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Volume 10, Number 2
July-December 2006

Transvestism, Transexualism, Transgender: Identification and Imitation
Simona Argentieri


SUMMARY

During the course of a few decades, there has been a dramatic change, both psychologically and in civil rights, in the convulsive social and cultural arena in which the so-called 'transsexualisms' live, define themselves and are defined. Even the technical language has changed. In the past, diagnoses of transsexualism and transvestism were quite distinct from each other; whereas, today, we speak of 'gender dysphoria' or we use the comprehensive term of 'transgender' that moves the accent from sexual drive to gender identity. In our clinical work the phenomenon of so-called infantile 'cross-dressing' has increased, and there are many more cases of feminine perversions or, at least, their existence is no longer denied although they may go under different names.

I think that psychoanalysis must work to laboriously retrieve its theoretical space and its specific method of clinical operation so as to remove it from the confused scandals of the media, and from the collusive, falsely liberal seduction of medical-surgical 're-assignment' of sexual gender (by now permitted in the public institutions of many countries) that, in fact, puts the problem back on the biological level. We cannot limit ourselves, as frequently happens, to intervening when the damage has already been done.

We have to understand whether the actual psychological organizations of transsexuals and transvestites correspond to the structural hypotheses formulated by Freud in his time; and how, from time to time, the compromise of the very early, pre-oedipal levels relative to the construction of gender identity interweaves with that of the sexual oedipal and drive levels.

It is also important to understand analytically the relational dynamics of those who accompany, love or sometimes sexually exploit transvestites and transsexuals, in the 'grey zone' on the boundaries of so-called normality. Furthermore, the specificity of psychoanalysis regarding sexuality is to consider it not as a 'function' in itself, but as an integrating part of the person. According to our discipline, it is not the descriptive, phenomenological aspects of sexuality that determine maturity, but the entire and complete object relationship that each individual manages to establish with the other.