Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism

Since ancient times, those who questioned their gender and sexuality were called hysteric. By listening attentively to what hysterics said, Freud discovered the unconscious and invented psychoanalysis in an attempt to resolve their sexual enigmas. Today, the question of sexual difference continues to puzzle us; the issues brought up by transgender patients provide us with new material to rethink gender and sexuality. This book explores how transgender discourse is changing our notions of sexual difference while reorienting clinical practice. It offers an original contribution to the theoretical and clinical understanding of transgenderism, arguing against its systematic pathologization. It critically investigates a wide range of discourses on hysteria, bisexuality, and transgenderism, testing their validity against clinical vignettes drawn from published sources as well as from the author's practice as a Lacanian psychoanalyst, with the goal of exploring what can be called today's democratizing of transgenderism. Book jacket.