Copyright 2002 Michaela Grey
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The Phallus in the Mirror: Narcissism & Transsexual Identity

The majority of FTMs and transmen do not have gender dysphoria; it is the rare FTM or transman who does not know from an early age what his gender identity is. What many experience, however, is body-part dysphoria, which focuses on elements such as breasts and menstruation that are quintessentially female. Those who do talk about having breasts do so with feelings that range from revulsion and denial to matter-of-fact acceptance. Yet I have never met an FTM or transman who did not want chest surgery [...] If breasts were defined as male, transmen and FTMs would not be dysphoric about them or have them removed. (Cromwell 106)

This epigraph—written by Jason Cromwell, himself a transgendered academic— addresses a long-standing medical/psychiatric debate surrounding the experience and understanding of transsexuality/transgenderism 1: are transsexuals born into an incorrectly gendered body, necessitating surgical and hormonal intervention to show the world their true identity; or, conversely, are they born as normally-gendered men and women for whom a childhood trauma has led to a dysphoric relationship to their bodies—the most suitable treatment for which includes surgical and hormonal intervention?

As has been noted by several observers (Butler Justice, Cromwell 107, Fausto-Sterling 25-6), framing the debate in such terms amounts to a problematic rephrasing of the classic "nature/nurture" question; participation in transsexual discourse thus often relies on an intricately woven tapestry of essentialist assumptions about gender, sex, and sexuality. One cannot believe oneself to be a man trapped in a woman’s body, for example, without an implicit belief in the discrete categories of male and female, or, for that matter, without a conviction that the body’s appearance and one’s self-identity should experience a specific sort of consonance. 2

In this paper, I hope to avoid such essentialization, although I will be reading transsexuality against psychoanalytic texts— specifically, Freud’s “On Narcissism” and Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” and “The Signification of the Phallus.” My intent is to explore the psychic effects of growing up ambiguously gendered in a gender-polarized sociocultural matrix; the psychoanalytic tools which have historically been used in the service of recuperating cultural norms of gender and sexuality3 would appear to be most apropos of the task.

In studying cultural effects on transsexual identity, it is perhaps best to begin by reviewing a text which has been historically linked with both homosexuality and transsexuality: Freud’s “On Narcissism”. The text begins with Paul Nacke’s late 19th century clinical definition of narcissism: " the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated "(545), a phenomenon which Freud suggests may occur not only in "disordered" individuals “whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance”(554) —but in all humans as a "libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct to self-preservation "(546).

In Freud’s account, the infant exists in a state of perfect narcissism, during which time his libido, or sexual energy, is entirely focused upon “vital functions which serve the purpose of self-preservation.” Only with the eventual transference of the infant’s libidinal self-attachment to “his mother or a substitute for her” (553) can he begin the lengthy process of psychic maturation. Love for others can then develop from an “‘anaclitic’ or ‘attachment’” (554) drive, in which the loved one is truly understood as a distinct person. A woman can then love “the man who protects her” and a man “the woman who feeds him”(556).

Freud is quick to point out, however, that for many individuals, love continues to originate in the narcissistic drive—”they are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object” (554) —potential partners are lovable because they remind the narcissist of “what he himself was”, or because they represent “what he himself would like to be”(556). In contemporary clinical literature cited by Freud, “perverts and homosexuals” are particularly prone to this form of narcissism— a scenario only slightly different than that of a healthy heterosexual man, who has “...two sexual objects—himself and the woman who nurses him”(554).

Freud acknowledges that describing normative heterosexual love in this fashion is disturbingly equivalent to “postulating a primary narcissism in everyone”, and further recognizes that this will lead to “fundamental differences” (554) between men and women in their choice of love-object. In fact, he goes so far as to suggest that “an allocation of the libido such as deserved to be described as narcissism might be present far more extensively [than originally thought], and that it might claim a place in the regular course of human sexual development”(546). Narcissism, then, cannot be said to be a neurosis or perversion in and of itself, although the megalomania observable in schizophrenics indicates that an excess of narcissistic libidinal investment is a common effect of physical or mental illness (546).

At this point, a clarification of Freud’s libidinal theory as it relates to object and ego is in order. An individual may focus a majority of his libidinal attentions upon objects—“people and things in the external world”; or he may “substitute for real objects imaginary ones from his memory”(546) as with hysterics or those with obsessional neuroses; or he may, like “the sick man [withdraw] his libidinal cathexes back upon his own ego, and [send] them out again when he recovers” (551). The finite amount of libidinal energy one has to spend thus creates “an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more of the one is employed, the more the other becomes depleted” (547).

