Transgendering Speech: Discussion of Farley and Kennedy’s “Transgender Embodiment as an Appeal to Thought”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Farley and Kennedy’s incisive and challenging essay unpacking the controversy surrounding “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) draws upon psychoanalysis to examine the complicated interplay among freedom of speech, truth, power, privilege, and transgender rights and desire. My response frames theirs within the intersecting gaps that psychoanalysis reveals—between materiality and gender, between materiality and speech, between speech and desire—in order both to highlight how freedom of speech and transgender issues are inevitably vulnerable to collision and to guide intervention: We must insistently pry open the seemingly seamless order between biology and gender, and between gendered desire and speech. Absent such dedicated intervention, I fear, the transgender subject will be left to bear this onto-ethical burden for all of us. We need to engender—and perhaps also to transgender—robust radically inclusive “spaces between” for all gendered subjects and for the disruptive, vibrational motions of desire, its freedom of speech.