Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2017, 62, 5, 678–687

Transgenderism and transformation: an

attempt at a Jungian understanding

Michael A. Marsman, New York

Abstract: While transgenderism as a cultural phenomenon seems to be based on a

collective taste for the sensational, its emergence represents a collective shift towards
a new or more differentiated way of experiencing and expressing sex and gender, a
movement of world soul. This paper attempts to explore that emergence from a
Jungian perspective. The paper utilizes clinical examples which illustrate how
dissociated aspects of the personality are seeking assimilation and expression in
order to move the personality towards greater wholeness. In that sense, it attempts
to understand the teleology of transgenderism on an individual and collective level.
The paper is intended as a starting-off point for discussion and explores gender as
fantasy, anima/animus dynamics, the psyche/soma relationship, the role of hormones/
biochemistry in our experience of ourselves and what transgender people carry and
suffer for our culture.

Keywords: feminine, gender, masculine, sexuality, testosterone, transexual, transformation,

transgender

Introduction
Transgenderism is all the rage. Our media is full of news stories and plotlines
about it, whether political fights over bathroom laws, television series such as
‘Transparent’ or the latest news about Caitlin Jenner. But the experience of
gender variance has been around for centuries, if not millennia, in mythology
and in lived life. As time progresses, the concepts of sex, gender, sexual
orientation and gender role become further differentiated. This is an
important point. The sex of the body is different from gender which is based
on how one experiences oneself. Gender role is the collective behaviours and
ways of being typically associated with a gender while sexual orientation
relates to the object of one’s sexual attraction. It was not until the late
nineteenth century, for example, that the term ‘homosexual’ was first used
and there was not an understanding of sexual orientation as distinct from
gender identity until the mid-twentieth century (Lev 2004).
While transgenderism’s emergence as a cultural phenomenon seems to be
based on a collective taste for the sensational, the transformation from one

0021-8774/2017/6205/678 © 2017, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Wiley Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12356
Transgenderism and transformation: an attempt at a Jungian understanding 679

sex to another being seen as a shocking form of human expression, its

emergence represents a collective shift towards a new or more differentiated
way of experiencing and expressing sex and gender, a movement of world
soul. This paper attempts to explore that emergence from a Jungian
perspective.

Griffin
In his article ‘Sexual TNT: a Transman Tells the Truth about Testosterone’,
Griffin Hansbury (2004), now a psychotherapist, describes his journey from
‘female to male’ starting in 1995 when at age 24 and living ‘uncomfortably’
in his ‘female body’ he received his first testosterone injection (pp. 7-8). In
female-bodied people, taking testosterone has a masculinizing effect on the
body, including clitoral enlargement. Hansbury noticed that the onset of
physical changes began a mere six days after the injection along with
psychological and emotional ones. He writes that ‘everything was sexual’,
feeling a ‘jolt through my pants’ upon seeing a red corvette driving down
Fifth Avenue and again when pressed against a Xerox machine (pp. 12-13).
Before testosterone, he would see an attractive woman and fantasize about
who she was and what it would be like to date her. After testosterone, he
separated women into body parts – breasts, buttocks, knees. ‘Dismember’ is
the term he used. He got clitoral erections when looking at women, an
experience he never anticipated as an erstwhile ‘sex-positive, post-feminist,
butch dyke’ undergraduate (p. 14). Though Griffin describes the biological/
hormonal differences between men and women, even prior to these changes
he still experienced himself as male. His identity appeared not to be related
to typical hormonal and psychological characteristics of men, at least in the
area of sex and relationship, for that identity existed before the
physiological changes.
In the article, Hansbury recalls having a dream the night of the injection:

I was being chased by a little girl. She looked like me; or, rather, like the way I looked
when I was small. Like the Sunbeam Bread girl1, with strawberry-blonde curls and
pink cheeks. In the dream, I was hiding in my mother’s bedroom, terrified. The
Sunbeam girl was trying to break down the door and I was holding it back against
her. I was shouting for someone to help, to call Bellevue2 to come get her and lock
her up. She was the crazy one; not me. At last, an ambulance came and two men
dressed in white took her away. She was surprisingly relaxed when she went,
actually limp. She did not struggle as the men strapped her to a gurney, put a blue
ice-pack over her head, and pushed her into the ambulance, which I thought looked
like an ice-cream truck, white and cold. I stood watching while the ambulance drove

1
Sunbeam has been a popular, mass-marketed white bread since the 1940s. The Sunbeam Bread
girl, or ‘Little Miss Sunbeam’ as is her official name, is its mascot.
2
Bellevue is a public psychiatric hospital in New York City.
680 Michael A. Marsman

away, with that little girl inside, and there was sadness to the dream, mixed with a
great sense of relief.

