know, just straightforward. so here's what they say. They say seemingly unconflicted parental expectation for a child to be cleansed of their atypical gender presentation is more unusual, like in New York City.
01:26:29
Speaker
And again, they don't call it a request for conversion therapy. Yeah. And then they're claiming this is unusual in New York City. And it's hard to know because of their lack of identifying it as a request for conversion therapy.
01:26:43
Speaker
Like, is it because is it unusual in her practice? Because people who want conversion therapy aren't going to her, right? But then they talk about Ori's family more but more particularly.
01:26:56
Speaker
The encounter with Ori's family was a meeting of two worlds that do not often intersect. the secular landscape of psychoanalysis, and a particular religious world in which gender and sexuality may have meanings illegible to many psychoanalytic practitioners.
01:27:10
Speaker
The lack of attention in our field to religiously inflected ideas about gender and sexuality can alienate religious families seeking help with gender non-conforming children, driving parents instead to community and religious leaders who are less experienced and oftentimes untrained, and working with struggles around sexuality and gender.
01:27:29
Speaker
Not infrequently, treatments that boil down to conversion therapies are recommended, with the attendant traumatizing effects being well documented. So they're aware conversion therapy exists.
01:27:41
Speaker
Right. They don't understand somehow that that is what they're being asked to perform. Yeah. This kind of reminds me of the recent Supreme Court case, which the Supreme Court said, you are not allowed to legislate to prohibit conversion therapy because it's a free speech issue for the therapist. Right.
01:28:03
Speaker
And of course, every jackass law professor and law journalist on the internet said, actually, this isn't that bad because what they said you can't ban isn't conversion therapy. It's actually talk therapy aimed at preventing someone from being gay or trans.
01:28:25
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Well, In human language, another term that we have for that practice is conversion therapy. It's the same shit. Yeah.
01:28:35
Speaker
Like we can get into some conversations here and, you know, they use the phrase conversion practices also, as well as conversion therapies here. This is part of the debate. Some people are saying, you know, we don't even want to sort of grant that these things are therapies. And there is a huge range of there's talk therapy ranging to like more and more and more physically abusive things that programs will do to straighten out a kid. And so what a lot of these law professors are trying to say, it's like, those are still banned. and it's kind of like, okay, or those can be banned. Yeah, those can still be banned, right? Because and this is like one of the classic things that like Supreme Court does in these kinds of decisions is they don't come right out and say, we are stopping you from banning conversion therapy.
Legal and Religious Implications of Conversion Therapy
01:29:20
Speaker
They dress it up and, oh, we are, it's not an objection to the law. It's an objection as applied to this law, which says that you need to put extra scrutiny around. And it's like, yeah, okay.
01:29:31
Speaker
So functionally, it means you can't stop someone from doing this, right? Like, u What is like, am i so am I still supposed to believe that there's like the magical genie who's going to pop up when you do the thing that like, oh, the text of the law actually says you can't do this. Like, no, you have to have some understanding of power as well. Right.
01:29:52
Speaker
Do you remember when Trump tried to ban Muslims from coming into the US in his first term? And the way he did it was ham-fisted enough that the administ that the Supreme Court was like, no, no, no, you can't do that. But wink, here's how you would go about something like that. yeah And then lo and behold, like a year later, he bans travel from basically every like Muslim majority country. yeah And that's fine. It's absolutely that kind of thing. But yeah, so there's this claim here. We need to engage with religiously inflected ideas about gender and sexuality because we're engaging with this kid who is a member of this community.
01:30:32
Speaker
and if we don't, we're going to drive the family to seek conversion therapy. Okay. i if what is being said here is we don't want to tell these parents to fuck off because if we tell these parents to fuck off, what's going to happen is they're just going to find a therapist who will do conversion therapy.
01:30:52
Speaker
At the same time, framing it as like... we need to engage with, i don't know, it's weird to me to frame it this way. And it's weird to me to not acknowledge at least that what you're doing is offering like textually, even if this isn't your plan in therapy, in the therapeutic session, you are essentially agreeing to straighten out this kid. Even if you're saying to the parents, that's not what we're going to do.
01:31:16
Speaker
They have clearly stated this is their expectation from your therapy. I mean, there is no non-problematic way for them to relate to the parents because i believe that they genuinely do want to improve the welfare of the child what the parents are asking them to do straightforwardly is to convert the child and they can either say no i'm not going to do that or they can convert the child or they can lie to the parents
01:31:47
Speaker
Yeah. And it kind of seems like what's being driven out here is more or less, we should pay lip service to the religious parents.
01:32:00
Speaker
But actually, we should treat the child in a way that affirms their process of self-identification, which sounds a lot to me like we should lie to the parents. Yeah.
01:32:11
Speaker
They are actually saying, and I think that they will do and we'll see them do, like they are saying we should engage with the parents. They're saying we should agree to meet with the parents. We should talk to the parents. And we should not agree to straighten out the kid, but we should take seriously the religiously inflected ideas about gender and sexuality that the parents have.
01:32:30
Speaker
What does that mean, take them seriously? Well, that's something that I think they don't really answer, but that they're going to try to do and we'll see them try to do. Like you can't take them seriously without agreeing to the validity of these conversion practices. Because the religious ideas that are at question here are, should we convert this child to being straight or not trans? And so the next chunk of this, they talk about like the diversity of opinions within religious communities.
01:32:58
Speaker
They have this great sentence, which is like the most euphemistic sentence you could imagine. Orthodox Judaism continues to struggle with how to make room for the lived experiences of its LGBTQ members.
01:33:11
Speaker
And there are a variety of Orthodox communities. And they talk about this and they talk about, okay, there's these communities that are much more openly trans. and there's these communities that read these possibilities for gender variance, like directly out of the Talmud. And and all of these things exist.
01:33:27
Speaker
None of that is really clinically relevant here because that's not what Ori's parents think. That's not the community they're part of. And so it's weird to talk about, oh, there's there's possibilities for diversity. I mean, they do say like even within these communities, like families, and they talk about some cases, you know, families have different ways of handling these sorts of things that are not just straightforwardly, right? Like they they have a more layered complex understanding within the family, but it's like...
01:33:51
Speaker
I'm not really buying it. They say, like, it is important to remember, however, that although Orthodox Judaism holds conservative ideas about gender and sexuality, religion is plural and being religious does not necessarily amount to being conservative and restricted to when it comes to gender and sexuality. And like, that's fine.
01:34:06
Speaker
It's pretty clearly the case that Ori's parents are conservative and restrictive when it comes to gender and sexuality. And maybe that's not entirely religious. I don't really care. That's exactly what i was saying.
01:34:17
Speaker
Engage seriously with these religious ideas. Like, how do you do that when the religious ideas that are in play are just bigotry? Yeah, I don't think you can. Like what, just because the word religion is like stapled to it? Like, suddenly you have to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I get it. I get it. I get it. When you were in your post, we're saying I'm listening to an interview, these guys, and like the vibe is bad. and they're talking about how sensitive they're being to a topic. I mean, this reads to me like them congratulating themselves on their sensitivity, without really answering like what it is that they're being sensitive to.
01:34:50
Speaker
So now we get into like, actually, the meetings and the specifics of the case. When I met Ilana for an initial consultation, she impressed me as an incredibly thoughtful and caring mother who had seemingly selflessly devoted herself to the care of her eight children.
01:35:06
Speaker
In our initial consultation, Ilana recounted a dizzying schedule of driving one kid after another from school to private lessons to violin practice to basketball games and to multiple therapy appointments.
01:35:18
Speaker
It was clear that she was overwhelmed, as well as determined to manage it at all stoically and without complaint. Alana was committed to the role of the quietly suffering mother. Her marriage appeared to be structured along very traditional gender roles, with her husband, Aaron, leaving early for work and returning late at night with little participation in the everyday care of the children.
01:35:38
Speaker
Alana welcomed his numerous corrective comments regarding her handling of Ori, whose girlishness Aaron felt Alana did not sufficiently reprimand. Alana nervously confessed to me that she feared that her son's femininity was her fault and wondered if she had encouraged it by not more firmly disciplining him for his effeminate speech or gestures. Okay, so like the parents also just think Ori is trans. Yeah, I mean, it's a little unclear whether they think the kid is gay or trans or whether they even view there as being some sort of distinction between those two. But like, yeah, they they have correctly pegged the child as queer, apparently.
01:36:16
Speaker
Yeah. So... And they do not like it. So Avgi goes on to talk about, know, she soon learned that all of the kids had so struggled with anxiety at some point.
01:36:27
Speaker
And as mentioned before, this this older kid, Henry, her oldest son, had had the most sort of intense symptoms. And so what had happened was he was very anxious and he wasn't able to attend school. Like he basically refused to go to school and they sent him to some...