Freud posits that “[h]ypochondria, like organic disease, manifests itself in distressing and painful bodily sensations, and it has the same effect as organic disease on the distribution of the libido”. The hypochondriac behaves exactly like a person with an organic illness, withdrawing “both interest and libido—the latter specially markedly—from the objects of the external world and concentrates both of them upon the organ that is engaging his attention” (551). From this evidence, Freud concludes that an organic process must be at work in hypochondria as well. Expanding upon his theory of “erotogenicity” —that all body parts have the capacity to send “sexually exciting stimuli to the mind” and can “act as substitutes for the genitals”— Freud notes that with any “change in the erotogenicity of the organs” there is a “parallel change of libidinal cathexis in the ego” (552). Freud sees in this relationship not only the source of the similarity between organic illness and hypochondria, but the underlying cause of hypochondria itself.

Hypochondria, like schizophrenia, is thus a narcissistic condition which is “dependent on ego-libido” for its thrust. As such, Freud traces in the hypochondriac a “damming up of ego-libido” comparable to the “damming up of object-libido” which produces other neuroses, such as hysteria and obsessional neurosis. While the Oedipal drama and its repression produces the latter conditions, the hypochondriac has repressed a critical drama related to his or her own ego, the result of which is a conviction that an actual organic condition is producing what Freud terms “unpleasure.” The greater the degree of repression, the higher the degree of hypochodriac anxiety.

Having identified hypochondria as an ego-based anxiety, Freud then asks “what makes it necessary at all for our mental life to pass beyond the limits of narcissism and to attach the libido to objects” (552): A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love. (553)

Arriving at the critical juncture of self-love and other-love, we may now begin to more directly address the phenomenon of female-to-male transsexuality 4 But first, let us return to Freud’s assertion that women experience a “fundamentally [different] type of object-choice” than men; in this account, men express their original narcissism in a “marked sexual overvaluation” related to the “transference of that narcissism to the sexual object”. Women, by contrast, who at“the onset of puberty [experience] the maturing of the female sexual organs” manifest a corresponding “intensification of the the original narcissism”, a condition which limits the masculine “development of a true object-choice with its accompanying sexual overvaluation.” Women, especially women deemed attractive by society, derive more satisfaction from being loved than they do in loving an external object, so the man who loves them is the man they narcissistically desire. Although Freud sites this “purest and truest” (554) form of narcissism firmly in the feminine, he admits the existence of many different types of women whose ways of loving differ from this norm:

There are other women, again, who do not have to wait for a child in order to take the step in development from (secondary) narcissism to love object. Before puberty they feel masculine and develop some way along masculine lines; after this trend has been cut short on their reaching female maturity, they still retain the capacity of longing for a masculine ideal - an ideal which is in fact a survival of the boyish nature that they themselves once possessed. (555)

To briefly restate: in a normal adult man, the libido is divided between the ego and its object cathexes, with the lion’s share being externalized (557). In heterosexual women, the libido, although essentially focused on the self, still finds its satisfaction in being loved by an external object cathexis, whether husband or son. Lesbians, in Freud’s account, can remain female-identified even as they “love according to the masculine type”(555), while the typical gay man expresses a narcissistic drive to love himself in another (554). A woman with residual longings for masculinity, on the other hand, may transfer them to an intense overvaluation of her male object-ideal (555); or she may, as with butch lesbians and FtMs, continue to pursue for herself the masculine ego-ideal of childhood. We will set aside for a moment the question of why this longing culminates for some but not all masculine women in a transsexual identity, and instead ask why any individual raised as a woman might develop a masculine ego-ideal in the first place.The following passage contains a critical key which might lead towards an answer to this question:

We have learnt that libidinal instinctual impulses undergo the vicissitudes of pathogenic repression if they come into conflict with the subject’s cultural and ethical ideas. By this we never mean that the individual in question has a merely intellectual knowledge of the existence of such ideas; we always mean that he recognizes them as a standard for himself and submits to the claims they make on him. (557) Keeping in mind that narcissism and hypochondria have been linked by Freud to a repression of the ego-libido (554), let us explore this passage in some detail. There is the primary matter of a conflict between the individual’s “libidinal instinctual impulses” and his or her “cultural and ethical ideas”. Earlier in the text, Freud asserted that the “attitude of affectionate parents towards their children [...] is a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism”(556), a fact which can be evidenced by their overvaluation of the child. But this overvaluation is conditional upon the child’s fulfillment of the parent’s own ego ideals: “The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out—the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father’s place, and the girl shall marry a prince as a tardy compensation for her mother” (556). Assuming that the child’s “instinctual libidinal impulses” are consistent with those of the parents, this should not present more than the usual amount of childhood trauma, and the child’s attention should not be excessively focused on questioning or doubting her socially assigned gender.

