by Claire Greenwood, MFT

ON THE CONCRETENESS OF TRANSPHOBIA

Psychoanalysis historically has had a fraught relationship with the reality of social and political forces. The anecdote of Donald Winnicott standing up in the middle of a British Psychoanalytical Society meeting and saying, “I should like to point out that there is an air raid going on” may or may not be fabricated, but it illustrates something of how psychoanalysis can focus overmuch on the intrapsychic (1943).

For my transgender patients, the dangers posed by the Trump administration are all too concrete: passport applications rejected, the threat of being sent to a male prison as a trans woman, the inability to use a safe bathroom in a more conservative state, not to mention blatant harassment, discrimination, and alienation from family. 

Take Bex, for example (a composite of many patients), a 32-year-old non-binary person. The day after Trump signed the executive order “officially” recognizing only male and female genders, Bex came to my office and slumped on the couch. 

“I guess I don’t exist,” they said. “Should I just disappear?” Their chronic, passive suicidal ideation moves more towards action with every new executive order, every new anti-trans bill. I try to empathize, but it feels futile. I feel stupid and ineffectual with my empathy, silence, and fancy office. 

Time passes, and Bex's eyes snap open, their body filled with fear and adrenaline. “I need to leave. It’s the same as Nazi Germany,” they say with assuredness. “Same play, different actors.” For a moment, I wonder if they are being paranoid. But who am I to make this assessment? As the saying goes, “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.” We spent the rest of the session talking about what countries they want to move to. The whole time, I’m unclear what my role is: should I be reassuring? Holding space? Helping to reality check? Helping to make a safety plan? Researching foreign visas with them? What is an analytic intervention for transgender patients in this moment– and is that even appropriate? 

I know that Bex – like many trans folks – has been chronically missed, misidentified, misgendered, misunderstood, and misrepresented. Now, the landscape of their mind is one in which danger is at every corner, and the self is constantly in flux, having never received proper mirroring. As a cisgender therapist I find myself missing them time and time again; something in me rejects their terror, and revolts at the idea that we are descending into Nazi Germany. 

But then, a few days later, I find myself googling how to immigrate to Canada – for myself. A great fear has caught hold of me, like a quickly growing wildfire. It could be projective identification, in which case my role would be to recover my capacity for reflective thought. Or it could be that the danger is real. Perhaps there is an air raid going on after all.