Discours experts, trans-ferts psychanalytiques et faire-trans novateurs

Abstract

BackgroundThis article proposes to carry out an archaeology and genealogy of medico-legal expertise on transidentities, and to examine its effects on psychoanalytical approaches. ObjectiveThe aim here is to show how medical, psychiatric, psychological, and psychoanalytical institutions do not effectively treat any transidentitary suffering that pre-dates their intervention, but, on the contrary, create this suffering, institute it, and contribute to institutionalizing it, by fabricating a category and producing knowledge about it.Since the clinical, theoretical, and epistemic aim of psychoanalysis is to deconstruct any knowledge production, it seems relevant to ask how psychoanalysis is positioned within this ontologizing institution of “transsexualism.” MethodTheoretical/epistemological exploration. Standpoint epistemology ResultsA reinforcement of gender ideology, the medico-legal paradigm of “transsexualism” postulates sexual duality and its metonymic manifestation by the genitals, whose congruency is verified by experts.The majority of psychoanalytical theories perpetuate this hegemonic expertise: their statutory presumptions of truth and supra-legality enforce a call to gender order either by demanding tokens of gender conformity, or by performatively asserting an irreducible sexual difference. Conclusion-In order not to be prescriptive of hegemonic forms of sexuality and sexuation, psychoanalysis does not have anything in particular to say about transidentities – nor about cis-identities, considered as a unitary category, unless one produces general and pathologizing assumptions about gender identifications or sexual orientations.-Beyond the imaginary abstraction of a non-situated psychoanalysis, the point of view of trans psychoanalysts is awaited with great interest.-Trans-identifications question psychoanalysis on the abstraction of a subject of the unconscious cut off from the political subject. The primary objective is then to recognize trans patients’ greater exposure to vulnerability, without essentializing it.-While it is not psychoanalysis's objective to perform any truth extraction about transidentities, the latter reveal the gender norms and the construct of sexuality that underly a major part of psychoanalytical theories. Trans and Queer Studies might offer psychoanalysis a critical analysis of sex difference that could enable it to carry out an archaeology of the social contract and its psychic effects.