#944 Ann Pellegrini & Avgi Saketopoulou: Gender Without Identity

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Decent. I'm your host, Ricardo Lobs. And today I'm joined by Doctor Zen Pellegrini and J Sat Toulou. Uh Dr Pellegrini is a professor of performance studies and Social and cultural analysis at New York University and also a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. And Doctor Sato is uh also a psychoanalyst in New York City and a member of the faculty at the NYU postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. And today we're talking about their book Gender Without Identity. So, and every welcome to the show, it's a huge pleasure to everyone.

00:44 Ann Pellegrini: Thank you. Thank you so much for this invitation.

00:48 Ricardo Lopes: So uh before we get into the specific content of your book, would you like to start by telling us? And this is particularly for the audience, what motivated you to write this book? And I mean, because I know that and you describe that in the book precisely, uh I know that there's a bit of a history behind the book. So could you tell us about that?

01:12 Avgi Saketopoulou: Yeah, very storied history. Um I mean, I can say something really quickly about it and maybe Anne if you wanna like just uh flesh it out more. Uh THE very short version of it is that um uh before we wrote a book, um we had received a very prestigious award which we were very excited about and then faced a lot of suppression regarding this work. Uh And I hope we'll talk a little bit about why today. Um And um in facing that suppression, we were left with having to decide what we were going to do with that material. And um I will say more about the details, but we ended up taking a sharp turn away from publishing in an academic journal. Um AND uh deciding that we could approach a press. We are really enamored by and which ended up publishing uh this work. So it was not kind of like how we started out out, we didn't intend to write this book. This book is almost, it's, it's strange to say this. Um And it, it may sound fake but it actually, it feels very true to us um that the book was kind of an accident. OK.

02:25 Ann Pellegrini: Yeah, this, this accidental book is the result of um actually a very unhappy experience with the international journal of psychoanalysis. Um WHICH is the I JP. The I GP is the oldest journal in the field of psychoanalysis. It was founded by Freud himself. So it has a very August history. Um We avi and I wrote a paper together which we submitted for consideration for the first ever Tus paper award. With this was being given by the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association or IP A. The IP A is also, it's the oldest psychoanalytic organization in the world and the um Sexual and gender Diversity studies committee. He started with surprise to actually start to solicit work that could sort of push psychoanalysis forward in terms of thinking about sexual and gender diversities to increase um both both psychoanalytic thinking about how to work with um LGBT Q people, but also to um basically have a more um let's say um affirmative clinical practices. So we said we wrote a paper together which was organized around a beautiful case study of Avi's work with a young gender non conforming child. We submitted that paper in 2021 and to our delight, we were awarded the first Tarius Paper award and one of the outcomes of this award was the possibility of having our um paper published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. So we submitted our paper and this, the editors had to read it and agree that in fact um met their publication standards and they decided it did. They gave us some suggestions for revision which we took up. We spent a year working on our revisions. During the course of that, there was a change in the editorial leadership of the journal. The next um editor also read the essay also confirmed it was going to be published. Also gave us some actually quite helpful feedback. We made some additional revisions, everything was on track or so we thought for publication we handed in what we thought was our last version of the article on in June of 2021. We included in that last version, something that's quite standard in academic publications. We included the set of Acknowledgments. That was the first footnote of our essay. Again, this is completely standard in academic publications that you would have Acknowledgments. Um You know, thanking people who had helped you along the way, you know, sort of and, and um we sent in the essay, we'd also added a few paragraphs giving more of the social context for arguments. We didn't hear back for a week for, for a week. And then when we heard back everything had changed, we were kindly, that was the word used, kindly asked to remove certain sentences from our Acknowledgments. So they actually highlighted the sentences we wanted removed. We were told to remove the additional paragraphs we'd added in the main text giving some of the historical context for our argument. And we were utterly befuddled. We were given no reasons for these removals. And when we asked, um we were actually not told directly, um and it became clear quite suddenly that the publication of our essay which had already been accepted for publication twice and in writing, but our publication was now newly contingent on our willingness to take out the sentences they demanded we remove. And maybe a, you can say a little bit about these sentences because they actually are connected to the heart of our books of, of our now books argument.

05:56 Avgi Saketopoulou: Yeah. I mean, the, the sentences that we were asked to remove were doing two things. They were welcoming uh trans and queer subjects into psychoanalysis, people that psychoanalysis is usually treated as problems. Um And in fact, we were welcoming them. Um Certainly we're not the first to welcome trans subjects in psychoanalysis. So it shouldn't become as such a surprise, but it was very particular to this award which was put together to actually fight institutional homo transphobia in psychoanalysis, which is a field with a very bad history in its treatment of uh of gay and trans subjects. So we want to make that explicit. And we also welcomed uh our trans and queer colleagues, not just as patients, but also our colleagues, our peers, our teachers, our students uh as people in the field with equitable power rather than as just subjects of the analytic gaze and of therapeutic attention. Um And back then, we were at some point when we really press for what is going on, we're told this is too political. It's, it's we, we were told actually that it wasn't good for us to include it. And they were trying to protect us and asking to remove it. And um we, we thought that that was quite absurd. Like we, we've both published quite extensively in queer and trans studies. Uh In fact, there's nothing uh undermining of one's work in acknowledging that um a field has harmed people. Um I think that the worry probably was more that the field was going to look bad in some of these things being named in the journals pages. So we went back and forth a lot. Um Con fact, there were um at some point like we, we really protested the retraction of the publication commitment. Uh We really um uh expressed our concern about the suppression of queerness and that kind of approach to queerness. Um The journal responded with legal sounding language that generated a lot of concerns and the people receiving those emails about whether there was going to be, I mean, we were told that what we were saying was a calumny and um slanderous. I think slanderous was a word that was used and correctly. We came to understand that there were concerns that we were going to be sued for libel that he could be sued for libel just for saying that suppression was happening, which was quite bizarre because you know, anybody who has published in a psych Analytic in a, in a journal, like in the academy knows that, you know, like Acknowledgments are never kind of like subjected to this kind of um kind of like constrained. Um THEY are completely separate from what one writes in the text itself. It's not subject to editorial revision. And it's, it's kind of unheard of for a journal to say we publish this and then say, actually we want, unless you do this or that, um, that we're asking you to do. Usually that happens during the editorial process by the time something is accepted, it's accepted. So, um, you know, there was a lot of back and forth, eventually became very clear to us that they were not going to publish it. They told us we either will publish the previous version or this one. And we said, no, um they said you can make your decisions. So with a lot of anguish because the journal does reach parts of the world that um are not easily reached, especially for these kinds of issues. And we didn't want that kind of reach for the first to prize. We, we eventually said, ok, we'll, we'll go elsewhere, we'll take this work elsewhere and then something really um both um upsetting and also in retrospect, quite amusing happened. Uh WHICH is that the journal changed its tune and addressed um the committee to say, uh some version of like, we don't know these people, like we don't have an agreement with them. Our agreement is with you. If your first series CS prize paper appears elsewhere, you will be in breach of our agreement, you know, like in breach of agreement is legal language. So now, of course, the committee now is also like kind of like scurrying around trying to figure out is this a threat of a lawsuit, like what is going on here? And if you, you know, in real time, I have to say I'm laughing now, but in real time, this was all very upsetting, uh incredibly stressful. But when you look back on it, it's, it's kind of like kind of both predictable and um uh kind of the problem that the committee was trying to address through the Tus Prize. Um THAT the first, the first time that the International Economic Association is awarding a paper specifically on uh LGBT Q issues is also met with such resistance and met with such um like suppression. So kind of like, so we wanted to, to, to see what could happen with this material, we had to decide what to do with it. And as I said, at the beginning, we approached a press, we really love the unconscious in translation. We approached Jonathan House. Um The press's um editor explained the situation and asked if he would be willing to publish it into a kind of like expanded version. And so we added some material um and a chapter from a theorist we're working with and the book came out as gender without identity um in June 2023. Um So we're very happy to have a book now, despite all the back and forth uh which taught us so much about where psychoanalysis continues to be.

