Tobias B.D. Wiggins

As the previously sanctioned pathologization of gender non-conforming identities is rapidly challenged within medical models, many transgender people are newly seeking out affirming mental health care. In turn, guidelines for trans competent psychotherapeutic practice are being developed to help practitioners best respect client self-determination, to better understand the multi-facets of gender identity, and to identify challenges to effective treatment. Yet many of these resources have overlooked the identification and management of what emerging scholarship has called transphobic countertransference (TCT), referring to the ways in which a clinician’s unconscious prejudice can be felt, and potentially acted out, within the consulting room. This chapter normalizes two underdiscussed elements of clinical work with 2TNG populations: first, the undeniable presence of transphobia within the consulting room; and relatedly, the impact and uses of TCT in psychotherapy of any orientation. Clinical transphobia is framed here as an “unresolved issue” that gains utility only through its identification. Borrowing from Hansbury’s (2017) foundation, I define psychotic TCT as a set of infantile affective distortions, and contribute two additional common forms of TCT to this conceptualization: perverse TCT, relating to the internalized law and omnipotence of diagnosis; and neurotic TCT, in which the clinician’s previously held gendered meanings and social learning materialize. Ultimately, this investigation aims to help cisgender therapists better recognize their own distinct and heterogeneous reactions to 2TNG gender difference in the consulting room and, further, to curtail potential enactments.

This article borrows from the lessons of dystopic science fiction to analyze fantasies that surround gender variance and perversion in the psychoanalytic clinic. Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is used to substrate Lacan’s formations of perversion and their relationship to the paradoxical nature of desire. Lacan’s idiosyncratic handling of perversion formulates an essential truth about the problematic nature of human desiring, a problem that must be creatively mitigated. This article postulates that quotidian difficulties of desire manifest symptomatically in psychoanalytic and psychiatric work with transgender patients through clinical expressions of transphobia. These claims are illustrated with a close reading of a 1948 clinical case study with a transgender analysand. The case pays special attention to the patient’s pencil drawing, produced while in treatment, which visually represents their gender.

Keira Bell’s case against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust challenged the notion that children can consent to certain forms of gender-affirming care, and the subsequent trial has sparked global effects. This paper considers the unconscious fantasies and anxieties that surround both this trail and trans childhood more broadly. Although psychic phenomenon, the normalized defenses of adults continue to inform policy, healthcare, and have a significant impact on the materiality of trans lives. Drawing from Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, I argue that gender non-conforming children become an extension of their caregiver’s subjectivity and provide a unique container for adult’s projected, unbearable thoughts and feelings. In particular, Young-Bruehl’s use of three Freudian personality structures is helpful for tracing symptomatic expressions of childism and conceptualizing the different unconscious motivational forces behind otherwise disparate, public discourses of concern for the child’s wellbeing.

Transgender people have long been associated with sexual perversion. For example, many early versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) infamously categorized any gender variance as sexual deviance or paraphilia. This article therefore investigates the taxonomical movement away from the transgender subject as perverse toward the current diagnosis of gender dysphoria, which instead consolidates the transgender subject as distressed and suffering. Through an unconventional use of psychoanalytic theories of perversion, I argue that DSM-5's new diagnosis criteria work defensively, functioning as an antidote to the clinician's anxiety in the face of difference. When separated from stereotypical acts and identities, perversion proves to be quite valuable in understanding clinical transphobia. In particular, Freud's writings on fetishism and disavowal reveal some of the unconscious roles at play in the repeated medicalization of trans people and the restricting of transition-related resources. Through the donning of a fetish object, disavowal acts to ignore an upsetting reality while the traumatic truth remains intact. An analysis of Chase Joynt's video installation, Resisterectomy, provides grounded narratives of gendered surgery and illness that disrupt anticipated affects, temporalities, and curative measures.

Wiggins, T. (2020). The Pervert on Your Couch: Psychoanalysis and Trans/Sexual Health. In J. Niemira, G, Jacobson, & K. Violet (Eds.), Sex, Sexuality and Trans Identities: Clinical Guidance for Psychotherapists and Counselors (pp. 155-181). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

“A specialised guide for therapists, counselors, academics and other mental health professionals to be used in clinical practice with transgender clients and their families. It includes diverse perspectives including sex therapy, social work and family counselling. An informative and important text for working with gender and sexuality issues.”

Taking the kastle as a starting point, the contributors to this volume consider the role of lesbian feminist histories and direct-action aesthetics in contemporary queer and feminist communities, particularly the ways in which political artwork can produce new ways of knowing about the past

My mother told me that I would end up like my uncles—“This is your destiny.”

Years later, I discovered both of my uncles had killed themselves before I was born.
Can the desire to die be inherited?