But what if those instinctual impulses include a the manifestation of behaviors and attitudes which society has assigned to the “opposite” gender? A mother who has narcissistically transferred her own fantasies of marrying a prince onto her daughter would likely experience great disappointment if she produced instead a biologically female child who by all indications wanted to be a prince; such disappointment, however well-concealed, would surely not go unnoticed by the child, who seeks the love of her mother, her original object-ideal. It is not inconceivable that such a child might suffer a lasting trauma to her ego, and quite understandably attribute her parent’s disappointment not to cultural gender norms but to her own female gender. Further, the child “recognizes [cultural and ethical ideas] as a standard for himself and submits to the claims they make on him”. The child, then, is aware from a very early age that cultural and ethical standards exist, and that she must inevitably establish a relationship between those standards and her own identity.

The text then suggests one possible distinction between masculine-identified women and those who identify as transsexual: “The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or at least works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness”. The repression in the latter case, which results from the “self-respect of the ego” (557), occurs when an external ego ideal is established, while in the former case, the subject “has formed no such ideal” (558). If those children who will later identify as transsexual take as their ego ideal not a masculine female (themselves), but a more culturally acceptable manifestation of masculinity (a biological male), then in Freudian terms they necessarily undergo a repression of their own ego, which may lead to narcissistic attitudes. This suggests that parental attitudes towards gender condition the disappointment in or approval of a masculine gender expression in female children, which lead to an internal or external ego ideal.

Those who do form an external ego ideal now have a substitute object upon which to transfer the “self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego”, setting the stage for narcissistic crises. As a child grows, she becomes aware of the “admonitions of others and by the awakening of [her] own critical judgement”. Unwilling to “forgo the narcissistic perfection of [her] childhood”, an ego ideal is constructed. The new ideal—a biological male, in the case of the FTM— “finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value” (558), A tomboy child can imagine that she is very like her male ideal, a fantasy which is disappointed at puberty; 5 a masculine-identified female would in this account experience much less inconsistency, not having taken an external, male ideal.

Freud links the formation of an ego ideal to sublimation, in which the object-libido turns itself “towards an aim other than, and remote from, that of sexual satisfaction” (558).6 Crucially for the question of transsexuality, Freud states: Idealization is a process that concerns the object; by it that object, without any alteration in its nature, is aggrandized and exalted in the subject’s mind. Idealization is possible in the sphere of ego-libido as well as in that of object-libido.” (558)

Sublimation is distinguished from idealization in that the former is concerned with the instincts, while the latter is concerned with the object; as Freud points out, “the ego ideal demands such sublimation, but it cannot enforce it”. Sublimation is presented as a “way out” (558), a way by which the failure of the ego to achieve its ideal can be mitigated without recourse to repression. The development of a conscience is thus, for Freud, a means by which the narcissistic and “essentially homosexual” ego libido is turned away from the potentially destructive path of the ego ideal. The conscience, “at bottom an embodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society” can manifest in an exaggerated form in the case of neurotics, specifically paranoiacs, in the sense of being constantly watched or judged, but “exists in every one of us in normal life” (559).

Freud then turns to the matter of self-regard, which “has a specially intimate dependence on narcissistic libido”, as evidenced by the extraordinarily high self-regard of schizophrenics as opposed to the extremely low self-regard of those with “transference neuroses”. Further, when one is loved, self-regard is heightened, while not being loved lowers self-regard. Freud reminds us that the “aim and satisfaction in a narcissistic object-choice is to be loved”, while those who love an object-cathexis experience a lowering of self-regard, since they have “forfeited a part of [their] narcissism”. The awareness that one cannot love “in consequence of mental or physical disorder”(560) due to the withdrawal of the libido from object cathexes, can be especially detrimental to self-regard.