11:37 Ann Pellegrini: I mean, we, we wrote, you know, we wrote the article, uh you know, the paper and then the article and now the book in part to flag the, it turns out ongoing difficulties psychoanalysis has had thinking complexly about diverse genders and sexualities and not just in thinking but in actually, in its work with people who present non normative genders or people who have queer sexualities. So we got an incredible lesson in real time of precisely those struggles, those ongoing struggles and psychoanalysis. And they're not just struggles, the actual ways in which psychoanalysis treats queer and trans people. It has treated and continues to treat queer and trans people actually despicably, right. Um There are things changing but um there are, there are still huge um challenges within psychoanalysis over these issues.

12:29 Ricardo Lopes: So let's get into that before we get into the main argument of your book. Uh IN what ways uh the psychoanalysis traditionally tend to approach LGBT Q plus people. I mean, what are some of the main things they say about uh these people

12:52 Ann Pellegrini: to put it? That's a great, sorry, go ahead

12:56 Avgi Saketopoulou: um to put it a bit in a historical context. Uh This is no longer the case in the US, even though it continues to be the case in other countries in the world. Like if you're out and gay, it used to be that you couldn't train, you were explicitly seen as being pathological and you would be excluded, such as gay people were advised in the eighties to not disclose their homosexuality in order to not be disqualified from being considered to train as psychoanalysts.

13:28 Ricardo Lopes: But but, but why,

13:31 Avgi Saketopoulou: because, because homosexuality was seen as pathology, it was seen as kind of not having met the developmental milestones and not having gone through normal development in the way that a psychoanalyst who should be the epitome of mental health. Like if you're going to be treating other people, you should be healthy yourself. And if you're gay, you're not healthy. And that, you know, used to be very explicitly the case, of course, it would be legal today. But, you know, it continued to happen um in ways that are more covert. So nobody would say anymore, like um that it's because of somebody's homosexuality. But with time as it became more illegal, people would find other reasons to reject candidates who were candidates for training, who were gay. Um AS I said, this doesn't happen anymore in the United States explicitly. Um Even though of course, it's always better if you're gay, if you're also married and perhaps have kids that really situates you as the safer gay person, um kind of like common activities alive and well in, in economic training. But, but in Europe, like, you know, I was there a few years ago giving a talk actually at that committee's first Study day, first International Study Day. And a lot of colleagues from Europe came out as being gay or queer in that space and expressed their fear of telling their institutes or express their fears of speaking up about these kinds of issues for fear of retribution. Um And this is not to even get into how psychoanalysis has treated gay patients um or trans patients. Um I mean, in um in analytic institutes up until recently, even having uh a training case when you're trained to be an analyst, you usually have a case that is very closely supervised by a colleague. As you're learning how to tran to transition from doing therapeutic work to analytic work. And um those cases have to be approved, they have to meet certain criteria so that they meet the criteria for your training. They would not approve trans patients as training cases because kind of like they were too much fringe um kind of like they were too much out of the norm. So you see there's like so many levels on which psychoanalysis has historically failed. Um And as it's been making changes and trying to make improvements, you see like the proliferation of these committees. But you also see kind of like in the experience that we were describing earlier, how quickly it generates tremendous kind of resistance.

16:06 Ricardo Lopes: But let me ask you perhaps a more specific question also for the audience to have a better understanding of what where those ideas come from. I mean, perhaps theoretically speaking, why is it that in psychoanalysis, let's say developmentally people would consider a gay people or trans people to be uh abnormal if we can use that word here.

