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A Typical Gender Identity Conference? Some Disturbing Reports from the Therapeutic Front Lines

m.hird{at}qub.ac.uk

This article resulted from my recent attendance at a conference on gender identity entitled `Atypical Gender Identity Development: Therapeutic Models, Philosophical and Ethical Issues' (2000). Although it featured presentations from pre-eminent clinical psychiatrists, psychologists and physicians in Britain, Canada and the United States, there was no reference to the feminist psychoanalytic and social psychology debates that have circulated in feminist psychology for years. In accounting for the absence of feminist scholarship, I consider three issues. First, rather than highlight the social construction of gender through the social construction of sex, the conference revealed a persistent belief in `sex' as the original sign through which gender is read. A second issue concerns the maturity hierarchy that clinicians seem to construct such that stable gender identification and `opposite' gender desire appear at the apex. Finally, I am concerned with what seems to be a continued association of homosexuality with pathology.

Key Words: feminism • intersex • psychoanalysis • social psychology • transsex

Feminism & Psychology, Vol. 13, No. 2, 181-199 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0959353503013002004


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