Freud credits Adler with the assertion that a handicapped individual will often overcompensate with a “higher level of performance”; however, just as hypochondria is as physically debilitating as organic illness, so the fact or mere imagining of a handicap can have comparable effects: “[n]euroses make use of such inferiorities as a pretext”. Thus, both an attractive neurotic and an unattractive one are equally convinced that illness is “inevitable [...] since she is ugly, deformed, or lacking in charm”(561).

This insight potentially returns us to a hypochondria model of FTM identity, in which an inadequate possession of the attributes of the male ego ideal—whether actual or falsely perceived—stands in for a repressed certainty of being unlovable to the object-ideal. Confronted with the impossibility of achieving the overvalued ego ideal and its imagined promise of being lovable, self-regard plummets, an experience which is defensively transferred to the physical attributes of the female body and other markers of abjected femininity. 7 Or, as Freud says in the essay’s closing remarks:

“The want of satisfaction which arises from the non-fulfilment of this ideal liberates homosexual libido, and this is transformed into a sense of guilt (social anxiety). Originally this sense of guilt was a fear of punishment by the parents, or, more correctly, the fear of losing their love; later the parents are replaced by an indefinite number of fellow-men.” (562)

As the female body parts are abjected, so the longed-for male body parts are imbued with every value. Butler’s “Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary”, speaking of cultural phallic idealization, notes a “kind of eroticized hypochondria” in the “imaginary valorization of body parts”(63). The opening epigraph of this paper can now be read from a Freudian angle: If it is true that most FTMs and transmen do not experience gender dysphoria, but feminine-marking “body part dysphoria”, and if it is true that most FTMs and transmen know from an early age what [their] gender is”, we may gather that it is at least partly a sense of social anxiety that leads to a transsexual identity. Had the “cultural and ethical” ideas idealized female masculinity, there would be no cause to fear the loss of parental love for expressing it. More properly, then, FTMs could be said to experience neither gender dysphoria nor body part dysphoria, but a culturally mediated form of gender hypochondria. As Freud reminds us, the discomfort of hypochondria is no less painful to the sufferer than that caused by organic illness. In fact, Butler follows freud in suggesting that it might be this very sort of “guilt-induced body suffering” which produces everyone’s idea of their own body.(Butler Phallus 64) Within transsexual discourses, passing means blending in and becoming unnoticeable and unremarkable as either a man or a woman. Blending in as normal means that one has succeeded and become a “real” man or woman. With “realness,” an individual is no longer a member of a stigmatized group of transsexuals; she or he has completed “transition” and is now “just a woman” or “just a man.” To do otherwise is to fail. (Cromwell 39)

For the vast majority of FTMs, the end goal of what Cromwell termed “sex and/or gender congruence surgery” is to be “legally [...] seen as nontranssexual men or women” (21). Many post-transition FTMs “go stealth,” leaving behind their pre-transition lives and starting over in communities where they will be seen as “just a man” (Cromwell 104), and where no one, including lovers and close friends, is informed of their transsexuality; others promote transempowerment and transvisibility by living openly as transgendered. Still others, for whom the term FTM may be less than appropriate, 8 prefer to remain in a transitional, shifting gender state, so that their gender, while masculine, cannot be clearly read by a casual observer (Cromwell 129,142), or even by the individual him/herself.

Each of these radically different modes of transsexual presentation shares a common focus: being seen, or read, by others as belonging or not belonging to a gender category. While Freud’s “On Narcissism” has been extremely helpful in theorizing how and why an increasing number of masculine females assume a transsexual identity, perhaps Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” can tell us more about how a crisis of masculinity can form in a very young female-bodied child in the first place, and how specularity figures into the phenomenon.

“The Mirror Stage” takes as its foundation a developmental stage in which the child, although ranking below a “chimpanzee” in “instrumental intelligence,” can “already recognize as such his own image in a mirror”(1). The layered wording of this passage suggests, among many other ideas, that the child “already” recognizes an image which is “as such” his own, an experience that would seem to require what Gallop referred to as a “problematic temporality” (80). In other words, the child has always already recognized his mirror image, even prior to being placed before the mirror; we may thus read the mirror stage as an allegory, but of what, exactly? Reading further, we see the child engage with the mirror image: This act, far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between the virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates - the child’s own body, and the persons and things, around him (1)