16:34 Ann Pellegrini: I, I think this is a actually a really important question. And you know, if we go back to the historical origins of psychoanalysis, which is in actually Freud's own theory, his body of work, he was profoundly ambivalent about what we might call today. Homosexuality. This isn't always the language he used. But you know, in some of his earliest work and maybe the famous important text here is his 1905 3 essays and the Theory of sexuality. In the first edition of that, we see him. Um Actually, at least in the first two essays is three essays presenting, you know, saying of sexuality something quite radical that it could develop in any direction. And sometimes he's saying there's no such thing as normal sexuality, right? It it that it could take any number of forms, any number of object choices, any number of sexual acts can result in pleasure, right? And so he's really pulled the rug out from under the normative picture of sexuality as being heterosexuality. Um That's the first two essays. By the time you though you get to the third essay of that text in 1905, he reasserts um the normative picture of human development. You have to move through these stages towards becoming heterosexual. And that movement towards becoming heterosexual, a kind of secure heterosexuality includes also normative gender positions. The boy becomes masculine, the girl becomes feminine. And so this again, this radical that's there. At the beginning of this text starts to be gradually pulled back. And you know, this is this is so even as Freud for example, um you know said in publicly that um homosexuality should not be uh illegal, it should, it is not something that requires institutionalization, which were actually important things and radical things to say in his day. But he, he, he really was of two minds um both in his moment historically and ahead of it at the same time. It's, you know, um so there's a conservatism, a kind of tension within psychoanalysis from the beginning. But the thing, one of the things that gets picked up from Freud's early thinking and elaborated by colleagues who are actually perhaps even more conservative than he ultimately was is that homosexuality represents a kind of regression. You're supposed to keep moving forward. There's this picture of a normative development, you move across time in one direction only. So if someone gets stuck or fixated on a homosexual object choice, then this is because you've either again gotten stuck, you haven't kept progressing in the right direction or you've fallen backwards, you've had a regression. It's a kind of, you know, it's like you've become primitive again in your sexuality. And I use the term primitive, quite aware of its racial connotations because that's there too. There's this notion of, you know, that what does it mean to have a civilized sexuality which is connected also to projects of whiteness and colonialism. And that's unfortunately baked into psychoanalysis because this is also the historical context within which it emerges.

19:42 Ricardo Lopes: Uh And, and about that historical context, I mean, I guess we will come back to that idea when we talk about in a bit the, the approach you have to gender identity in the book. But that's a very important element here, right? In terms of the development of psychoanalysis as a discipline and even more more broadly in our society in general, how we think about gender identity and even how people develop their own gender identities, history and social context is very important here.

20:17 Ann Pellegrini: Absolutely. And you know, again, I, I think there's so many radical openings in Freud and in other psychoanalytic thinkers, but there's a whole conservative plot around them, so to speak, it's sort of like it gets slowed down. And certainly, you know, A and II, I um it is fair to say this and both of us, we love psychoanalysis and we love its possibilities, what it can actually offer for queer and trans life. We actually think it can offer us different ways to think about our, about ourselves, our interactions with others and to promote flourishing for all sorts of diversities. But we're also aware that some of the ways in which it got again, ST psychoanalysis has gotten stuck in certain ways, these are ongoing problems. And we really would like to, you know, we, we offer this book and arguments as a way to sort of try to loosen up some of these impasses within psychoanalysis because we think it is actually can offer very supple ways to think about how anyone becomes and changes over time because we are actually interested in our book in the question of development. But what's very distinctive about the argument we're offering is we would distinguish development actually charting how things change over time from the developmental is which actually states you can only develop in one direction only. And any departure from this linear chronology of A to B this again, teleological linear chronology, any departure from that means that you've been warped, means that you're pathological means that something in you has gone wrong.

21:52 Ricardo Lopes: So tell us then about the sort of uh argument regarding gender identity that you present in the book. I mean, tell us about the main argument and then we can break it down and go through some of its details.

22:08 Avgi Saketopoulou: Yeah, I mean, there's two main threads to the argument in the book and both of them have to do with what Anne was saying earlier. Uh ABOUT how much we love psychoanalysis. Like, you know, with everything that we've said so far, it would be easy to say. So why bother? And many people have said like in the academy and in the clinic in clinical settings have said, why bother with psychoanalysis? It's outdated, it's homophobic, it's transphobic, let's just throw it out. But the reason why we persist is because we think that there are so many um so many concepts in psychoanalysis about which I'll speak in a moment that offer us ways of thinking and understanding human experience and psychic life that are not available in any other therapeutic or psychological theory. So, psychoanalysis has a deep appreciation for the strangeness of the unconscious and for things that are outside our awareness and nevertheless exert an influence on us and our every day uh producing like say symptoms or errors that we think are dismissible, but nevertheless, an important turn out to be important dreams. Um But also for thinking about the other way of thinking about the unconscious, which is also very important is as something that is always that has to do with something that we will never fully be able to know about ourselves, that we're always foreign to ourselves, to some degree and that we stand to be surprised by ourselves. However well, we may think we know ourselves. Psych analysis is like really remarkable in that respect. So it is based on some of these ideas that we make two main arguments in the book. The one is that this notion of gender identity, which in fact started from psychoanalysis and has spread in many other types of discourses and conversations. It was proposed by Robert Soler in 1964. This notion of gender identity that presumes that there is something true about one's own experience of one's gender at the core of the self. Um The first argument in the book is to say that this is fictional, it's made up uh which may sound very surprising to some people because that, that language has really taken and not only is it um a fictionalized concept, it's also not a concept that serves as well. Um It's a concept that does a lot of damage and we can talk about this more uh through our conversation. The second argument is to say that nobody kind of like is it follows from this notion that gender identity is a fiction but nobody is born into their gender. Nobody has a gender that is correct or incorrect about them. Like we may feel that our gender is right or not, but there's no gender in the core of the self that can be confirmed or discon confirmed our genders come again. This is true for cis people, for trans people, for gender queer people. It's true for everyone. It's not just an argument for trans nest. Um And that psychic processes including trauma may have something to do with how somebody comes into their gender, how somebody acquires a gender so that we want to be able to start conversations about what it means to not have been feeling like you're trans from however young, like, you know, people say, like ever since I was two years old, I was dressing and kind of like, I always wanted to wearing dresses. Like, certainly some people have that experience. But we believe that it is also important to have ways of thinking about how people become trans or become queer or become sis, which is language that we have generally associated with conversion practices. Um And perhaps I will say a little bit more about that. Um But we need to bring that language into our, into affirming thinking for queer and trans life. And psychoanalysis gives us a way to do that.

26:10 Ricardo Lopes: Uh So you're certainly making here an argument against the idea of gender identity being in some way innate, right? And being the result of certain, for example, biological predispositions, like for example, uh brain wiring or a set of hormones that you have in your body or a certain set of genes or something like that.

26:36 Avgi Saketopoulou: Right. Absolutely. Um And, and, and I know that kind of like you have some things that you might want to say about how we came to put so much weight on those ideas.