01:36:43
Speaker
They use this phrase, various therapeutic interventions failed. I'm like not sure what therapeutic interventions, and I'm very interested in those. The parents decided to send him to boarding school. And basically the father was like, that'll ensure that he goes to school because he'll be at boarding school. And it'll also teach him the lesson that his acting out is not going to be tolerated.
01:37:03
Speaker
Ilana was ambivalent about this, but... you know, the the father was adamant this is what needed to happen. So yeah, we're seeing a lot of the same impulses of we need our kids to behave in this way and anxiety or, you know, any kind of difficulty that the child is presenting, like it needs to be handled by just forcing them to act the way we want them to act and not like trying to figure out what the problem is.
01:37:26
Speaker
Alana had been ambivalent about this decision, agreeing reluctantly and at her husband's insistence. Though, as we will see, that ambivalence was more layered than she was aware. Henry deteriorated a gravely while in boarding school.
01:37:39
Speaker
It was only in retrospect, and with Dr. P's help that the parents came to understand that sending him to boarding school had been experienced by Henry as a violent expulsion. an eviction from his home and his family.
01:37:50
Speaker
Much of Henry's treatment, Alana explained, revolved around processing that trauma and trying to undo the effects of that parental message. So far, I'm a fan of Dr. P. I think he comes out of this story looking pretty good.
01:38:03
Speaker
He has correctly diagnosed the parents as sucking ass, it sounds like. Been like, don't be cruel to your children. Some of this... language. It was experienced by Henry as a violent expulsion.
01:38:18
Speaker
i mean, experienced by Henry because that's what it was. Right. Okay. That's how psychoanalysis has to work, right? You're not, it doesn't matter if you're really adjudicating this in some ultimate sense, if if you're at least getting the point across that this was a bad move, Henry needs help kind of processing this expulsion. Right.
01:38:37
Speaker
And the parents need to be more understanding that like this anxiety has a cause and and the thing they want, which is to their kid to not have this anxious refusal to attend school is possible. And they just, they can have a good relationship with their kid. They just need to be mindful of like the things they're doing and how that's coming across the kid.
01:38:56
Speaker
I also like Dr. P because he, I think correctly is like, oh yeah, Ori is trans. He needs help coming out. This isn't really my wheelhouse. So I'm going to refer Ori to an analyst who I think will be able to handle this better.
01:39:10
Speaker
So, so far, I think, you know, this is kind of the last we're going to hear of Dr. P. I like Dr. P. All right. Dr. P, you get the ODM symposium star of approval. Right.
01:39:20
Speaker
You can put the sticker on your therapy room door. So here's another, I think, really telling statement. It was also clear that Ilana was hesitant to bring Ori in to see me.
01:39:32
Speaker
On the manifest level, this was related to the family's recent experience of having consulted with a colleague who, never having met Ori, told them that he was likely trans. The parents felt that this diagnosis was rushed and based on insufficient information.
01:39:47
Speaker
It was also clear to me that such a possibility would have been very unwelcome in this family. The parents wanted the right therapist who could help prevent both homosexuality and transness, and this, I came to realize, was what I was being vetted for.
01:40:01
Speaker
Still a refusal to use the phrase conversion therapy, and i want to call massive bullshit, right? They objected to this doctor's rushed diagnosis of transness?
01:40:11
Speaker
Bullshit. They objected to the doctor saying, I think your kid is trans. It had nothing to do with the speed at which that diagnosis happened or whether he talked to Ori beforehand. That's totally irrelevant. What they actually mean to say is that the parents rationalized their rejection of this diagnosis by describing it as rushed and based on in sort of insufficient information.
01:40:33
Speaker
And by putting it in these terms, it suggests that the authors of the book to some extent agree When they say this was related to the family's recent experience of having consulted with a colleague who never having met Ori told them he was likely trans, there's a hint in there that they agree, like, yeah, without meeting Ori, like saying that Ori's trans is inappropriate.
01:40:53
Speaker
And we've seen their ability to qualify statements as not being things they agree with, like elsewhere. They're very verbose, right? Adding another clause to say, you know, no matter how reasonable or whatever, like wouldn't have, you know, I don't think they would balk at that. I think that they do kind of want to pat themselves on the back a little bit for not taking that rushed step, especially as we've seen the patient affirmation model as their model. You know, I want to be charitable to them and reject what you're saying, but it really does kind of fit in their interest in the therapist as being someone who affirms process.
01:41:29
Speaker
Like it's very in line with what you're saying. During our meetings, Alana described Ori as a sensitive boy with multiple learning and emotional issues.
01:41:39
Speaker
It was clear from the way she spoke about him that she loved him dearly and felt especially protective of him. Ori seemed to have a special place in her heart. At the same time, It was also clear that Alana was frustrated with this child whose femininity and speech, gesture, and habits she found uncomfortable and confusing.
01:41:57
Speaker
Plus, Alana worried that she would be forever blamed for his gender complexity. Gender complexity. Just call the child a slur, okay? Yeah. In fact, Erin and her parents attributed it to her difficulty setting boundaries with him.
01:42:11
Speaker
Ori's femininity, Alana explained, was now becoming disruptive to the family's unity. Aaron, often impatient with him, had become abrupt and sharp in his manner of addressing Ori. As a result, Alana reported, Ori was increasingly irritated and avoidant of his father. There's a lot going on here.
01:42:29
Speaker
Boy, yeah, I don't know. Really, really putting in some legwork to be sensitive toward the mother here. Absolve her of what is pretty clearly a wretchedly homophobic attitude.
01:42:46
Speaker
And also, i don't know, it's just a lot to put into explaining what, to me as a queer person, is instantly recognizable as like a typical household situation with a queer child, which is the queer child is scared of his parents because they suck ass and they're hostile to him and appear to be on the verge of abusing him, which is in fact what they are trying to do at this moment because they are trying to find conversion therapy for him.
01:43:17
Speaker
Yeah. This line, it was clear from the way that she spoke about him that she loved him dearly. Okay. i could I could pivot here. And instead of ranting about psychoanalysis, one of my frequent villains, I could talk about like liberalism and like this kind of emotive, like liberal fascist response of like, what does it mean that she loved him dearly, right? It means that she like spoke about him nicely. She used some nice terms. She wasn't actually like, like what do you mean by love? What do you think love is? Love is when you send your kids off to boarding schools and when you try to have them subjected to conversion therapy.
01:43:48
Speaker
That's what love is. but you feel kind of bad about it. Yeah. Yeah. We can kind of forgive anything if there's that little hint of feeling bad about it. Remember how like, okay, who is the non-misogynist husband, right?
01:44:03
Speaker
Husbands are going to beat their wives and shout at them and not listen to them. And if you listen to your wife and let her talk like you're a cuck, but if you are a dick to your wife, but then, but then you feel bad when she dies, that's the loving husband.
01:44:16
Speaker
This is a throwback to our very first episode, by the way. This was an argument made by Mr. Leacock. Yeah. And, you know, it's not quite as bad here, but we've seen the way that this idea has evolved and and taken on this progressive idea. But this is something that I think is everywhere, right? Like, oh, she the parent clearly cares about the kid. The parent clearly loves the kid. And it's like, okay, what is that worth?
01:44:39
Speaker
If you're investigating therapy, that's going to straighten out your kid, right? Like even if you're, even if these parents are not considering, you know, what they're doing is conversion therapy, right? The thing is they want a therapist who's going to straighten out their kid.
01:44:51
Speaker
I think there's something more insidious going on here, actually. There's this essay I've been trying to find for forever because I remember it being really good. It was from the first Trump administration.
01:45:02
Speaker
And it was a person who was talking about how they had friends in government and these friends in government are constantly having this experience.
01:45:13
Speaker
where they said, i am being asked to do these unethical at best and more genuinely monstrous things, and I don't know what to do.
01:45:23
Speaker
They would tell their friends about this, and their friends would say, at least a good person is being tasked with this. At least a good person who feels bad about this is being tasked with carrying out these monstrous acts.
01:45:39
Speaker
And the essay was talking about how these people are kind of functioning as sin eaters for the society that is causing horrible things to happen. The process of the person who is enacting cruelty, feeling guilt can help absolve the rest of us of that guilt. And kind of what they're doing with this paper in part is enacting that process of sin eating, is of saying, I'm a person who is being asked to do these monstrous things, but at least it's me, someone who can recognize cruelty, someone who feels conflict,
01:46:18
Speaker
over what I'm being asked to do, who is being tasked with these things. yeah It is very much that liberal fascist response that you were talking about, not only in how they sensitize the parents, but in how they are congratulating themselves over their own sensitivity. that doesn't really help the people who, you know, it doesn't help victims of conversion therapy that if the people doing that feel bad about it, that doesn't really matter.
