Transgender Children: The Making of a Modern Hysteria

Abstract

Jung made frequent reference to the fact that unconscious forces find myriad ways to express themselves. Historians of psychiatry and others have explored the role of culture in shaping and spreading psychological symptoms. In this context is the recent phenomenon of the transgender child. The rise in the number of children and teens self-diagnosing as transgender can be compared with the explosion in the numbers of young women exhibiting symptoms of hysteria at the end of the 19th century. Both diagnoses are characterized by subjective symptoms that cannot be objectively verified; both have been propagated by high profile physicians; both affect vulnerable patients, particularly adolescent females; and both have taken root in supportive cultural environments. Hysterical symptoms ought to be explored as expressions of the unconscious; that is, they ought to be taken seriously but explored for their symbolic meaning rather than taken at face value.