26:48 Ann Pellegrini: Yes. Yeah, we're definitely arguing against the idea that either gender or sexuality is inborn. Um And to that degree immutable because of some sort of biological basis, whether that biological basis be located in hormones and DNA um in some, in some region of the hypothalamus. This was one speculated in respect to the homosexuality. Um And one of our, we, we make this observation right, that we, that we do not think that gender or sexuality is inborn. We make this observation as clinicians. We also make this observation on the basis of, you know, I think we're both persuaded by um years now of work by historians of gender and sexuality who are pointing to its social construction, its variability uh and how in systems that try to organize gender and sexuality, its variability across cultures. Um But we're also, we're also aware and this, we, we see that part of our argument is actually quite um I, I suppose it could be controversial that we are in a moment when L GB Q, LGBT Q people are under attack in numerous national contacts. I'll just speak about the United States right now. Um As of early April, I haven't checked since April 2nd, but as of April 2nd, 484 bills have been introduced into state legislatures across the United States to restrict in some way LGBT Q rights and access to health care. A lot of these bills have focused on blocking access to gender affirmative care for trans youth and also for trans adults. So there is kind of there's a huge not just public debate, but we could even say a kind of war on trans people in particular. And it's not just happening in the United States. I just know the the statistics about films in the United States, right? And in the face of such open opposition to the very possibility of there being trans people. It just seemed as if the only argument we who would advocate for trans and queer life would make. It seemed as if the only argument we can make is to say that we were born that way we can't change. Therefore, we deserve equal rights on the basis of who we are immutably. Right? So one of the reasons I think born that way and arguments for mutability have gained traction is it seemed like that's the only thing we can say to protect us from discrimination. But it actually hasn't worked. I mean, it actually hasn't worked legally, it hasn't worked politically to secure these rights. It hasn't defeated attempts to roll back rights that have already been extended. We also think it's ethically short sighted because the reason not to discriminate against queer and trans and gender queer people is not because we were born that way. It's because it's wrong to discriminate against queer and trans people. It's just wrong, right. That's so we don't, to me, you don't need to like an argument from immutability to make that case. And then as clinicians, it doesn't square with what we're hearing from the people we sit with once a week, twice a week, three times a week, four times a week, we are hearing much more complex stories about people's genders and people's sexualities when we sit with them and when they have the freedom and under and believe themselves to be in a space that they can trust when people have the freedom to start talking about how their own gender, for example, has changed across their lifetime or how indeed that gender may have shifted. They've experienced a shift in the wake of some traumatic event or maybe their sexuality has shifted in the wake of some traumatic event when there's the freedom for people to talk about it. You start hearing how gender and sexuality are not so immutable are not. So, you know, as it were stuck for any of us, that their change does indeed happen. That doesn't this is not a romance for change because change can also feel scary, it can feel disorienting. But we, you know, we think that for all sorts of reasons, again, clinical, ethical, political legal, the born that way argument just we actually think it's wrong, it's incorrect, it's not accurate to the complexity of people's lives.

31:01 Ricardo Lopes: Uh So before we break down a little bit, what you just mentioned there, and uh let me just ask you this. So within your argument uh about gender identity, would there still be space for uh certain people who say that they feel that in their own experience, they were born this or that way? I mean, is there still space for accommodating uh those kinds of experiences that people report or not?

31:35 Ann Pellegrini: Absolutely. And I really appreciate you saying that we are in no way legislating how any queer, trans bisexual gender, non conforming person would describe their relationship to their gender or their sexuality and especially in a world where unfortunately, in so many national contexts, there are laws that would restrict LGBT Q life. So for someone who is minoritized, marginalized, even oppressed because of their gender and sexuality, for such a person to give any account of themselves is an act actually of, of I think of courage and is to be commended and affirmed. So we're not telling those queer and trans people who would save themselves, they're born that way. Oh, you're so foolish. We're not saying that at all with this. We're, we're not in that respect. We would not be so condescending and arrogant as to presume to tell, to tell anyone how they're supposed to tell the story themselves. But because so many queer and trans people would not describe their genders or their sexuality in the language of born. That way, we need to provide more space for the much more complex stories. People in fact do tell about themselves, but which, but which some people are being told. Don't say that in public, it's gonna hurt the movement. Don't say that in public is going to make it harder to pass um anti discs laws because you're, you're basically giving, you're, you're basically in giving comfort to those who say that trans and queerness are a matter of being warped. And, you know, obviously you can say something about the warped that way, argument. Uh We, we want to create more expansive um conversation that really holds open the complexities of how anyone becomes who and how they are.

33:15 Ricardo Lopes: You know, this is very interesting to me because uh and this is probably the main reason why I really loved your book is because even before I read it, uh for a few years, I've been having this fought and I, I mean, I'm not gay, I'm not a ransom or anything like that. I, I mean, I'm a see straight man. So people might say, oh, you have no saying on this matter and that's fair enough. But still when it comes to protecting LGBT Q plus rights, yes, that it's still fair to have this sort of discussion where whatever kind of gender identity or sexual orientation you might have because I think that when it comes to relying too much on this kind of born this way type of argument, uh I agree with you when you say that it might be harmful even for advancing LGBT Q plus rights. Because first of all, the argument, as you said should be, uh it's, there's nothing wrong with being gay, lesbian, trans person because that's not wrong. There's nothing wrong with that. And that should be the argument and not, oh, it's not wrong because people can't change it. It's not wrong because they were born that way. So there's nothing we can do about it. It's just their nature or something along those lines. But then the second way by which it can be harmful is that what if people find out that that's not true and that people can actually change their gender identity or even through unconscious processes or something like that through their own history experience. And even I, I mean, I'm not sure if that would be true in any way or not, but, but even through their own choice because even if this was a choice, I don't think there would be anything wrong with that again. So I, I mean, what are your thoughts on all of what I just said here?