01:46:45
Speaker
Unsurprisingly, Ori had recently started refusing to have any conversations with her about his behaviors, which further distressed her. As a result, she was also doubtful that he would talk to me.
01:46:57
Speaker
I too felt that his femininity had become so much a focus that talking about his feelings about it or his family's reactions might feel as if he were being monitored by yet another adult.
01:47:07
Speaker
Which he is. That's exactly what's happening here, but okay. More than anything, I felt pessimistic that there would be enough time to allow a therapeutic process to unfold.
01:47:19
Speaker
These parents wanted Ori's gender cleaned up. seeking the kinds of magical results that my colleague had produced with Henry's symptoms and that I could neither guarantee nor endorse.
01:47:31
Speaker
I have a question. okay More than anything, I felt pessimistic that there would be enough time to allow a therapeutic process to unfold. A therapeutic process to what end?
01:47:43
Speaker
What exactly needs to be addressed with the child? Well, I mean, he's dealing with some anxiety. He's dealing with some anxiety. Yeah, because his parents fucking suck, because his parents' behavior and belief needs modification, because his parents need treatment.
01:48:00
Speaker
That's like very clearly what's going on. There's nothing in this about treating the parents. They're the root cause of the issues here. yeah It's their behavior. i think...
01:48:12
Speaker
This is exactly one of the like fall lines of this, which is like, I mean, historically, like origins of a lot of conversion therapy techniques come out of the fact that we have this notion of psychoanalysis, which is meant to treat symptoms, treat abnormal psychology.
Therapist's Role and Family Dynamics
01:48:28
Speaker
And the question of like, what is a symptom is really like fraught and political. And so in some sense, you know, it was like the psychoanalytic process for Henry was successful because there really was something that wasn't working for Henry, like his extreme anxiety, which also did have to do with the parents, but also like they, you know, they talked about Henry needing to process the trauma of, and undo the effects of that parental message. Like there was a therapeutic process for Henry.
01:48:58
Speaker
And that makes sense because like anxiety is something you want to help alleviate. Whereas, gender complexity doesn't need alleviation. They're aware it doesn't need alleviation. They're saying the therapeutic process would help explore his gender complexity.
01:49:15
Speaker
That's the only thing I could read it as being targeted at, right? But does his gender complexity, quote unquote, need exploring? Does his gender have much complexity? These are questions they don't even think to ask. It's kind of taken as given that like, yeah, obviously anyone could benefit benefit from therapy. And it's like, okay, yeah, but that's not really what's the issue here.
01:49:35
Speaker
By the way, let me point out that Henry's treatment, how is it described? Well, Dr. P... talks to Henry and helps him process the trauma and undo the effects of that parental message.
01:49:52
Speaker
I don't think it's actually explicitly said, but Henry no longer has to go to the boarding school. And all of this is communicated to our author by the mother.
01:50:04
Speaker
So, in other words, what that process entailed, one that they want to repeat with our author, is a situation in which the child goes in and unloads all their fears and anxieties and so on.
01:50:17
Speaker
And then the therapist presents those fears and anxieties to the parent. In other words, the therapist is actually directly and specifically being asked to monitor the child, extract the the core of their emotional turbulence and present it to the parents.
01:50:38
Speaker
Ori is 100% right to feel that they are going to be spied on, monitored, etc. This therapist is only their ally to the extent that they are working on behalf of Ori essentially against the parents, although certainly they don't want to understand it that way.
01:50:57
Speaker
Yeah. Ori is absolutely correct to believe that the therapist is not going to perceive it correctly in that and that the therapist is not on their side, that they are an enemy. Yeah.
01:51:09
Speaker
So they have a little more to say about about this In my joint meeting with both parents, I suggested to them that Henry's having been sent away to boarding school likely had an impact on Ori as well.
01:51:20
Speaker
Might it have fueled fears that he too could be expelled from the family home if his behavior did not align with parental expectations? which, by the way, I'm 100% confident that Ori is correct to be worried about that, I further noted that their obvious displeasure at his gender presentation might make him feel precarious.
01:51:38
Speaker
While I was explaining that any therapeutic endeavor would have to prioritize his emotional well-being rather than being invested in any one particular gender outcome, Aaron briskly interrupted me.
01:51:49
Speaker
You should know that if he becomes a homosexual, he would not be welcome in our home. It's not like we would have him over for family dinner with his boyfriend. That's not the kind of family we have. It's not the life we live. And I don't mean he'd have to leave when he grows up, he added with force. But as soon as it's clear that that's where he's heading.
01:52:09
Speaker
Oh, fuck. This manifesto stunned me. I quickly took inventory of what I knew about this family. I couldn't imagine that Alana would altogether refuse her son. You fucking idiot. But I could also see that standing up to Aaron would be no easy task.
01:52:25
Speaker
The meeting left me heartbroken and scared for Ori. How could I, in good conscience, do the work that this child would need when that work could conceivably lead in a direction that spelled a family catastrophe or an abandonment?
01:52:38
Speaker
I could discern no opening in this family that might, over time and with work, become a path to accepting their child. Were Ori to come to identify as gay, genderqueer, or trans.
01:52:49
Speaker
All right. Yeah. I don't have that much stuff on hand to throw. It's kind of a problem right now. Yeah. I can't throw my mic. Aaron is saying we'd kick him out, but Alana surely is more caring. You fucking rube.
01:53:02
Speaker
It's all part of it. Ilana, like earlier she says, like Ilana welcomed his corrective comments. She's the one seeking out this therapy. Like, come on, like have a little bit of critical faculty here.
01:53:15
Speaker
It's wild that we've had decades, decades of portrayal of the good cop, bad cop routine. it's It's a basic cultural unit in media and so they can't recognize it when it's right in front of them.
01:53:30
Speaker
Yeah. I'm. This is so upsetting. Alan, this is so odious. I cut a tiny bit here earlier. So when we have a bit like Ori was increasingly irritated and avoidant of his father, they do talk about him like clinging to the mother more. So he is specifically avoidant of the father. And then the father locates this as like, oh, this is why he's being feminine is like the mother is not setting boundaries properly. So there is this antagonism between them.
01:53:54
Speaker
I don't think that really alleviates this problem that we're pointing out here, which is like you're not noticing that like Ilana is part of the structure of of this thing, that like being the caring mother, but not caring in the way of at all protecting this kid from the like gender policing, just feeling bad about it more is like absolutely part of the repressive structure.
01:54:15
Speaker
Do psychoanalysts just not have this concept of an enabler? Is that just like a pop? Maybe just a pop psychology thing. I feel like they should maybe look at that a bit, if not so. And if they do have that concept, then maybe these guys should do like the most basic fucking professional research. Yeah. And develop a little understanding of it because it's like so obviously what's going on with the dynamic here.
01:54:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you said earlier, right, like at the beginning of the thing, might it have fueled fears that he too could be expelled? You were like, yeah, absolutely. It should. And it and it did. And then that's where this excerpt was leaving leading to is Aaron saying this is going to happen. and then And then she says, this manifesto stunned me. And it's like, why did it stun you? This didn't surprise me at all. This is clearly part of the deal here.
01:55:02
Speaker
And then once again, we come back to this question of how could I in good conscience do the work that this child would need when that work could conceivably lead in the direction that spelled a family catastrophe or an abandonment? What work?
01:55:14
Speaker
Right? Yeah. The kid's already queer. really stuck out to me. That was so... You are not doing the work that's helping himself theorize as queer. He's already an effeminate kid. Yeah. He is who he is. You actually don't need to do anything with him. It's the parents. It's all the fucking parents. It's the parents. I think I just knocked my mic. I'm so mad.
01:55:35
Speaker
It's the fucking parents. Ori's psychology isn't even relevant. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. And so they're talking about wanting to like do this work and center Ori. But like, are we ready to read about Ori in the clinic?
01:55:50
Speaker
I'm okay. I'm ready. I'm so sorry, Sarah. do you need a moment to like calm down? All right. I'm normal now. I'm not normal. Oh man. I really hope Ori does not trust this fucking rat narc psychologist.
01:56:04
Speaker
I met with Ori's parents for almost three months before they decided it was time for him to come and meet with me. Okay. Given what we have heard so far, that is three months of making absolutely sure that this therapist is willing to go along with their bigoted requests.
01:56:24
Speaker
Like, that is the only thing that could have happened with those three months of meetings unusually pretty and vulnerable looking what oh oh okay we're only starting in on the second we're only starting in on the second sentence of this excerpt i'm losing my fucking mind by the way In the history of trans research, there is, I feel like I mentioned this every time, every time we talk about the history of sexology or any of this shit, but there's so much of these researchers fucking their patients and abusing them and being pedophilic and just being fucking weird and creepy.