(Hansbury 2004, p. 10)

One could look at this dream as a reaction to Hansbury’s testosterone injection.

One could also take the position that the dream and the fantasy behind the
decision to take testosterone arose out of a particular attitude towards
femininity. The dream highlights a fear of process that results in the
banishment of a foundational feminine essence, that is, the feminine is sent
into a deep freeze and Hansbury utilizes the masculine to do this. The
feminine desperately wants to make contact, to break through the mother
complex, but the dreamer prevents it. His hiding in his mother’s bedroom is a
childish move. Perhaps that is one reason why the feminine is depicted as a
little girl – the face that the unconscious shows is the face one shows to it. His
is a ‘crazy’ solution, even though it is the little girl that is sent to Bellevue.
The Sunbeam bread girl offers the potential of bringing consciousness
(Sunbeam) and sustenance (bread) to the dreamer. It is a young, even
undeveloped feminine representing a fixed point in time (i.e. he recognizes it
as himself as a little girl); it is a reconciling symbol, a divine child, a puella
aeterna, a nascent self figure. It represents the potential for a nutritive
feminine consciousness, yet he seems to banish that possibility, at least for
now, in a cold, sanitized, feelingless way. I cannot help but hear the ‘ice
cream’ of ‘ice cream truck’ as ‘I scream’.
My first reaction to the dream was that it indicated that the dreamer’s
decision to transition and begin hormone treatment was a mistake, a gross
assault on core femininity based in the mother complex. While not necessarily
incorrect, my quickness to interpret along those lines betrayed my own view
at the time that physical transition from one gender to another was always a
literalization of something meant to take place only on a symbolic level. I
realized, though, that I was the one who was reifying the body. My own
concretizing attitude held that the body is only sacred and should not be
changed, that it must be left pristine and untouched. In some way, my
attitude reflected the inverse of the dreamer’s, for it did not consider the
possibility that intentional morphological change could be an individuating
move. As we move from nature to culture, we use technology to build houses
and cure diseases, why not change bodies? This is not to negate technology’s
shadow side, of course. Who can know what needs to take place on a
symbolic level and what needs to be actualized in physical life?
The dream indicates that the dreamer had a disturbingly one-sided bias
towards masculinity. Perhaps this could be expected as he moved towards
physical transition as the fulfillment of a long-time wish to live as a man. The
feminine is not destroyed, though; it is sent away. The work, in his new
embodied form, would be to redeem the feminine and incorporate it into his
conscious attitude and his life.
Transgenderism and transformation: an attempt at a Jungian understanding 681

Alex
Alex is a 50-year-old transman whom I worked with for several years at a clinic
where I was employed. He began therapy as a result of depression that he
associated with physical limitations experienced as a side-effect of treatment
for a recently diagnosed blood-borne disease. Alex also reported having been
continually physically abused by his mother from infancy and sexually abused
by his father when he (she at the time) was an adolescent. Before
transitioning, Alex, like Hansbury, identified as a butch dyke. She was an
avid body builder and worked as a bouncer at a lesbian club. Alex considered
himself to be overly sensitive, though, and said that his emotions had always
gotten the better of him. After testosterone, he was better able to ‘control’ his
emotions, as he put it, thereby eliminating his over-sensitivity.
Throughout treatment, Alex had to confront incapacity and weakness which
affronted his desired conception of himself as a strong man. He became a father
after his partner became pregnant through artificial insemination using a
donor’s sperm. This brought out a lovely nurturing capacity in Alex, a
tenderness that previously had lain dormant. We discussed his newly
developing capacity for incorporating disavowed femininity.
During this process, Alex brought up that he was losing his leg hair, which he
thought was due to his medical treatment. Not only was he concerned that this
would affect his ability to pass as a man (objectively, it would not), he felt it as
emasculating and a blow to his ego ideal. He then presented a dream:

I was in my parent’s house, though they weren’t my parents – the parents that I have.
They were like Ward and June Cleaver3, very conventional, and we were living in an
upper middle class house. My parents wanted me to give up the LGBT4 stuff and in
the dream I was trans. Usually when I dream, I’m either male or female, but in this
dream, I was trans. They were having people over and wanted me to be like them. I
escaped and went over to see my friend O. She was going to perform and I went to
see her in her dressing room. She gave me a little pot to relax and gave me the key
to her apartment and told me I could stay there.