35:27 Avgi Saketopoulou: I mean, it's so interesting to hear you say, look, I'm not gay or trans myself, but this idea of like gender is immutable and it's in you and you have it from the beginning doesn't make sense. Um Kind of like you don't have to be gay or trans to see that there's nothing that adds up about that kind of narrative. Now, as Anne was saying, kind of like our argument is pitched to clinicians and it's pitched to people who think about gender and to politicians who kind of like want to see some notion and you know, when we say that like, gender is not immutable, we don't just mean biologically that, you know, there's no chromosome or hormone or whatever. We also mean that this notion, this psychologize notion of like your internal sense of who you are is something true that that too is an argument of immutability and an argument of innateness, even as that is not hinged on biology, but hinged on psychological truth. Right. So, um, you know, like when you say, and I really, like when you said, like, you know, what if it were a choice, um you know, like what would be wrong with that? It's only if you start with the premise that being trans or queer is a bad outcome that having it be a choice becomes a problem. And I think kind of like you don't have to be queer or trans to see that uh you just have to be a thinking person. Um But you know, but, but here's where psychoanalysis offers us a different kind of resource, um which is kind of both paradoxical and we think very expensive and hopeful, which is to say that kind of like, even as there's nothing wrong with people making a choice, there's also ways in which kind of like we, things appeal to us, our bodies are experienced by us in certain ways, our attractions, our relations, our understandings of ourselves come to us, not always as a result of a choice. Um But not neither as imposed necessarily that sometimes of like very complex psychic processes, some of which have to do with unconscious life and like synergize, kind of like come together to make us who we are. So one of the most forceful and formidable, I think uh formidable in the sense of pushing back against received wisdom, arguments that we make in the book is this idea that even trauma may have something to do with how somebody becomes the gender that they understand themselves to be. And this takes us back to what Anne referenced as a war this way. So on the one hand, we have born this way as like that's how you were born with this kind of gender identity or these genes. On the other hand, you have this idea that everybody should be cis or trans cis or binary gendered from the beginning. And if you mistakenly think mistakenly in quotes that you're uh trans or non binary or gender queer, that's because something bad must have happened to you that kind of derailed you from your normal and healthy course. And I put normal and healthy in quotes, um normal and healthy course that would have made you kind of like normative gendered. That argument has been very much weaponized and used against queer and trans people um in including by queer and trans people themselves who find who, who we see the clinic being very worried that if something about their sexuality may have a little bit to do with, or a lot to do with trauma or if something about their gender shifts after a traumatic experience, then maybe they're not truly trans or truly queer, maybe they're just bent out of shape or derailed. And I, I was thinking, I don't know if, uh, if you or any of our listeners have had a chance to see Baby Reindeer the, the Netflix series, um, that is now kind of like, actually quite everybody's talking about. It's a really interesting Netflix series because it is, it portrays the true story of a man who begins to who has kind of like an experience of sexual assault, which it takes him some time to understand it as a sexual assault. And it raises questions about whether it inflects sexual orientation, whether his desires uh that begin to deviate from being just straight desires are somehow impacted by this trauma. Now, the usual response to that the affirmative response, the non homophobic response is absolutely not. Maybe this just helped him understand that he was gay or this is a homophobic argument to make. But part of what we want to do and what we do through psychoanalysis and gender without identity is to say that of course, trauma can have a share in. So how somebody acquires their gender, how somebody acquires their sexuality without that having to mean that it's delegitimizing of somebody's trans. If, if trauma has something to do with your queerness that does not make you less queer or not truly queer because that's also how heterosexuality and and normative gender are also constituted. They're also constituted through trauma. We're just not used to seeing them as constituted. We see them as just having been there always. Um And we can say more about how that happens for heterosexuality and cis gender too. But like what we want to do is help both our colleagues in our field. But also uh larger conversations that are happening around g we want to help people build a tolerance for thinking about how trauma does not just break you or warp you or uh disfigure your psychic life. But it can also put emotional processes that take you in different directions that people do not just do things about their trauma, they also do things with their trauma. And those things that we do with trauma are as much part of psychic autonomy, as conscious choices that we make even as they may not be as conscious um as the decision to do this or that. Um

41:52 Ricardo Lopes: mhm uh So, but just for this point to be clear because um I, I mean, o of course, I'm not very much into psychoanalytic theory. So you will have to explain, explain this bit here. So when it comes to trauma, because of course, I would imagine that the sort of ways people approach trauma, for example, in social psychology or in sociology would differ from the ways U psycho analysts approach trauma. So for the audience, how do psychoanalysts usually approach trauma? What the stra mean for psycho for psychoanalysis?

42:34 Ann Pellegrini: I I'll begin and then I want, I'll hand the VP as well. I mean, I guess one thing to say is that there is no one way in which trauma is theorized and thought about within even psychoanalysis. Um SO, and, and one, um let's say particular way in which even psychoanalysis has struggled over the question of trauma. And this is something ay has talked about at length in her solo book, Sexuality Beyond Consent is that psychoanalysis, numerous psychological practices, psychotherapies often speak of trauma as something that is can be cured or healed, that it's something that broke into and broke apart and otherwise intact subject, right? And so then the, so the task of a therapeutic treatment, the task of clinical work would be to help put the pieces back together to, we can use the language of heal or cure this despite the fact that when pushed pretty much every psychoanalyst would say you can't actually heal or cure trauma. So then what is it, is trauma, something that is a matter of breaking us apart and that we're trying to put back together or is it, does it do a different kind of work? So we are in our book and our thinking, drawing on a particular psychoanalytic way of thinking about trauma. We're drawing on the work of Jean Laplanche, she was a deep um reader of Freud. Um BUT he um makes some really interesting points about trauma as being normative to the generation, the production of any self that there's something about the way in which we're all set into motion. And La Planche even thinks about the constitution of what we could call the ego and the constitution of what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious. Out of the the ne the infants struggle to make sense of materials that have come into the infant body from the other, from the parental other quite often from caretakers material that the infant has to make sense of. Um AND has to make sense of in part because even the adult doesn't even know the particular kinds of messages or communications they're making and just these ordinary acts of care of holding the infant, of cleaning the infant of feeding the infant. We're not talking about an adult who's making as it were traumatic incursions into the infant through sexual abuse. We're talking about everyday interactions between the adult and the infant. Laplanche says become the occasions for a certain kind of implantation of of adult material which is unconscious to the adult into the infant. This is what La Planche thinks of as a kind of normative trauma that set something in motion. And this is and what is set into motion is the effort the infant then must make the the infant becoming human, right? Um The effort the infant must make to as it were translate those strange intrusions from the the adult unconscious to translate a content that actually has no content. And here's some, here's a space for psychic freedom. That translation has is a space of psychic freedom. Why? Because there's no actual content that even the adult doesn't know the content of those communications and the infant translates will come to language as it were or represent things that have happened by drawing on material from the Laplanche uses the language of the myth of symbolic. Basically drawing on the vernaculars, the categories made available in the culture of the family and in the wider culture and these categories, these concepts, these vernaculars include the vernaculars of gender, include the vernaculars of sexuality. So we draw on these categories outside ourselves to make sense of something that's come into ourselves. Laplanche would say, and again, that's normative trauma. It happens to all of us. He even argues it's necessary that it happens to all of us to set us in motion to become a particular kind of human. This we could distinguish this normative trauma from, we could say uppercase t trauma which are events that not everyone experiences. It could be the, the the trauma of um a sexual assault, the trauma of um the experience of genocide, the trauma of even everyday racism we could think of as a kind of trauma that accumulates on top of the normative trauma of being, you know, called into subjectivity. But this is we're drawing in the plan and we're also drawing on it through work has done uh on her own as well.