—Vivek Shraya, I want to kill myself


To inherit, broadly defined, means that which is passed along. In one sense, it is whatever we receive from someone familiar (or someone who is at least meant to be familiar, anyway). And along with this familiarity comes close associations, abiding memory trails, a type of metonymic progression to a particular moment in this present time: I inherited this. “This” is what I am left with, so what do I make of it now? “This” is a confluence of received parts, wanted and unwanted, left behind both intentionality and by chance. Or circumstance. Presently, we meet its trace residues, that may exist ephemerally, nonmaterial, or in a solid form. Confronting the weight of its meanings and history, its contradictions and unnamabilities, we may wonder, what do I do with “this,” now? We are all heirs to things that aren't ever fully ours. But somehow, also, they become ours as we make sense of them, retroactively, reinscribing them into the folds of self.

Perversion at the Crossroads of Critical Race Studies, Psychoanalysis, and Queer Theory
June 5-9th, 2017 York University, Toronto, Canada

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

The Summer Institute in Sexuality Studies is a transnational and multidisciplinary platform for emerging and established scholars to share innovative and current knowledge in sexuality studies.
SISS curriculum includes lectures, master classes, creative workshops, roundtables, a poster session, and a visit to FAG Feminist Art Gallery.

Planned activities include:

Dr David Eng, University of Pennsylvania
Lecture: Race As Relation
Master Class: Psychoanalysis and Racial Violence

* * *

Dr Amber Jamilla Musser, Washington University
Lecture: Carrie Mae Weems and the Question of Brown Jouissance
Master Class: Black Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis

* * *

Dr Trish Salah, Queen's University
Lecture: Race as Kink: Reading Trans-Racial Fetishism
Workshop: Uses of the Perverse: Perversity as Power/Knowledge

* * *

Dr Amar Wahab, York University
Lecture: Race, Queerness and Fetish Citizenship in Canada
Master Class: Race and Queerness in Perverse Urban Spaces

TO APPLY

Submit a short bio, statement of interest, and an abstract for a poster session at www.siss.info.yorku.ca

Application Deadline: January 9, 2017
Registration Fee upon acceptance: CAD $300
Limited number of travel subsidies available.

This short, open-access educational film explores issues of cultural appropriation in western yoga communities.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
0:00 – Introduction

1:05 – What is yoga, and how can it be taught?

3:15 – What is cultural appropriation?

4: 25 – What are the roots of cultural appropriation?

9:50 – Who benefits from cultural appropriation?

12:57 – What are the potential losses and harms?

14:12 – Tannis Nielsen and the 5 steps of colonization

18:08 – What are strategies to address cultural appropriation?

23:20 – Credits

A Film by Toby Wiggins
Featuring nisha ahuja

Documentary Film, 25 min.

Watch online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OoBaDt9cvQ

Visit the website:
https://yogaappropriation.wordpress.com

One fated interaction catapults an engagement with decomposition, queerness, gentrification, and sexuality. “Act Natural!” explores perceptions of "the natural": what sex we have, in what ways we may be close to living beings, how things get compartmentalized despite their intersections, what we eat/take in, who gets to live, and how we reconcile the violence of our surroundings.

Experimental Video, 6 min

Nourish Peterborough is a documentary film that follows ten groups from Peterborough, Ontario who are advocating for food sovereignty. These programs have a substantial influence on many people’s lives, though many of them go underfunded. The film provides a platform for these organizations, giving members, participants, volunteers, and staff, a louder voice in the community.

Documentary Film, 65 min.

Perversion is derived from the Latin pervertere which means “to turn around” and has been broadly conceptualized as that which deviates or wavers from an original course. One could argue that the
perverse is fundamentally constructed through difference; its existence is predicated upon being set up against some norm and its eccentricity is maintained through a continued refusal to adhere to the rule. This dissertation explores questions of gender difference and sexual deviance as they relate to the clinical pathologization of transgender people’s mental health. In particular, it considers how psychoanalytic theories of perversion - in their multifaceted definitions and various clinical applications - can be usefully employed to understand transphobia as it emerges throughout psychiatric institutions. In borrowing from Freud’s polymorphous perversity, fetishism, perverse defense, and Lacan’s perverse structure, this study both contributes to and moves beyond a genealogical account of transgender people’s relationship to psychoanalysis. It uniquely considers the psychical provocations behind clinician’s anxious descriptions and treatments of gender variance, as they have emerged since transsexual’s nosological coinage in the early 20th century.

By combining two disparate contemporary fields of study - psychoanalysis and transgender studies - this project also asks how transgender people may re-narrate their relationship to the perverse. To do so, this research investigates many under-considered objects of study, including surrealist transsexual drawings from the mid 1900s, lineages of psychiatric taxonomies, science fiction literature, contemporary transgender art installations, autoethno-pornographic transition narratives, and transgender accounts of undergoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Through a combination of critical historiographies, discourse analysis, content analysis, and narrative research, this dissertation contributes to a rapidly emerging non-pathological conversation about the psychic life of gender variance, both for transgender people themselves and the mental health institutions that serve them. Ultimately, it finds perversion to be quite useful as a floating signifier, as its various theoretical containers and clinical meanings are employed to deconstruct institutionalized transphobia’s tenacity. Furthermore, this research centers an archive of historically neglected transgender narratives on mental health as they emerge in the clinic, through case study, and in art or aesthetics.