O is a lesbian performance artist whom Alex knew from his days as a bouncer
and who can appear androgynous at times. Her apartment is very small.
This dream also takes place within the context of parental complexes, where
Alex is asked to give up his identity as a trans person and to accept a 1950s/
1960s conception of gender and gender role. It is a conventional and
comfortable place for him, hence the upper-middle-class home where he is
asked to take on a collective identity, for his parents want him to be like the
people who are coming over to visit. Thus we can understand his attachment to
a stereotyped masculinity. In my work with transgender people, especially those
3
The Cleavers were the idealized suburban American parents from the 1950s-1960s television
show Leave it to Beaver. Interesting in this context that ‘beaver’ is a vulgar term for vagina. June
derives from Juno, the Roman counterpart of Hera, and cleaver is a knife.
4
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.
682 Michael A. Marsman

in their 30s and above, I have noticed that many hold on to a particular 1950s/
1960s conception of gender. In the Hansbury (2004) article, for example,
Griffin describes preparing for his new publishing job and admits that he held a
‘1950s vision of what it would be like’ (p. 11). When one is physically
becoming the other, one often relies on stereotyped cultural images to form
one’s understanding of oneself, for there is a strong tendency to identify with a
persona based on cultural introjects of early life. Animus/anima identification/
possession also plays some role to a varying degree. In general, but especially
when working with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transpeople, I find it important to
view anima/animus as function rather than fixed form. Anima, for example,
would not necessarily be imaged as female but would instead be characterized
as the inner other, that which carries the inferior function and draws one into a
relationship with the unconscious, often carrying something of the erotic.
Alex holds to a fantasy of what it is to be a man. But gender itself is fantasy and
is separate from sex, which is biologically determined. What is it to be a man or a
woman, not just in terms of gender role, which is fluid and changing, but one’s
foundational experience of one’s self as a gendered being? At certain points in
my life, I certainly did not feel like a man, though I lived out a culturally
‘appropriate’ gender role. I had a fantasy of what being a man was and I was not it.
In the dream, it is Alex’s identification as trans rather than a particular image
of male or female that sets off the complex reaction creating psychological
pressure to identify with a particular gender. The dream offers Alex the
possibility of accepting a transgender identity, one that incorporates a fluidity
of gender experience and role rather than identifying strictly as a particular
image of male or female. Instead of confronting the parental complexes by
asserting his identity, Alex escapes to see his friend, a performance artist, who
gives him marijuana and the key to her apartment where he can stay. His
solution, then, is to dissociate5 and to stay in the place of performance, which
is smaller than the place he left. Perhaps this is an intermediate move, though:
for O, through her art, plays with gender role and challenges others to do the
same, while still maintaining her lesbian identity. This sense of gender
flexibility offers an alternative to Alex’s fixed adherence to gender stereotype.
Like Tiresias, both Griffin and Alex have lived as woman and as man. Both of
their dreams call for an integration of masculine and feminine gendered
experience that is not necessarily tied to biological sex. This is perhaps a telos
in transgenderism. ‘One becomes two, two becomes three and out of the third
comes the One as the fourth’, goes the Axiom of Maria (Jung 1953, para.
209). Both dreams point to a way of holding the tension of male/female as
well as not male/not female in service to a new way of being.
Gender derives from the Latin generere, meaning ‘to produce, to cause’
(Partridge 1983). Its root is a verb. The prefix trans means ‘across’, so
transgenderism’s essence is creation and movement. Our gendered experience

5
De-emphasizing the teleological aspect of marijuana.
Transgenderism and transformation: an attempt at a Jungian understanding 683

of ourselves need not be fixed and this lack of fixity need not threaten our core
sense of self. Alex’s dream emphasizes this potential, for accepting a
transgender identity could lead to an enlargement of life through creating,
becoming, moving to other. Transgender as transformation.
Because of the assumed fixity of gender, many gender theorists consider
culture to be caught in a socially constructed yet non-essential binary of male/
female. In my opinion, one cannot actually escape this binary. The two-ness
has an archetypal basis against which one measures one’s experience. Non-
transgender people typically identify with a particular aspect of the binary.
Transgenderism enables us to re-vision gender as spectrum, but as spherical
rather than linear, with individual gender experience being a particular mix of
male/female that is separate from embodied form or gender role, all of which
could also be located at different points along the sphere, maybe even
changeable over time. Even this model will probably eventually prove inadequate.