47:16 Ricardo Lopes: So let me ask you about this since we're talking here about gender identity and also more specifically about trends, people. What do you think about the diagnosis of gender dysphoria? I mean, how would you approach that through this perspective?

47:36 Avgi Saketopoulou: Yeah, this is a really important question because gender dysphoria is the catchphrase right now on how uh trans people are being seen as kind of like abnormalize and pathological. Um Let me actually loop to your question through something that Ann said, you know, when you were asking about trauma. Um YOU know, another way to say some of the things that Ann was describing is that no, usually in popular culture and in some therapeutic models, we think of trauma as you have an organized self, you have, you are who you are and then you have something from the outside, either overwhelming you or trying to damage you and then you have to protect against it. And if you can protect against its success and if you can't, you can get traumatized. So trauma is usually seen as kind of like a trespass from the outside, right? And it is in that model that the idea is that if you have been broken by trauma, then the point is to be repaired to return to some intact. But the, the particular offering of psychoanalysis that we're working with here is this idea that of like that we are broken through by things all the time, from the beginning of our lives, through the through our experiences. In fact, people who imagine that they are unbreakable or deserve to be unbroken are people with kind of like social privilege with certain kinds of entitlements. Uh Whiteness works very much like that. It's entitled to be unbroken. And if it's broken, then kind of like somebody has to be harmed uh over it. Um So kind of like the model that we're working with is the idea that trauma is actually everywhere in psychic life and that it is in response to trauma that the psyche is forced to, to invent to do something with what you do with that breach from what can be experienced from the outside. Once it's inside you, it's too late like it's already inside you. Another question is what do you do with it? You can try to evict it. But sometimes, I mean, like there's certainly many models through for thinking about how some organisms take that thing from the uh from what feels like the outside and do something with it and make it part of the self and may make something, sometimes that thing become works and sometimes it doesn't. Um So when, when you're talking about gender dysphoria to come back to, to your specific question, the term gender dysphoria presumes that this psychic, this, this person should have stayed intact in there, presumably original. And I'll put this in air, quote, healthy gender of being and binary, but something has invaded them and it causes them like in the world this way, uh reference that we're making earlier and it has caused them to be dysphoric. When in fact, if it had not invaded them, they would have been at peace with their normative cisgender. Um This of course, doesn't permit for the possibility that kind of like, first of all, you kind of like not, we don't start out sis or binary and it does permit for the fact that people do with trauma, all kinds of things including kind of like pro uh coming, coming to different kinds of genders. Um So gender dysphoria is a very anthologizing way of talking about trans because it presumes that you are, I was like it, it used to be, I mean, I should, I should finish this thought first because it presumes that there's something pathological about being trans. Now, historically, it used to be a way that people were talking, trying to describe their relationship with their body that they were feeling dysphoria between how they were assigned, how people saw their gender, how they experienced it and what they felt in their body. But increasingly so, um dysphoria is the word that is being um instrumental um utilized um misused in order to argue that there's something off about people who want to transition or to say that only people who have a certain degree of dysphoria should have access to um to gender affirming care. So you see, like, it's interesting to see how kind of like those arguments kind of like, cut both ways. Like, if you have too much dysphoria, it's a problem and if you have too little, it's a problem. And that begins to, to point as to how dysphoria is a problematic term in that context.

52:15 Ann Pellegrini: And I'll just add that. I, I think, you know, dysphoria, either way, dysphoria includes a model. It takes for granted a model of immutability. The anti trans version of dysphoria is that a someone who should have been cysts because everyone is actually cysts, something has warped them such that they mistakenly think they're a different gender. So there's some so that, but that mistake is itself a symptom. There's some so that um but here, dysphoria presumes the core, the immutable core would be cyst. That is normative gendered. The, the transformative model is that dysphoria um indicates actually the difficulties and in fact, there are real difficulties in living in the world as someone who's trans because we live in a transphobic world. But dysphoria would then name like this discordance between the, again the sex assigned at birth and the gender one feels oneself to be um usually articulated through a born that way model, I've always been this way, we have to now fix this incongruity. So as to get rid of the dysphoria. But again, dysphoria, I think is built on a premise of immutability, whether an anti transversion or transforming version.

53:26 Ricardo Lopes: So le let me ask you this and I know this is a very sensitive question. But since that idea is out there, I guess we also have to address it because when it comes to trans people nowadays, particularly from uh the American right, and also the right wing in other countries, we have this very uh common idea that when it comes to certain people and particularly when it comes to Children, identifying us rounds that there would be an element of social contagion to it. So according to the framework you bring into your book, would there be space for that kind of phenomenon or not?