01:57:09
Speaker
And just commenting on how pretty and vulnerable looking this child is. you not understand how bizarre that is? What is wrong with you? You fucking freak.
01:57:22
Speaker
Oh my God. Okay. I'm normal. I'm normal. I'm continuing the second sentence in this excerpt. I'm sure it's all going to be normal from here too. Ori carried himself in an intensely shy and reserved manner that seemed self-protective.
01:57:37
Speaker
Under the external presentation of polite deference, I could discern his reflexive tendency to organize himself around what he sensed others expected of him. As early as the first meeting, his inclination to want to please manifested in our relationship, as well as his fear that human bonds were too fragile to sustain difference, or worse.
01:57:58
Speaker
attention. This is such a lib-slop. I hate this shit. God fucking damn it. He was reluctant to take initiative or indicate any interest that might shape our session. He did not look through my board games or books as some children his age tend to do.
01:58:13
Speaker
He replied courteously to my gentle inquiries by quickly turning them into queries about my likes and my preferences. all the while sitting obediently on the couch with his hands crossed across his lap, perhaps to keep them from betraying his girlishness while waiting to be instructed what to do. Okay, so a quick little note. So this thing about perhaps to keep them from betraying his girlishness, there was discussion about like the parents specifically not liking the way that he like used his hands while he talked.
01:58:40
Speaker
and trying to get him to like sit on his hands more, like keep his hands folded more like specifically this. So it's not like to keep them from betraying his girlishness. Maybe I wouldn't put it that way. I would put it more as this like behavior that's been tortured into him.
01:58:53
Speaker
But OK, Ori seems clever enough to realize the game. the analyst doesn't seem clever enough to realize that Ori is clever enough to realize the game. I don't know why after all this time, it's still possible for me to be astonished that someone erudite can just be like so fucking stupid.
01:59:10
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Like what a mark. Holy shit. I would be so humiliated if I wrote something this gullible and just like put it out there for the world, let alone commended it as an example of my sterling bravery. Like, what is that? Yeah. All right. So this hot child comes in and immediately understands that they should deflect the that they should be protective of themselves, perhaps that this is a dangerous situation, there're they're alert.
01:59:43
Speaker
And therapist has no idea what's going on. I think a listener could object that, you know, to the same extent that the therapist is reading this whole narrative of... the reflexive tendency to organize himself around what he sensed others expected of him or all these other things and and missing this, you know, we're also reading a narrative onto here.
02:00:01
Speaker
So I don't, you know, I would even qualify that and say, i don't know how much he like even as consciously or not understanding because we just don't know, right? Like he's just not opening his mouth. We don't have his voice here. So we just don't know. Like, is he consciously understanding?
02:00:14
Speaker
oh, I need to like be guarded in this way? Is it a reflect is it a reflective tendency not to like please others, quote unquote, but to like be suspicious of adult figures in this way? i mean, that was the therapist's hypothesis in their first meeting. The therapist was like, well, I think Ori saw what happened to the other kid and was like, I'm in danger here.
02:00:36
Speaker
And the parent was like... Yeah. Yeah. Ori's in danger. Yeah. Like, it would be it would be pretty weird, like, at that point, if Ori were not, like, highly conscious of what's going on. Yeah. After a rather long exchange about the fabric of the couch, I commented with admiration that he seemed to know so much about how things felt on his skin.
02:00:58
Speaker
Sorry, you said what? Yeah. So, okay, I cut a little bit. I think this is actually worse without the context. So she talks a bit about how they they have some small talk. He's like not really responding to anything. She notices specifically that he's like really, really paying attention to like the way the fabric of the couch feels on his skin.
02:01:16
Speaker
And so she's trying to like get into that a little bit. It's a weird way of putting it. It's a weird, especially with the like pretty invulnerable looking comment earlier. It's a weird way of putting it. But she's offering this as like, this is what sort of opened up a conversation a little bit. Okay.
02:01:30
Speaker
In retrospect, my comment may seem too intimate. Yeah. too Too embodied for such a reluctant and cautious child.
02:01:40
Speaker
But in the tenor of the conversation at the time, it made intuitive sense. Okay, you mean like you just blurted it out. Fine. Ori responded with a shy, content smile.
02:01:53
Speaker
Something in him opened up. Speaking spontaneously for the first time, Cory started telling me about a small collection of fabric pieces that he kept hidden in a bag in his bedroom.
02:02:04
Speaker
I asked about them. He became animated in describing their textures. And soon, he started leading me around the room, instructing me to touch objects, fabrics, and plants that might convey to me the feel of the particular softness of one, the velvety texture of another, the way another swished when the wind blew on it softly.
02:02:22
Speaker
right, I didn't mention it with the previous excerpt, but I was definitely thinking about it while we were talking about the hand motion thing. I mean, I can't diagnose the kid, but this this does feel pretty autistic to me. Yeah. I'm just saying.
02:02:36
Speaker
um Let's see. I lost my spot. Right. We talked about his fabrics for several sessions. One day. Sorry, it's just his special interest in the texture of fabrics. Okay. It's so cute. i don't know. That's really sweet. I know it's adorable. One day, as he was struggling to find the right word to describe the precise color of his latest acquisition, I asked whether he might want to bring his prized bag to our session and show me his fabrics.
02:03:06
Speaker
Ori quickly retreated. His face darkened. His parents, he told me, did not know about this bag. They would not like him having it, and they could not find out about it. Plus, Ori explained he could not imagine how he could sneak it in.
02:03:19
Speaker
I was pleased that sneaking it in, even if not something he could do, was something he could imagine. It suggested to me a capacity to separate, at least in his mind, from his parents' wishes for him. Ori volunteered that he did not know why his parents would be dismayed at this collection.
02:03:33
Speaker
I wondered to myself if he knew more about their displeasure than he was ready to discuss openly with me or to acknowledge to himself. Ori is 12, certainly quite young. A little strange to pose this as like, this was good because it suggested a capacity to separate from his parents' wishes for him.
02:03:55
Speaker
i don't know. I guess I'm not an expert in child psychology, but I would expect already with this kind of tension and with things like Ori avoiding the father or Ori refusing to discuss these things with the mother, like It seems he already knows how to separate these things. And it seems like in a way he's been forced to separate these things in his mind.
02:04:13
Speaker
He seems to have a more sophisticated understanding of the separation than the therapist does. Yeah, in in a lot of ways. He's saying like he doesn't know why his parents would be dismayed at his collection. and think there's a couple of ways to read that.
02:04:26
Speaker
One could be, I mean, an element of that being genuine. Like he is honestly saying, yeah, I don't really understand it. Another is he's realized he's opened this thing up and he doesn't really want to get into the real reasons why, which he does understand, are this queerness that he wants to still protect the therapist. You know, he still doesn't want to talk about what the therapist. And so he's saying, like, you know, I don't know why. Now, she does acknowledge it could be something he wasn't ready to openly discuss.
02:04:56
Speaker
And she's like, you know, i don't I don't know what element of this was something he's not ready to openly discuss versus something he's not ready to acknowledge to himself, right? But yeah, it... There's like hints here that she kind of glimpses what's going on. But again, i don't really know. Like, even if we understand like, okay, she knows that he's being guarded. She knows that he doesn't want to play this game. She knows that he knows that it's about his femininity. And that's why they don't want the bag, of you know, the fabric bag.
02:05:20
Speaker
It's really unclear to me in this moment, what she thinks the clinical goal is like, this is what you were saying. Like, it doesn't matter. Like, I don't understand why she's like doing this work. What is that? What are they going to uncover here?
02:05:32
Speaker
He's a young effeminate boy for now who has a special interest in fabric. And he's got a little bag of fabrics that he likes touching. And he's really good at conveying the color and texture of these things.
02:05:44
Speaker
Great. What are you trying? What are you doing? Like, are we doing here? i don't know. i don't know. She's, she's jerking herself off about the little bag of fabric. And meanwhile, I don't know how this story ends for the kid, but without any further information, I think there's like a very high probability that Ori is dead. now We'll get to like how the story ends actually very soon.
02:06:04
Speaker
I learned that Ori's favorite preoccupation was researching orchids online and learning about their care, about different types and the delicate attention they require to survive, about their exquisite sensitivity to light and water, all of which he told me was reflected in the color of their roots.
02:06:20
Speaker
Quote, if you know how to look, end quote. This is the most neurotypical child I've ever heard of. I admired his knowledge and asked him if he would be willing to teach me about them. How? he asked, bewildered. I suggested I get an orchid from my office that we would care for together. He took me up on it immediately.
02:06:36
Speaker
We went online, browsed through online orchid sellers, and decided together on the size and color of the plant. When Ori left the session, he said goodbye to me for the first time. At our next meeting, Ori eagerly entered my office, scanning the room to find the plant. He quickly located the white and purple speckled flowers.