Joy
English professor Joy Laden (2016, p. 5), herself a transwoman, says that the
‘“X trapped in a Y body” meme is an inadequate and confusing model of
identity’, and she found herself trying to use extant models for understanding
who she was, none of which worked. In her ‘Address to psychotherapists’,
Laden discusses being trans from childhood and explains that:

I could never fulfill the requirements of the ‘I am a girl trapped in a boy’s or man’s body’
model because I wasn’t a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman: I was an anxiously self-
monitoring, chronically depressed, intermittently suicidal person with a male body, a
male persona, and a female gender identity I was too ashamed and afraid to
express…. Because I had no model of identity that encompassed and made sense of
all aspects of myself, I constantly had to choose between identifying with my male
body and persona, or with my invisible, inexplicable, carefully hidden female gender
identity…. My body was a thing that wasn’t me. It was a thing that hurt and negated
me, a thing I hurt and dissociated from to show how little it meant to me; my male
persona was a masquerade. But because I dissociated from my body and the life I
lived, no matter how fiercely I clung to my female gender identity, I rarely felt alive. I
thought of myself as a ghost without a body, or a body without a soul.

(Laden 2016, pp. 6-7)

Laden speaks to a sort of retrospective ontology. That is, her current state of
consciousness supports her stream of memories, so that she can say, ‘When
looking back, this is who I always knew myself to be and what made me who
I am’. Though this is a common way of making meaning of one’s life, it is
especially significant when dealing with matters of core identity and important
to keep in mind when we ask, ‘When did you realize that you were…?’
Laden explains that her male persona was detrimental to her expression of
self. One aspect of that was her felt need to present within and perform the
684 Michael A. Marsman

gender role associated with maleness which she calls a ‘collaborative fantasy’
(p. 7). Laden also considered her male body to be an aspect of that persona.
‘Becoming a woman requires more than a female gender identity’, she says, ‘it
requires living that gender identity’. She recognized her suicidality as ‘a failure
of imagination … [which] was an individual manifestation of a cultural
problem: my culture offered no sense of how to live a whole, authentic life as
something other than male or female’ (p. 7).
This raises several questions: do we consider transexualism (i.e. the belief that
one’s body does not represent one’s true sex [Lev 2004]) to be a pathological
conflation of persona and body, a failure of imagination and an inability to
hold the symbolic? Sometimes this seems to be the case. But perhaps body is
an aspect of persona in a culture where there is no category for being a
female-bodied male or a male-bodied female or even something else.
Neumann (1990, pp. 29-30) writes that ‘external collective developments are
decades behind the individual’, that ‘not infrequently a sensitive person falls
ill because of his incapacity to deal with a problem which is not recognized as
such by the world in which he lives, but which is, in fact, a future problem of
humanity which has confronted him and forced him to wrestle with it’. Are
transgender people limited by collective imagination (including scientific and
technological understanding) and do they suffer psychologically as a result of
this societal limitation? Transgender people at least in part suffer because
there is not yet collective psychic space to exist in the same way that space
did not exist for gays and lesbians until relatively recently.
Speaking of her own experience, Laden (2016, pp. 11-12) recognizes that
‘aspects of ourselves that we don’t express or manifest in relationships tend to
be underdeveloped, tentative, vulnerable and sometimes child-like’ and says that
eight-and-a-half years after fully living as a woman, ‘being alive still feels like a
miracle’. She goes on to say that living as herself was the beginning of a ‘lifelong
process of learning to recognize desires, make choices and take responsibility for
consequences … to be present in relationships, to acknowledge and embrace my
place in the world’. She continues that ‘after 45 years of dissociation from my
body and my life, I had developed very little capacity to hold my feelings, and I
had never allowed myself to feel very much’ and that she still ‘fell back on my
old coping mechanisms, dissociations and suicidality’ when ‘drowning in
feelings I didn’t know how to handle’. ‘I wasn’t suffering from gender dysphoria
any more’ she writes, ‘my body and life finally reflected my female gender
identity – but the damage of years as living as someone I wasn’t would take
years to heal. To do that healing, I first had to learn to commit myself to life’.
Professor Laden speaks eloquently and unsentimentally to a commitment to
what we call an individuation process. Transgender people have a fantasy of
what life will be like after transition which often is complexed-based,
idealized and unrealistic. Some regret their actions. Laden’s path seems to
have necessitated the physical transition from male to female to even develop
what we typically ascribe to anima functioning, that is, relatedness, emotional
Transgenderism and transformation: an attempt at a Jungian understanding 685

