Cisgender/Transgender: Bye-Bye, Binary

Agender, Bigender, Cisgender, FTM, MTF, Genderqueer, Other, Neither, and Two-Spirit; these are a few of the 58 gender options that Facebook offers. Whatever happened to him and her? We are confronting twenty-first-century conceptions of gender with a nineteenthcentury mind-set.

Freud theorized that infants are bisexual and of indistinct gender identity—“polymorphously perverse”—and that the development of both sexual orientation and gender identity are mediated by repression and identification in the resolution of the Oedipus complex.

In 1990, the philosopher Judith Butler wrote, “We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it’s a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start…. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.”

As our patients struggle to understand the role that gender plays in their psychic journey, we as clinicians must be willing to travel the same path of discovery. This workshop will present an original documentary compiling existing footage of depictions of gender roles as they have evolved in contemporary visual media.

Richard Sacks, LP, is on the faculty of the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies and is in private practice in New York City. He has a longstanding interest in psychoanalysis and film.

Students register by email here.

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