02:06:53
Speaker
plant had two stems, one of which was attached to a supporting plastic rod while the other was less supported and slightly bent to the side. He was delighted and pronounced the plant, fabulous.
02:07:05
Speaker
With uncharacteristic pleasure, he proceeded to inspect its roots and advised me about placement and watering. It was, he told me, a healthy and strong plant. It would do very well in my office, he announced. A comment that I also heard as transferential.
02:07:20
Speaker
Oh, come on, come on, come on, come on I saw that you were going for the metaphor here. And i don't know, just because you're such a cringe fucking weirdo. Of course you had to put it on the child. You had to be you have to be like, oh, the child the child is looking at this metaphor and describing the office in terms of it. Shut the fuck up. I asked him if there was anything we should be doing about the unsupported bent stem.
02:07:46
Speaker
At the time, I didn't intend this statement as an intervention, and the moment it felt like a genuine question addressed by me, the orchid novice, to him, the orchid expert. But when Ori instantly fell silent, I realized that what I'd said was more fraught.
02:08:01
Speaker
After a few moments of silence, he volunteered that his mother had also bought him an orchid. This was the first time he was referencing anything about his family life. That plant, he explained, had a single stem, and it was bent over, just like the one I had asked him about.
02:08:16
Speaker
She tried to fix it, he said. She broke it. It died. The tone in the room shifted. i waited. Then, he softly added, i thought it had looked rather beautiful bent over.
02:08:27
Speaker
Your mom seems to have felt it and needed fixing, I said gently. But it sounds like it may have been beautiful just as it was. Bent. Ori looked at me, making eye contact for the first time.
02:08:39
Speaker
The session came to an end. Ori never returned to see me. Yeah. Well, there's no like postscript about the kids. There's a bunch more, but we don't really know what happens to Ori after this. Okay. Okay.
02:08:54
Speaker
Ori asks his parents to stop going. Ori's dad supports this idea because first of all, he had always been, they reveal at this point that he had always, he had begun to suspect or possibly he had been suspecting all along that shouldn't he really be seeing a male therapist if the point is to like fix his masculinity.
02:09:11
Speaker
Also, the father was worrying that, the therapist wasn't quote setting appropriate limits on Ori's girliness. The mother starts asking if she can meet for parenting advice on a regular basis, which the therapist agrees to on the basis that it could leave the door open for Ori to return at some future point.
02:09:32
Speaker
She starts to hear a lot about the mother's early family history, talks, quote, with admiration and pride about her religious heritage. She was certain she confided in me that her deep belief in God and her prayers had been instrumental in healing her parents from the serious life-threatening illnesses they had both suffered when she was a child. So she has this sort of like deep personal experience of of religious faith.
02:09:54
Speaker
So we get a lot of theorizing about the mother here. So remember when you said, I think what's going to happen here is theoretical bullshit for the sake of theoretical bullshit.
02:10:05
Speaker
We get a lot of that here. I think this is the longest excerpt because I kind of just want to let them talk and say like, this is how a lot of this book reads. Alana's crisis, I learned, occurred at age 12, the same age as Ori when he was brought to see me.
02:10:18
Speaker
Her crisis mirrored the fears around shame and sudden separation that I suspected Ori was also experiencing. I wondered if her need to repair Ori's gender to an unimpeachable masculinity with no threat of queerness on the horizon functioned as a kind of symbolic reparation unconsciously extended to her father for her own lapses in normality when it came to conforming fully to the family's religious beliefs.
02:10:41
Speaker
What if Alana's investment in her child's otherness and in the process of cleansing him of it were in part a displacement of her highly charged guilt around questioning the religion that her father, family, and culture so deeply believed in?
02:10:55
Speaker
Might Ori's gender hold for her both the damage she had done to her father in her fantasy by her heretical difference and the fantasized reparative gesture to him? If so, Alana might have a conflictual investment in Ori's gender disobedience.
02:11:10
Speaker
On the one hand, his femininity sustained the disobedience that she had to give up to be a dutiful daughter and not lose her family. On the other, by seeking to eliminate his femininity, she was repairing the damage w risked by her own phase of noncompliance.
02:11:25
Speaker
Fantasies of reparations such as Lana's may be one dynamic at play in some families, helping us understand the parent's deep and intractable investment in a child's normativity. They may help explain why parents who are otherwise loving and caring may appear self-righteous in their commitments to cleanse their children of their gender atypicality, even as this investment clearly overrides a child's emotional well-being.
02:11:47
Speaker
To be sure, gender is never straightforward. It is never that it only about gender. In this case, gender is also about race and religion. More specifically, in questioning her religion, had young Alana also felt herself to be challenging male authority to interpret religious ideas? If so, maybe Alana too had once experienced her own version of gender trouble as refracted through religion.
02:12:10
Speaker
not in the sense of questioning her gender assignment, but in the sense of questioning received wisdom that she was prohibited by her gender from interrogating. The overlay of religion, gender, and race in the modern history of anti-Semitism may make gender into an especially apt conduit for the kind of reparative fantasies discussed here.
02:12:28
Speaker
Numerous scholars have traced how modern antisemitism has imagined Jewish difference through the prisms of gender and sexuality, in effect, racing gender slash sex and sexing race slash religion.
02:12:41
Speaker
The racial sciences of the late 19th and early 20th centuries scrutinized the Jewish male body for proof of dangerous Jewish difference. In the anti-Semitic imaginary, a cluster of bodily signs, such as the weak Jewish foot with its faulty gait, or the corrupt accent of the Jewish voice, was held to expose the specific and negative distinction of the Jew.
02:13:04
Speaker
But the central proof of racialized Jewish difference was circumcision, which embodied the supposedly perverse sexuality and dubious effeminate gender of Jewish men.
02:13:16
Speaker
Many of the anti-semitic stereotypes circling around Jewish male difference also became part of the medico-cultural repertoire for identifying sexual inversion, and later, homosexuality.
02:13:27
Speaker
Although most of this anti-semitic discourse focused on Jewish men, the accusation that Jews did their gender wrong and their sexuality perversely has also negatively impacted Jewish women.
02:13:39
Speaker
These anti-Semitic and homophobic stereotypes have a violent, even genocidal history. Could they have been part of the intergenerational transmission between Alana and her son, in this instance, as the transmission of a religio-racial trauma?
02:13:54
Speaker
What?
02:14:02
Speaker
talent Oh my God. i mean, you know what this is This is the same shit where people are like, did you know that cultures never had misogyny or homophobia or any of that shit until European colonizers were created it and like certainly European colonizers absolutely did a great amount to like inflict that shit on other societies I'm not denying that yeah but this is just bizarre to just be like you know what you know what is really causing these parents to be homophobic towards their kids it's kind of the Nazis if you think about it it's one it's the Nazis and it's anti-semitism and two there's even a hint here that's like you know
02:14:48
Speaker
Maybe maybe Ori's gender complexity, which again, we don't have any reason to believe that he has any gender complexity. He might just be straightforwardly a woman. Uh huh.
02:14:59
Speaker
Or he might just be like a cis gay guy. Like, yeah we don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Like, of course, they would say, of course, you know, my gender complexity, we don't mean that any identity is more or less complex than any other, right?
02:15:11
Speaker
No, I have I have the most complex identity, actually. That's pretty cool. The complexity is all an artifact of the parents treatment of it whatever complexity there is. It's it's it's not that. And so they're saying, ah, this complexity, like it could arise because this is, you know, Jewish trauma and.
02:15:29
Speaker
You know, is it maybe, you know, if we presuppose that Ori is actually trans on the basis of this effeminacy, like, are we maybe being anti-Semitic? Because we don't understand that, like, it's actually, it's a sensitive issue for the Jews to be called women, right? Like, are we doing the same thing as when they talked about the weak Jewish foot? Yeah, exactly. Like, if I tell this Orthodox Jewish couple that I think their son is very feminine, am I doing the same thing that...
02:15:58
Speaker
you know, other people did when they said that Jews more broadly are feminine and degenerate, to which my answer is like, no, those are these are not the same thing at all. What are you talking about? Those are those are very different things, right? hu
02:16:15
Speaker
There's a bunch more here. I just made you read that long excerpt, so I'm not going to make you read this next long excerpt that I was thinking about having you read. But basically they say, look, there's been a huge, they say a sea change of cultural shifts around gender and sexual non-normativity in adolescence, some of which have been enabled by advances in queer theory and trans studies.
02:16:33
Speaker
And this has led to a lot of adolescents making more solid claims about being gay or trans. Okay, this is like broadly true. In instances when children are too young to make such claims, parents are already thinking about them and perhaps downloading them into their children, foreclosing some possibilities even as they try to help craft others.