maturity and development of feeling. She recognizes that, for her, transition in
and of itself was not healing but rather its precondition.

Conclusion
Understanding transgenderism and its manifestations starts with unknowing
and challenges us to move beyond the limitations of our own imaginations
which can tend to presuppose and preconceive the range of symbolic and
physical form in which individuation takes place, both individually and
collectively. Because of the highly charged nature of the subject, we are
admonished to be especially diligent in discerning anthropos from shadow in
symbolic expression. Jung grounds us in this attempt when he writes that:

No one can know what the ultimate things are. We must therefore take them as we
experience them. And if such experience helps to make life healthier, more beautiful,
more complete and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may
safely say: ‘This was the grace of God’.

(Jung 1938/1940, para. 167)

References
Hansbury, G. (2004). ‘Sexual TNT: a transman tells the truth about testosterone’.
Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, 8, 1/2, 7-8, 10-14.
Jung, C.G. (1938/1940). ‘Psychology and religion (The Terry Lectures)’. CW 11.
——— (1938/1940). (1953). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12.
Laden, J. (2016). ‘What we talk about when we talk about “gender dysphoria”: an
address to psychotherapists’. Paper presented at New York Psychoanalytic Institute:
Works In Progress programme.
Lev, A.I. (2004). Transgender Emergence. New York & London: Routledge.
Neumann, E. (1990). Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. Boston & London: Shambhala.
Partridge, E. (1983). Origins: a Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New
York: Greenwich House.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Alors que le transgendérisme en tant que phénomène culturel semble être fondé sur un
goût pour le sensationnel, son émergence représente une évolution collective vers une
manière différenciée nouvelle, ou plus accentuée qu’auparavant, de l’expérience et de
l’expression de la sexualité et du genre, un mouvement de l’âme du monde. Cet article
tente d’explorer cette émergence à partir d’un point de vue jungien. Il utilise des
exemples cliniques qui illustrent comment des aspects dissociés de la personnalité
cherchent assimilation et expression afin de mener la personnalité vers une plus grande
totalité. En ce sens, l’article cherche à saisir la téléologie du transgendérisme aux
niveaux individuel et collectif.
Cet article se veut être un point de départ pour une discussion, il explore le genre en
tant que fantasme, dynamiques anima/animus, relation psyché-soma, rôle des
686 Michael A. Marsman

hormones et de la biochimie dans notre expérience de nous-même, et s’intéresse à ce que

les personnes transgenres portent et souffrent pour notre culture.

Mots clés: genre, transgenre, transformation, féminin, masculin, testostérone,

transsexuel, sexualité

Während Transgenderismus als kulturelles Phänomen auf einer kollektiven Neigung zum
Sensationellen zu beruhen scheint, repräsentiert dessen Aufkommen eine kollektive
Verschiebung hin zu einer neuen oder differenzierteren Art der Erfahrung und des
Ausdrucks von Sexualität und Geschlecht, eine Bewegung der Weltseele. Dieser Text
versucht, diese Entstehung aus Jungianischer Perspektive zu erforschen. Der Beitrag
nutzt klinische Beispiele die deutlich machen, wie dissoziierte Aspekte der
Persönlichkeit nach Assimilation und Ausdruck streben, um die Persönlichkeit in
Richtung größerer Ganzheit zu bewegen. In diesem Sinne wird der Versuch
unternommen, das Teleologische des Transgenderismus auf individueller und
kollektiver Ebene zu verstehen.
Der Text ist als Ausgangspunkt für eine Diskussion gedacht und erforscht Geschlecht
als Phantasie, Anima/Animus-Dynamik, die Beziehung von Psyche und Soma, die Rolle
von Hormonen/Biochemie in unserer eigenen Erfahrung und dem, was transgender
Menschen für unsere Kultur tragen und leiden.