The child, then, masters the image which has been “found empty”. In spite of this knowledge, the act of seeing himself in the mirror results in the child initiating a “series of gestures” in which a number of extremely complex relationships are determined. The child recognizes that his gestures are duplicated by the mirror image. The child’s environment is likewise reflected in the mirror, providing a redoubled sense of perspective. But above all, the child’s relationship to people, to objects, and, crucially, to himself is installed in the realm of specularity.
The child leans towards the mirror image as he is held upright by a parent or in an infant seat, “in order to hold it in his gaze,” and “brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.” (2) The reflected image, then, is “assumed” by the child, a process which Lacan describes as
an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image - whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago. (2)

The atemporal, allegorical quality of this experience is reaffirmed by Lacan’s statement that this event is predestined. A child cannot choose to look away when placed before the mirror, nor can he fail to assume the image he sees reflected there. Lacan then asserts that this predestination is linked to the “symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of the identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject”(2) By this passage, Lacan implies that there is never really a time before the child is objectified, since he has come into existence within a “symbolic matrix” which inexorably “restores” to his I the function of linguistic subject. The recognition of the mirror image as a mirror image of himself “as such” is only possible if the child is always already cognizant of himself as a subject, and the other as an other.9 This insight renders questionable any assertion of an inherent or natural self, a self imagined or understood before exposure to the symbolic matrix of the culture and its values.

But something paradoxically precedes this atemporal recognition of the self as subject; in Lacan’s account, the child’s “specific prematurity of birth”(4) leads to a “fragmented body image”, an image which we retain in the subconscious where it “usually manifests itself in dreams”, and which is also observable as “fragilization” in schizophrenia and the “spasmodic symptoms of hysteria”(5). The specter of the fragmented body, manifested by the insufficiency of our infantile form and anticipation for an idealized, adult self, produces fantasies of sprouting wings, of mutated limbs, of excess or castrated organs; it causes a long-lasting confusion in the subject between the I and the other (4,5). The mirror stage attempts to frame the very instant at which the child experiences an understanding of himself as a totalized body, and simultaneously, from this understanding, derives a fictional past in which his body existed in fragments (Gallop 80-85).

The anticipation/insufficiency loop “manufactures for the subject [...a] succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality” which Lacan refers to as “orthopaedic” and which eventually rigidifies into an “armour” of an “alienating identity” (4) which determines the remainder of the child’s development into an adult. The mirror stage, then, marks the moment in time when the “specular I” is deflected onto the “social I” (5) — the time at which the child’s understanding of himself as a social subject, within a social framework, is constructed out of nothing (Gallop 80), colonizing the imagined past, the atemporal present, and the fantasized future. For Lacan, the I is inextricably linked to “socially elaborated situations”, while the “whole of human knowledge” is experienced in a “mediatization through the desire of the other”. There is no I without the knowledge of the other, and it is impossible to speak of a “natural maturation”(5), grounded as it is on a series of reflected illusions (Gallop 83).

Lacan specifically links the mirror stage to infantile primary narcissism and libidinal investments, since the “cultural mediation” through which the child must pursue the “normalization of this maturation [...] in the case of the sexual object” is the Oedipus complex, and since there is an “evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I” (6) As Freud suggested, loving another necessarily takes love away from oneself, and the constitution of the social I requires that one seek the love and approval of others at the expense of one’s own sense of self-sufficiency. Since the I wishes to believe in the “illusion of autonomy” (6) it must engage in a series of méconaissances in creating and sustaining the ego. While for Freud the narcissistic drive can lead one to illness through its association with the death drive and necessary withdrawal of libidinal attachments from external objects, Lacanian narcissism is virtually inevitable, caught as we are by the withering mirror gaze of the symbolic order, and obligated to continually patch together our fragmented selves with illusions and desires.

We are now confronted with the suggestion of inversion, a classic psychoanalytic reading of transsexuality. Lacanian repression of a sense of insufficiency (as with Freudian narcissism) prefigures inversion, and prefigures the socialization proper of the individual. The ego, in building for itself an artificially unified sense of self, defends itself against possible damage from failing to conform to a social ideal, even prior to having consciously experienced this ideal. For Lacan, this is a universal experience which merely manifests more noticeably in dreamstates or among the mentally ill or traumatized(5).