02:16:49
Speaker
You know, they're they're bringing they're talking again about this notion of like the parent who wants to say, oh, I understand my kid is gay in order to foreclose the possibility that the kid is trans or to say, I understand my kid is... They do bring this up. well I don't know if that the second thing happened so much, which is to like...
02:17:05
Speaker
oh, my kid is like trans in this like binary way when really like if we let the child's, you know, self-theorization, right, if we let the therapeutic process play out, because again, they don't want to ever talk about like a true nature. That's like one of their core commitments here. You know, maybe the child will land on some, you know, non-binary, more complicated identity.
02:17:24
Speaker
So they're talking a little bit about like, again, sort of what the role of psychoanalysts should be clinically. And they're going to bring this back to Orgy. So we have all this theorizing. We have all this thing. We should need to be open to like complexity. We need to not foreclose some possibilities by sort of downloading our understandings into children.
02:17:40
Speaker
We have to have, you know, clinical affirmation of these identities, but also an understanding of their nuanced complexity. But all of this is like, what does this have to do with Ori, right? You just told me the story about this kid who like very clearly needed help. You did not help him.
02:17:53
Speaker
Why are you now going back to this, this thing? So they're saying, okay, here's how we think this theory we just laid out, like clinically applies to Ori. Oh man, I'm so ready to rage at this.
02:18:04
Speaker
I'm expecting this to be absolute dogshit. In this context, what if we considered the possibility that Ori's gender is partly constructed through the particular way it is put to use in his mother's psyche?
02:18:18
Speaker
right Okay, I'm gonna keep reading. I'm gonna keep reading. Might Alana's need for Ori's non-normative gender as a placeholder for her own otherness, an otherness that would have been unacceptable to her family of origin and larger religious community, and that had to be actively suppressed, have become a translational code for Ori?
02:18:39
Speaker
I'm losing my fucking mind. Okay. Keep in mind, none of this invalidates the reality of Ori's, you know, gender. Like, trauma can inform gender. That doesn't make it not real.
02:18:52
Speaker
Let's keep going and then let's let's let's address the whole passage. Okay, okay. I mean, am am I understanding this correctly so far? That Ori's mother had these conflicts around the restrictiveness of her religious experience and the claim is that Ori's transness or being gay or whatever is like a reaction to his mother's trauma?
02:19:17
Speaker
I mean, reaction is a very flat word. We could talk about a translational code or a generational transference or a puncturing of the other, the residue of the other. That's so bigoted.
02:19:30
Speaker
I'm losing my fucking mind. i can't believe they've gone here. All right. I'm going to keep reading. Notably, both Henry and Ori end up with symptoms that speak not just to their own difficulties, but to Ilana's trouble. Henry, for instance, struggled with school attendance at the same age his mother underwent her period of religious doubt, and Ori similarly found himself in a place of anxiety about being ejected from his home and family.
02:19:57
Speaker
Could we think of Ori's gender as carrying the mother's own disavowed early conflicts regarding her relationship with with her religion, ab but complete with fears of parental rejection and social isolation? No, no, I haven't answered to that. No, no, we can't. That's not a thing. What the fuck are you talking about? Why are you jerking yourself off like this? Okay, I'm going to keep reading. I'm normal now.
02:20:23
Speaker
Here, worry over the son's gender may be an especially powerful carrier of the mother's religious doubt because gender queerness has been linked to Jewish difference and the larger cultural imagination. Seriously examining these questions requires us to maintain a paradoxical tension. Maybe there's a paradox because it's bullshit. Did you think about that?
02:20:48
Speaker
On the one hand, we would have to hold Ori's gender as an artifact of intergenerational transport, kept in place by the function it serves not in the self, but in the object, in this case, Alana.
02:21:01
Speaker
This is so dehumanizing. This is so fucking evil. Ori's gender is, in that sense, an intergenerational errand, to use Afri's term. On the other hand, we have to keep that formulation in mind without turning Ori's gender into Alana's symptom. That is, without rendering it into something alien to Ori by treating it as an imposition of parental fantasy that stores Ori's original and true male gender.
02:21:28
Speaker
Okay, you say, on the other hand, we have to keep that formulation in mind without doing this thing that you just fucking did. Yeah. That's exactly what you just fucking did.
02:21:38
Speaker
Their response to that would be like, oh, all of this theorizing doesn't in any way say that Ori's gender expression is like illegitimate. But of course, we can't talk about like gender identity. And this is one of the things that I think is like fundamentally at issue with this like theory, right? You know, I brought up all this stuff about like gender was invented by like the concept of gender was invented by sexology and then taken up. But there's a reason why.
02:22:00
Speaker
like feminist theorists and trans theorists and these other progressive movements like took up this concept. And it's because if you don't actually hold that there is something like happening within Ori that is like proper to Ori, that is like Ori's gender, then it's not actually a clinical fuck up or it's not actually a problem that the parents are doing all this shit because you're like, oh, this is all, you know, relational and it's all about the puncturing the other and you're completely unable, right?
02:22:24
Speaker
You can't in their framework say the parents are suppressing Ori's gender because they don't believe in a core gender identity. Well, isn't that kind of fucking convenient for them? They haven't failed Ori in that kind in that framework because there's like there's no core gender identity to fail. And it's like, OK, you can make all these arguments about the reactionary tendency of the core gender identity. But come on, you can't just say, oh we're going to do it without treating it as an imposition of parental fantasy. But you just got done saying that the whole thing is an intergenerational errand, right? It's a paradox because you're just doing it. That's that's crazy. This is a dog shit salad. this I'm astonished that they're taking just like every way to treat this as bigoted and
02:23:07
Speaker
and they're doing it, and they're congratulating themselves for their wokeness like the whole fucking time. It's so infuriating. They're excusing the parents' bigotry, which in itself constitutes essentially a kidnapping of the child's ability to self-determine, of the child's identity, of the child's gender and orientation.
02:23:28
Speaker
They're aiding and they're abetting that, and then they're actually performing their own secondary heist where they try to take it away from the parents and actually, I have analyzed this. And this is you passing down your trauma to the child, your trauma, which by the way, is the Nazis saying that Jewish people had like bad feet or some shit. This is on the level of the people who are like, curb is actually a trauma narrative. And the reason Larry David is so stingy is because of like intergenerational trauma of like coming from like poor Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis. Yeah. Right. It's like, no, it's not like it's not always about trauma.
02:24:06
Speaker
And like you can play these games of saying, yeah, we should understand trauma. We should understand the complexity of trauma. We should not think of trauma as something that's just going to be like cured and straightened out. And especially and this is important at the beginning, they say, if a patient comes in and says, I want to talk about these things and I want to understand my trauma.
02:24:25
Speaker
and the relationship my trauma has to my gender. And they do talk about actually cases of like cis patients saying, you know a cis woman saying, my femininity is inflected by this traumatic experience, and I want to unpack that and understand that. And that analysts are able to talk about femininity in that context without undermining its validity. And they're saying, we want to do that with queer children as well. But it's important, neither Ori nor, in fact, Alana has asked for this, has participated in this. This isn't a self-theorization.
02:24:51
Speaker
Right. They're saying, oh, it has to come from the self. But that seems to only apply to the direct statement. I am trans or I am gay. Sort of anything else is on the table. Right. So this is where I'm saying we're kind of getting towards like egg prime directive stuff. Right. There's this weird like siloed thing, which is these straightforward statements about I am gay. I am trans. Those need to come from the self.
02:25:13
Speaker
But this intergenerational theory about the Jew and why this trauma is inflecting the mother's feeling and then that's an intergenerational... All of that, none of that is coming from Ori or Alana.
02:25:27
Speaker
Yes. so So they're just not doing the thing. Like, on some level, I did think about this episode for a while as, like, theory and practice where it's like, here's the theory and then here's the practice where they just don't do the theory at all because they're just not doing it Like, all the parts we said were good have now evaporated. We are we are like we are in hell. but Okay, there's three excerpts.
02:25:49
Speaker
left and then we're going to wrap up and do do our ratings. But they need to address like, okay, here's here's the context with Ori. Here's what this theory has to say about Ori. And then here's what that has to say clinically.
02:26:01
Speaker
Where does that leave us clinically speaking in relation to what Ori's gender is or should be? The clinical task could be extremely complex. To help my patient recognize the parental pressures that task him to perform both otherness and compliant normativity.
02:26:16
Speaker
but to do so without implying that his gender is not his own. This may be why my comment to him about the bent orchid stem disrupted our work. Although on the surface it was empathic and compassionate, it also treated Ori's gender not as his own creation, but as bent by his mother's neglect.
02:26:34
Speaker
This is not to overlook that her disapproval considerably affected him. It is to note that rather than prioritize his own internal sturdiness, as expressed through his persistent feminine presentation, a noncompliance that he was determined to uphold his sheer will to be himself rather than wilt under the duress of what was expected of him, my comment focused on his injury.