54:12 Ann Pellegrini: You know, this idea of contagion that somehow kids are catching transnet there, you know, because they're, they're on, you know, basically a contagion by internet, a contagion by again, a bad teacher, a contagion by, oh this other kid is trans. So maybe I am too, this is actually relying on what is a now discredited study um which causes this notion of rapid onset gender dysphoria. This this the paper promoting that actually had to be retracted. It was its methods were so um dubious and yet the term has gained traction and it circulates with a kind of medical panache to it. See, even the experts say um it's a contagion. Um We think that also we, we would absolutely reject the notion of contagion. Um But we do want to note the following. There may well be an increase in the number of young people identifying as gender, non conforming and identifying as trans. But we should not be surprised at that increase. Why the the psychotic model we're using um involves the idea that as we make, we make sense of ourselves, we elaborate ourselves. This is not a fully volitional process, but we elaborate ourselves. We come to give names to ourselves, sometimes not the names our parents gave us, not the names society wants to assign to us, but we come to self theorize and self elaborate drawing on existing cultural categories. And because there are now in numerous cultural contexts, more categories, more names for the ways we can do our gender, including the name trans, including the name, gender, non binary. It of course makes sense that more Children having available those new or newly emergent vernaculars would use those names to describe their experiences of embodiment, their experiences of themselves. But this is not a contagion. This is about the ongoing transformation of culture that has come about in part through political struggle. It's also about ongoing possibilities of self transformation in light of social changes. This isn't a 1 to 1 thing. Oh you learned about trans. Now you think you are, it's a much more complex interaction, right? The contagion model assumes that something comes into you and Voila. There you are, you just think this you are this, we, we're actually talking about a much more complex interaction and the social matters, but it doesn't matter in this again, 1 to 1 mono causal way.

56:48 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm I get it. Uh So let me ask you now another kind of question. So when it comes to the way you approach gender identity here and particularly the bit about trauma, uh I, I wanted to ask you whatever way people deal with their specific traumas, whether they are single events or whether they are ongoing experiences that they have throughout their lives, whatever way they deal with it in terms of, of how they express themselves uh on the level of their gender identity, for example, is there any one correct way of doing that? I mean, uh if uh different people through their own particular experiences get at different or develop different sorts of gender identity? I mean, is there uh are anyone doing anything wrong with their own gender identity? I guess that's what I'm asking you. I mean, from a more uh let's say clinical perspective, I guess.

58:00 Avgi Saketopoulou: Yeah, I, I think that's part of the implication as you're picking up on with where we're heading and we talk about this in, in our, in our book quite a bit that if we go with what one who's ex and was explaining earlier, there is no way to get your gender right. And there's no way to get your gender wrong. Like there's rightness and wrongness have nothing to do with gender. There's no way to assess if somebody is truly trans or if somebody is really a woman sis or otherwise, like there's no way to pin gender to precision or actuality, in fact, if anything. Um AND this is kind of like the the really expansive and more radical proposition that we offer in our volume is that gender is a wildly improvisational process. And this is why actually, even though people stand under categories, like some people might say, I identify as a woman or identify as a trans mask, uh non-binary person, like none of these categories includes in them kind of like homogeneous subjects. Like all women are women differently, all cis women or trans women or kind of like non binary people. That's why you see so much variation in gender, like they share some things but really like every gender, there's, there's as many genders as there are people, even as we try to group them in different categories to make this distinction. So obviously, I'm not saying that these distinctions are meaningless, but they are not as decisive or firm or tight as we imagine them to be.

59:35 Ann Pellegrini: And you know, in the very fact that these distinctions are not so tight, in fact, they're porous. I think this is part of what feeds the current moral panic over trans kids and, and trans adults as well. Because I think that for, for many people, the prospect that, that there I'll say for many cis people, right? For many people who are normative gendered have experienced their gender as unchanging across their lifetime. I think that a trans person, a non binary person could challenge some of their own settled assumptions about their gender. I'm not saying that suddenly someone who's normally gender is like, oh my God, what if I'm trans too? Although people might, their trans panic might take the form of, well, this person could change, maybe I could as well. But I think it, I think part of the panic is that it, it does something to you to realize that, oh, what are all the ways in which I'm not exactly how I think I am like, what does it mean to, you know, come reckon with all the ways in which even for someone who was assigned female at birth, who identifies comfortably or? So it feels to her with the category girl and then woman, right? Even that person has undergone changes in her gender across her lifetime changes that also might be connected to physiological changes of puberty. Maybe there was a pregnancy then menopause, right? So we're not saying the body doesn't matter. We're not saying biology doesn't matter, but it's not 1 to 1 in the ways it matters but I think that it's very scary to a lot of people to encounter the ways in which not just the world is changing around them, like, politically, socially, the world is changing around them. But actually they may not be exactly who and how they think they are. That's can be frightening for many people to encounter.

1:01:23 Ricardo Lopes: So let me ask you one last question. Then when it comes to reps, the hopes you would have for your book. I mean, when it comes to, I, if you were to decide in an ideal world, what sort of influence would the book like this have on your uh psycho uh uh psychoanalytic colleagues? Uh AND people like that, what would you like basically for other psychoanalysts to take from this book? And in what ways would you love for it to have an impact on how psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalysts approach, the topics like gender identity?

1:02:07 Avgi Saketopoulou: Um I really appreciate this question and, and I also appreciate that the vision and the hopefulness of this question that our book could have that kind of an impact, which of course we would love for each case. Uh I mean, I think I can think of three things at the moment and I'm sure that Ann may have things to add to that the first would be to begin to move away from this notion of gender identity. Um And to become smarter and able to think more complexly about how people acquire their gender. Um PSYCHOANALYSIS has always had very, very elaborate theories about how CIS people become cis. I mean, it, it, it has not seen itself as doing that. But, you know, we actually have a lot of theories about how boys become boys and girls become girls and, and was talking about that a little bit earlier. So we want to extend that resource that of complexity to queer and trans people. The second is to begin to take seriously the ways in which trauma is actually part of life and not the thing that interrupts it. And this is not to minimize that trauma is difficult or, or to say that we should pull back from social justice movements. That's not what we're saying at all. It is to say that since trauma is inevitable, thinking in ways that are more trauma, ahi rather than trauma, phobic thinking with ways about that have to do more with what people do with their trauma and how different kinds of self configurations arise out of trauma without invalidating them without treating them as um as being uh illegitimate uh is very important. And the third is to to begin to take more seriously kind of like how much more brutal and strange gender is than we realize. But gender is very strange and all of our efforts to understand it, to master it, to have some Dominion over it, to control it, whether people try to control it through words or through categorization or through who gets access or not. This is that gender as, as uh Paulo Preciado says is always going to mutate, you know, even when you feel you're kind of like at the at the leading edge of trying to understand something, it will always slip away and that's not a bad thing. That's not a failure that has to do with the kind of like how with the mortality and the energy of psychic life and of what it means to be alive.