Schlüsselwörter: Geschlecht, Transgender, Transformation, feminin, maskulin,

Testosteron, transsexuell, Sexualität

Mentre il transgender come fenomeno culturale sembra basarsi sulla predilezione collettiva per
ciò che è sensazionale, la sua apparizione rappresenta una svolta verso un nuovo modo di
vivere ed esprimere il sesso ed il genere sessuale, un movimento che coinvolge l’anima del
mondo. Questo articolo tenta di esplorare questo fenomeno da una prospettiva junghiana. Il
lavoro utilizza esempi clinici che mostrano come parti dissociate delle personalità stiano
cercando di essere assimilate e di avere espressione al fine di procedere verso una più ampia
interezza. In questo senso, si tenta di comprendere la teleologia del fenomeno transgender ad
un livello individuale e collettivo.
L’articolo vuole essere un punto di partenza per una discussione ed esplora il genere
sessuale nella fantasia, nelle dinamiche anima/animus e nella relazione psiche-soma,
considera inoltre il ruolo degli ormoni e della biochimica nella nostra esperienza di noi
stessi ed in quella degli individui transgender.
Parole chiave: Parole chiavegenere, transgender, trasformazione, femminile, mascolino
testosterone, transessuale, sessualità

Трансгендерность как культурный феномен, похоже, базируется на

коллективном пристрастии к ощущениям, но его появление олицетворяет
коллективный сдвиг в сторону нового или более дифференцированного
Transgenderism and transformation: an attempt at a Jungian understanding 687

способа переживания и выражения половых различий, движение мировой

души. Эта статья делает попытку исследовать это явление с юнгианской
точки зрения. В статье используются клинические примеры,
иллюстрирующие то, как диссоциированные аспекты личности ищут
ассимиляции и выражения, подталкивая личность к большей целостности. В
этом смысле автор пытается понять телеологию транссексуальности на
индивидуальном и коллективном уровнях.
Статья мыслилась как стартовая точки для дискуссии, и в ней исследуется
гендер как фантазия, как динамика анимы/анимуса, как отношения психе/
сомы, а также роль гормонов/биохимии в нашем опыте восприятия себя и то,
что несут в себе транссексуальные люди в нашей культуре и от чего страдают.

Ключевые слова: гендер, трансгендер, трансформация, женственный,

мужественный, тестостерон, транссексуальный, сексуальность

Mientras que el género trans como fenómeno cultural pareciera estar basado en un gusto
colectivo por lo sensacional, su emergencia representa un cambio de rumbo colectivo
hacia un nuevo y más diferenciado modo de experimentar y expresar el sexo y el género,
un movimiento del alma del mundo. El presente trabajo intenta explorar esta emergencia
desde una perspectiva Junguiana. El ensayo utiliza ejemplos clínicos para ilustrar como
aspectos disociados de la personalidad buscan ser asimilados y expresados para posibilitar
una mayor integración de la personalidad. En este sentido, se intenta comprender
el género trans desde una perspectiva teleológica a un nivel individual y colectivo.
El trabajo se propone como punto de partida para una discusión, y explora el género
como fantasía, dinámicas de anima/animus, relación psique/soma, el rol de las hormonas/
bioquímica en nuestra experiencia de nosotros mismos, y que es lo que las personas trans
sostienen y sufren para nuestra cultura.

Palabras clave: género, transgénero, transformación, femenino, masculino, testosterona,

transexual, sexualidad

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此, 从个体和集体的水平来尝试理解跨越性别的目的。
这篇文章企图作为一个讨论和探索性别的起点, 这一讨论的视角把性别作为一种幻
想, 一种阿尼玛/阿尼姆斯动力, 联系了身心关系、荷尔蒙/生物化学在我们关于自身的
经验中扮演的角色, 以及跨越性别者如何为我们的文化背负苦痛。

关键词: 性别, 跨越性别, 转化, 女性化, 男性化, 睾丸激素, 变别转换, 性欲