02:26:56
Speaker
I just think she totally missed the mark here entirely. I agree. I don't think she's reading this correctly at all. First of all, I don't think this is a complex task. I don't think you should, at this stage of the game, if this is something you should address at all, address the ways in which Alana might actually be invested in Ori's gender variance.
02:27:14
Speaker
Pretty clearly, the friction is from Ori's queerness being met with threat of expulsion from the family and like intense gender policing.
02:27:25
Speaker
Yeah, maybe we should clarify what the clinician's task actually is here, which is to protect Ori from death, which is a very real possibility. Yes. It's a possibility both at the hands of his parents.
02:27:38
Speaker
That could absolutely happen. Like directly, they could murder him. But also it is a possibility when they just kick him out and he's on the street.
02:27:49
Speaker
and he has no protection and just fucking dies for one reason or another. Or he could repress his parents don't kick him out. And then he fucking kills himself.
02:28:00
Speaker
Like these are all completely possible ways that he could die like this. This is a high stakes situation. And the therapist does not seem to understand like what their responsibilities are at all.
02:28:12
Speaker
And said they're talking about how We need to help the patient recognize this performance of otherness without implying that his gender is not his own. And by the way, I don't think that the reason that Ori was like ah weirded out by this business with the orchid was necessarily what...
02:28:30
Speaker
what they're thinking here, which is like, oh, I focus too much on his injury, on the wound that his mother was causing him. I think maybe it's because they recognize that this is a dangerous situation and that the therapist is trying to open up or perhaps you could say force a kind of intimacy that they haven't earned and that they don't deserve. And that is dangerous to Ori. totally agree. Because even here, like this explanation, notice that like bent by his mother's neglect, that's not even the metaphor.
02:29:01
Speaker
Like it doesn't even, it doesn't even cohere on the level of it, right? Like the whole point is that that's what the orchid looks like and seeing it as bent is is incorrect. And it's not the mother's neglect that bent it. It's the mother's intervention that that tried to unbend it and actually killed it. So even if we were to engage with this on this like mythos symbolic level, as they as they say. That's not really it. So I think my theory here is they had this experience of of seeing this kid, completely failed to help this kid and felt terrible about it and needed to cope by constructing this theoretical framework.
02:29:37
Speaker
I don't think it's quite as bad as Shane Wolf because we saw Shane Wolf actually just was a conversion therapist was on the board of conversion therapy group. Yeah, Shane Wolf is so much worse than this.
02:29:49
Speaker
But we saw a very similar thing where he engaged with genuinely upsetting things to which he had a real duty of care. And then he kind of missed the mark and then filled in a lot of theoretical nonsense to shield himself from having to really engage with the severity of the problem. By the way, I think that right there might be the first time that either of us has actually pronounced Shane Wolf's name correctly on the podcast.
02:30:14
Speaker
And I just want to let the listener know that we're aware that we're not pronouncing it correctly and we don't care. Yeah. Our position then is not that the mother has to process her history so as to release her son from the errand he has assumed, or he was already putting up a fight to be the person he felt he was, whatever form that might take.
02:30:33
Speaker
Consequently, the mother's effort to straighten out the orchid while clearly of symbolic value when delivering an unambiguous message to Ori, was perhaps not what the treatment should be focused on. Ori was not acting on his mother's unconscious agenda, he very much had his own.
02:30:49
Speaker
To focus on the yes or no of the parent is to question the very foundation of the translation made by the subject, and my interpretation may have made Ori feel more unsteady in the room with me.
02:31:00
Speaker
Leaving the treatment was thus part of Ori's sturdiness. leaving me wondering what I had done wrong, as well I should. Learning from our mistakes takes humility, because it requires us to admit that we have not served a patient well, but we owe nothing less than such humility to those who come to us for help, especially when we fail them. You have no humility.
02:31:21
Speaker
You have no humility. None. If I could rewind time, I would have stayed more with the orchid, the sensuality of its petals, the exquisite attention its care required, and the acute precariousness of its survival.
02:31:37
Speaker
Rather than interpret, I would have waited. It is this kind of waiting that we described earlier in this chapter as patient affirmation. The slow time that it involves has to do with slowing down the analyst, not the patient.
02:31:50
Speaker
The word orchid from the Oxford English Dictionary comes from the modern Latin orcus, which in turn originates in the Greek word orcus, which means testicle.
02:32:02
Speaker
As a native Greek speaker, this reference was not lost on me during my work with Ori, although I did not yet know how to engage it. There is a plenitude of signifiers here, Ori's testicles as bodily markers of the normative gender his parents wanted him to consort himself to be, as symbolic vehicles of disempowerment and the w risks of psychic castration by the other, as speaking to possibilities of unfulfilled homosexual desire, as sites of courage and forcefulness, having the balls to be oneself, as metonymically speaking and perhaps speaking back to a long history of anti-Semitic stereotypes that race and sex Jewish difference under the sign of circumcision.
02:32:46
Speaker
Yo, what the fuck are you talking about?
02:32:51
Speaker
I think already in the first half, right, there's this like, if I could rewind time, there's no acknowledgement that maybe the game was rigged from the beginning, that maybe the thing you needed to actually fix was failure to say, I'm going to lie to your parents, right? Like failure to really understand that the like opposition. mean, all the things we've talked about already, staying more with the orchid. Exactly where this like lib sloth tendency that we keep bringing up comes from, you know? It's this...
02:33:18
Speaker
inability to look outside the bounds of process and ask what is actually going to produce positive outcomes here? Like, is this process that I have so much faith in going to harm people, going to potentially get them killed? Yeah. so And then the shit with the orchid.
02:33:35
Speaker
I would have stayed more with the orchid. Fuck off. Now, did you know orchid means testicle? The word eunuch is also closely associated with the word scheme. buth What kind of argument is that, right?
02:33:50
Speaker
Oh, there's a plenary. I didn't yet know how to engage it. That yet haunts me. Like, just how many sessions were you going to wait before you started, like, interrogating this, like, poor abused child about his feelings about his testicles? Ori, when you look at this orchid, do you ever think about the risks of psychic castration by the other? i just want to know. Ori, what do you think about when you masturbate?
02:34:16
Speaker
Uh-huh. Do you wear women's clothes while you masturbate? You know, Ori, I think you could actually be rather attractive if you dressed in women's clothing. Gosh, it's so bleak. This is really bad. We're basically at the end here, and they need to end with a little coda, which is why have they chosen he, him for Ori? And they basically got a page on this, so we're not going to read the whole page.
02:34:40
Speaker
and they say, look, we thought about saying she, but that seemed presumptive. They've done a lot of other presumptive stuff, but okay. We thought about they, them, but we don't want to give the impression, like already there's this uphill battle of understanding like they, them is not only just like indeterminate, but actually like you know, non-binary genders being like in themselves like real and like they them is a different pronoun and you can't just like view it as totally a neutral choice.
02:35:07
Speaker
i don't know if i buy that argument so much, but they wanted to object to the idea of a generic they and that's that's okay, I guess. Here's kind of where they settle with it. The space we have labored to hold is this.
02:35:18
Speaker
Neither of us knows who Ori will grow up to be. Sorry, I feel like I'm repeating the same point over and over again. Unless there's some further update here, there's an extremely real possibility that Ori is dead.
02:35:29
Speaker
How is gender making Giel, and whether or how it will shapeshift with time? We would not be surprised if Ori comes to identify as gay, as trans, as non-binary. If he settles into he, him, his pronouns, or into some other gender form we cannot yet imagine. Nor do we know if he will remain within his religious world, or if he will go off the derrick, that is, off the path, and leave his religious community.
02:35:53
Speaker
It is not for us to play prophet and decide the question of who or what Ori will become. Neither, dear reader. Should you? So when the first time I read this, I like actually threw my book when I got to that last line. I was so mad because, yeah, I wasn't speculating about whether Ori was going to transition later in her life.
02:36:11
Speaker
I was like haunted by the possibility that Ori was already dead as I was reading this. Like, as you say, right, it's not that like, oh, you shouldn't play prophet and speculate about his future.
02:36:22
Speaker
How is that not what you're doing? Like, why is that different than all of this mumbo jumbo about fucking the intergenerational errand of the anti-Semitic Jewish foot, right? Like, Yeah. Why is this where you draw the lines of like what we're allowed to speculate about?
02:36:42
Speaker
i got to say, Helen, this is not our most odious episode. This is not the worst episode in terms of content for sure. But this is the one that has made me the most angry
Critique of Psychoanalysis and Progressive Ideals
02:36:54
Speaker
by far.
