Gender, violence, and trauma: A case of transmasculine subjectification and resistance in the French biopolitical context

Abstract

Given the relative invisibility of female-to-male trans identities in academic literature and cultural representations, the author attempts to provide a psychoanalytical understanding of his therapeutic work in the French activist milieu with an adult wishing to change the female gender assigned at birth. On the basis of the theoretical framework of enigmatic messages by Jean Laplanche and gender melancholy by Judith Butler, he explores the multiple expressions of violence—intrapsychic, family, social, and clinical—that contribute to the complex dynamics of gender subjectivity. In the context of these cumulative traumas, the therapist’s self-questioning of his own countertransference proves crucial. The author further reflects on the intersectional interweaving of ethnicity and gender.