1:04:38 Ann Pellegrini: I mean, I think this is also about flagging and this is one of the things we hope it will do in the book, it flag the Experimentalism of gender. Um And that, that experimentalism um is to be validated and given and given space for for however long that particular experiment lasts such that people are also allowed to change. If it's an experiment, one can change and change again. Um We would say it's gender transition all the way down, right? Um One thing that I want to go back to something we talked about earlier is that um one of the strongest claims our book makes and we make it over and over and over again in different kinds of language is that there is nothing wrong with being queer or trans or gender non-binary. But even more importantly, there is no wrong way to become queer or trans or gender, non binary. That's we want this this is a really big takeaway. We want our book to have and you know, I, I know you've raised and we really appreciate this question. What would you want? How would we wish psychoanalysts maybe put this book to work? You know, this is our book also is standing on the shoulders of other psychoanalytic thinkers who are trying to do queer and trans affirmative work, right? So we're really grateful for that work. We also could not have written this book without the resources of queer and trans studies. And, and, and very importantly, queer and trans of color critique. We needed these resources from outside psychoanalysis to help shake psychoanalysis up and make it more rethink supple more accountable, right? Um But some of your, of your viewers might think well. Ok, great. This is actually a book for psychoanalysts. We don't really, at the end of the day, we don't kind of care about psychoanalysis. We'll let them have this conversation. Here's why your viewers should care about psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis cares about queer and trans people. Although the way that psychoanalysis cares about queer and trans people isn't so caring. What do I mean by that, that in I'll speak about the United States, anti trans, especially anti trans legislation and anti trans policies that would bar access to gender affirmative care and in particular bar children's access to gender affirmative care. Much of this legal language, these bills, these proposed bills and even some legal opinions are undergirded by, they refer to medical research. Much of this medical research is being done by psychoanalytic activists by psychoanalysts who oppose we would say oppose trans life, especially um um have difficulties even acknowledging the reality of trans Children. So, um psychoanalysts are doing a lot of mischief in the world right now in the United States, in Britain and Australia in other contexts too. I know better the English language publications on this. But so unfortunately, psychoanalysis is being put to use and weaponized against queer and trans people and especially trans people right now. That's another reason why we think we hope our book will do some work in the world was to show that there are other kinds of psychoanalytic arguments that can be made to promote queer and trans flourishing and arguments. We think that could maybe not get stuck in the dead end of born that way, warped that way, right? We think that these particular debates are not happening, he helping queer and trans people and are flourishing.

1:07:59 Ricardo Lopes: So I think that's a great message to end our conversation on and the book is again, gender without identity. I'm leaving a link to it in the description of the interview and an and avi would you like to tell the audience apart from the book where they can find you and your work on the internet?

1:08:19 Avgi Saketopoulou: So, uh thank you for um asking that um we are both online. Uh MY people can find my work on my website um www of yulo.com and I'm also on Instagram um where my um handle is at Golis 98 a Vgolis 98 where you can follow me and see what I'm doing, um talks I'm giving and interact with me there. We also read reviews that people write of our books. So if you want to engage with us this way, please leave reviews where you leave your um reviews on the internet.

1:09:02 Ricardo Lopes: Uh And uh where can people find you?

1:09:06 Ann Pellegrini: Right? Sorry. As I, as I talk into the muted mic, um I can be found on Instagram as well at a pl 168. That's a pe LL 168. And I also have a website um and pellegrini.com and I'm also happy to interact with people um through social media.

1:09:24 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So thank you so much again for coming on the show. Look, I really, really love this conversation. So thank you so much.

1:09:33 Ann Pellegrini: Thank you so much. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

1:09:37 Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys. Thank you for watching this interview. Until the end. If you liked it, please share it. Leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by N Lights Learning and development. Then differently check the website at N lights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or paypal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and paypal supporters, Perego Larson, Jerry Muller and Frederick Suno Bernard Seche O of Alex Adam, Castle Matthew Whitting Bear. No wolf, Tim Ho Erica LJ Connors Philip Forrest Connelly. Then the Met Robert Wine in NAI Z Mar Nevs calling in Hobel Governor Mikel Stormer Samuel Andre Francis for Agns Ferger Ken Hall, her ma J and Lain Jung Y and the Samuel K Hes Mark Smith J Tom Hummel s friends, David Sloan Wilson Yaar, Roman Roach Diego, Jan Punter, Romani Charlotte, Bli Nicole Barba, Adam Hunt, Pavlo Stassi Nale Me, Gary G Alman, Samo, Zal Ari and YPJ Barboza Julian Price Edward Hall, Eden Broner Douglas Fry Franka La Gilon Cortez or Scott Zachary ftdw Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Giorgio, Luke Loki, Georgio, Theophano, Chris Williams and Peter Wo David Williams, the Ausa Anton Erickson Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralie Chevalier, Bangalore. Larry Dey junior, Old Ebon, Starry Michael Bailey then Spur by Robert Grassy Zorn. Jeff mcmahon, Jake Zul Barnabas Radick Mark Temple, Thomas Dvor Luke Neeson, Chris Tory Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Gilbert Jessica, a week in the Brendan Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensley Man, George Katis, Valentine Steinman Perros Kate Von Goler, Alexander Albert Liam Dan Biar Masoud Ali Mohammadi Perpendicular J Ner Urla. Good enough Gregory Hastings David Pins of Sean Nelson, Mike Levin and Jos Net. A special thanks to my producers is our web, Jim Frank Luca Toni, Tom Ween Bernard N Cortes Dixon Bendik Muller Thomas Trumble. Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carl, Negro, Nick Ortiz and Nick Golden. And to my executive producers, Matthew lavender, Si Adrian Bogdan Knits and Rosie. Thank you for all.