02:36:54
Speaker
Yeah, I would agree. And I think... one of the things I wanted to do with this is, you know, I kind of joked with the Althusser episode, like, oh, yeah, let's look at some leftists. And, you know, we've talked about that with Rousseau as well, like people on the left or whatever. and And we've talked about, right. But in each of those cases, what we saw was basically just not even really trying to use any of their kind of progressive ideas, just immediately falling back on very reactionary things, right? I wouldn't really say that our episode about Althusser was engaging with like,
02:37:22
Speaker
any inherent problem with you know Marxism or whatever. It was just like straightforwardly an old-school misogynist French guy who also happened to be a Marxist professor, but who killed his wife. right Here, I do think, in a way, it's more upsetting because this is...
02:37:38
Speaker
progressive, right? Like this book was hugely celebrated. We saw the controversy that's posed as this like brave reclamation of psychoanalysis towards queer and trans flourishing. I mean, even here, this thing about like, oh, we need to note...
02:37:53
Speaker
his own internal sturdiness expressed through his persistent feminine presentation, a noncompliance he was determined to uphold, right? They're reading this, like, this will, this sturdiness, this persistence. This is the thing I marked at the beginning.
02:38:06
Speaker
Like, this persistence that Ori has, they even at some point, talks on, like, kind of about, like, oh, like, this identity that, like, produces joy. You know, all this stuff about Ori's sheer will to be himself. Like, they don't really have any any evidence that he has this, like, persistent, like,
02:38:22
Speaker
will and like joyful desire to like pursue this identity, right? like Often the inability to require children to like be like properly masculine or like perform this masculinity is like not something that is... right They're framing it here as this like persistent will to be himself, but it's it's really just you can't do anything differently, right? it's like And the experience of it is one of failure. There's a lot of shame and...
02:38:46
Speaker
self-hate that is bred in that, like, why am I not able to be properly masculine? Because these things are not, like, it's not a conscious decision often. And so to read that and then to get to this thing and then, oh, we don't know what Ori's going to come to. It's like, we don't know Ori's alive. Like, this celebration of queer and trans joy and queer and trans flourishing, like, all of that is good, but that's not really the issue here. The issue is this, like, failure to protect this kid and...
02:39:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think just because of the specificity of it, it's upsetting. And because these are people who are supposed to be our allies, these are the people fighting on our side in psychoanalysis. These are the good guys. think a huge part of what is getting me so upset is just the self-congratulatory nature of it. They're talking about their humility, about their need to coldly examine their failures in this therapeutic process.
02:39:40
Speaker
I don't get that at all. think they're so smug. I think they're so full of themselves. I think they show so little respect for queer identities, actually.
02:39:51
Speaker
It's disgusting. So luckily, we don't need to speculate about why we found this so upsetting, because we actually have a rigorous system. Yes, it's called the FAG scale.
02:40:03
Speaker
We rate each of our authors on a three bullet point scale. F for their ferocity, A for their arrogance, and G for their gullibility.
02:40:15
Speaker
And for each of those categories, we give them one to five. Ferocity, i think is going to be quite low. When we get into high ferocity ratings, we're talking about people who are consciously and intentionally describing the need for a like extermination project or subjugating project.
02:40:32
Speaker
I don't think we really have that here. Yeah, by no means. Some of this stuff felt very gross, but I'm kind of leaning towards a one at this point. I think this is a solid one for me. The other ferocity one we had was Swetnam, which I think it was for very different reasons.
02:40:47
Speaker
But I think this is really expanding our notion that like a one isn't normal. Like, I don't think these people have normal. i don't think these people are normal about queer identities. I just think it's the least bad you can be while still being on our podcast. Okay, arrogance. This is so arrogant.
02:41:03
Speaker
It really is. The only six we've given in arrogance is Ayn Rand. Is this Ayn Rand levels of bad? I don't think it's quite Ayn Rand. I don't think it's theirs. Ayn Rand had the arrogance, had the awareness of the arrogance, and had the whole project was centered around...
02:41:20
Speaker
jerking yourself off for the arrogance. That's right. It was a celebration of arrogance for its own sake, really. So I think we have to go with a five. Yeah, I'm completely on board with you. I think this is a five. Gullibility. Now, this is interesting. I think this is our first six, right? I think so.
02:41:35
Speaker
Yeah, we haven't given a six in gullibility before, and I think we're both going to give a six. Now, we need to say a little bit. about what gullibility is, right? Ferocity and arrogance are pretty self-explanatory. For gullibility, you know, all of these people are bigoted in some way, or this is interesting.
02:41:50
Speaker
One of the reasons I brought this book on now, as opposed to earlier, is we've kind of transitioned the podcast a little bit from we said, originally, we read bigoted historical texts, towards we're reading about the, or we're understanding the production of bigotry.
02:42:04
Speaker
I was a little bit less clear directly if like this itself was a bigoted text, but I think it pretty clearly is like engaged in the production of bigotry and has something to say about the production of bigotry. So that was kind of why I think now I can bring it on.
02:42:16
Speaker
The gullibility, you know, the point is not like, oh, you're like tricked by your bigotry or whatever, because all these people are bigoted. They all have like incorrect beliefs about the way the world works. And so that's not what we're rating. What we're really trying to understand is what is the role that these people have in the production of bigotry and how aware are they of this role?
02:42:32
Speaker
And I don't think we've seen people who are less aware of the role they have throughout this one therapist and the other author have failed to identify that they were being asked to do conversion therapy. And it's not clear if they ever really conceptualized that that was the thing they were being asked to do.
02:42:47
Speaker
They do talk about understanding that the parents wish is to like straighten out this like aberrant thing, but they don't. ever call that conversion therapy despite knowing that conversion therapies exist. They just place them as like not psychoanalytic, which is completely incorrect.
02:43:01
Speaker
So yeah, what they're being asked to do, I mean, I think we should explicitly say like, what is their role in the production of bigotry? They are being asked to help monitor police surveil the gender and sexuality of this child.
02:43:17
Speaker
They completely failed to do anything other than that, right? It's not clear if they really like uncovered anything, if they really served the parents' desires in this way, but they did not help protect this child. And there was no indication that had things gone more in the direction that they wanted them to, that they would have protected the child.
02:43:35
Speaker
Yeah. They don't seem to have any understanding of what protecting the child might actually entail. Yeah. All of that taken together means we've both given this one a 12, which is quite high because 15 is the soft cap. So I think...
02:43:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think this sort of goes with what we were saying about why this is so upsetting. It's not that it's particularly bigoted. It's annoying that it's so arrogant. But really, it is this complete disconnect between their understanding of like what they're doing, which is they think they're being these like brave, they're doing this brave intervention in psychoanalysis. And really, like they've just found a way to do woke things.
02:44:13
Speaker
conversion therapy. I mean, they are not doing conversion therapy, right? But they found a way to like, make it impossible to articulate, right? You can't in the framework that they're saying, you can't articulate like, what it is that happened, which is that this child with a queer identity is being erased by his parents.
02:44:30
Speaker
Because there's no core identity, right? it's it ah These are the good guys. These are the allies. With friends like these, huh? Oh my God. We're so fucking cucked. Okay.
02:44:42
Speaker
It's so Joker. Yeah. So I think I also wanted to do this because weve we've done a bunch of psychoanalysis. We've done a bunch of gender theory. I think this is a good capstone. I think I'm going to move away from this stuff. Next next episode that I prep, I promise, is not going to be about psychoanalysis and it's not going to be about trans issues because I don't want this to just be a queer theory podcast. And I've prepped two in a row where I've had to talk about who John Money was and I kind of don't want to keep doing that.
02:45:06
Speaker
So we'll move on to other topics. We've done a pretty wide survey. Like we've seen Janice Raymond, the like pretty straightforwardly conservative view that is like engaged knowingly in this project of trans erasure.
Podcast Direction and Community Engagement
02:45:17
Speaker
And we've seen the allies who are helping us fight the Janice Raymond's of the world and how they fit into the project to erase trans lives. So yeah, I think we've kind of seen it and we can move on and talk about something else, but Okay, well, no guarantees on my part.
02:45:33
Speaker
You should continue to explore this theme. I'm just announcing. Actually, what I'm going to have you do is I'm going to watch every Batman movie with you and read probably every Batman comic from, I don't know, 1960 to 1990 or so.
02:45:50
Speaker
That's going to be really fun. You're going to love it. Was this really that bad? You need to get that level of revenge? but If you want to support two trans voices, you can check out patreon.com slash odium symposium.
02:46:04
Speaker
You can sign up for $5 a month, get access to early episodes and be nice to us. And also, once again, we're starting a discord. You will find the link in the episode notes.
02:46:17
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Bye. Bye. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
02:46:37
Speaker
Is Trump to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you. I'll suck you in your goddamn face. You'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
02:46:54
Speaker
some level of masochism.