FtMs could thus have quite accurately remembered “always feeling this way,” if the nature of their trauma required that their unified sense of self acquire a male form. Their discourse of the other inverts from “I am a female-bodied person, whose behavior is interpreted by this culture as masculine” to “I am a male person, who is inhabiting a female body”. This reading is encouraged by Lacan’s invocation of Callois’ legendary psychasthenia 10; by the related notion of infantile transitivism, in which the child’s identification with the other leads him to cry when he has struck another child; and by the Lacanian obsessional inversion, in which “the imaginary is represented as a barrier blocking the discourse of the Other, causing this discourse to arrive at the subject in an inverted form.” (Evans 91)

But precisely whom, or what, is the other? A Lacanian subject requires an object—the other—against whose lack the subject is able to judge his own possession. Freud held that the original other is always the mother; the child’s discovery of her castration propels him into maturity. Similarly for Lacan, and critically for our examination of FTM interiority, the other is always feminine in gender, for in a masculinized culture,“[m]an here acts as the relay whereby the woman becomes this Other for herself as she is this Other for him.” (Evans 132) Consider that all Lacanian children experience, as a result of their sense of insufficiency and of the méconnaisances necessary for ego preservation, the “drama of primordial jealousy” (Lacan 5). This jealousy leaves a residue which underlies all social interactions and, indeed, shapes one’s sense of self. When jealousy of the identified-with other is repressed, for example in a highly gender-stratified family, the child’s social and self-development is now permanently bound up with it. Ego and object ideal alike are formed from defensiveness and longing in all people, and this is certainly observable in the psychology of FtMs.

When I was being seen as a butch dyke I was stone in that the only contact my partners had with my genitalia was through the transference of pleasure my dildo could convey,” says Spencer Bergstedt. “However, once I came out as male and my then-partner acknowledged that she saw me as a male, it became much easier for me to allow myself the pleasure of relating to my genitalia.” (Cromwell 132)

Bergstedt’s sense of desirability and genital sensuality—to himself and to his partner— is connected to his partner’s perception of him as male. Specularity—looking at or being seen by the other— is for Lacan the defining act which solidifies one’s subjective/objective identity and places one firmly within the social structure. When the infant looks at his reflection in the mirror, it is actually the imagined other—and the symbolic order she represents—who sees, judges, and hopefully desires11. When this desire is not received, dissatisfaction and disappointment ensues; Freud’s account of narcissism as the cause and effect of a feared loss of love is not dissimilar. If the specularized infant who has already assumed a male ego ideal is not seen, or properly desired by the other, a specific sort of méconnaissance of gender may occur.

But as with the infant’s necessarily prescient subjecthood, to misrecognize one’s gender implies an underlying recognition and submission all the same— a “captation of the subject by the situation” which is the foundation of paranoia, neuroses and sociopolitical crises for Lacan. The I is trapped by a process of socialization equivalent to the death of the self’s perception of symbolic wholeness. The quest for wholeness is then projected onto society and the social I. When this quest bursts out from the latent, “madness” is the result. Lacan reads the passion of madness in inverse proportion to the society’s level of passion, since the more forcefully passions are repressed, the more violently they will explode 12. Thus, however the misrecognition of gender is acted out, FTMs inevitably reinscribe their own bodies with the very same indications of the “deadening of the passions in society” (6-7) against which they have struggled.

“Breasts are hated more than genitals, which the majority of people in one’s life do not see. Props fill in for male genitalia. Ironically, transmen and FTMs are accused of imitating men when in fact they are improvising and using the available language to communicate personal identities on a social level.” (Cromwell 106)

The concept of passing as it relates to transsexuality operates on multiple levels of specularity and misrecognition. A successfully passing FTM will usually be perceived as biologically male by those around him; at the same time, many FTMs report feeling as if they are “doing drag” or passing when they are dressed as women, and are only expressing their “true selves in living, dressing, and behaving as men.” Passing is thus used to describe contradictory conditions within the transcommunity; this confusion may be due to a transitive overidentification with the dominant discourse, or to linguistic limitations. Alternatively, the paradox of transsexual passing, in which “a person lies to become real,” and “realness is the lie” (Cromwell 39) could be read as a conflict between the FTM’s socialized feminine desire to be desired and seen, and their assumed masculine desire to be a desiring, specular subject. It is not quite clear for whom FTMs are passing, or from which side of the mirror to which their journey takes them.

Yet some FTMs do live as lesbians before living as men. ‘I can’t remember ever being happy about being female,’ a correspondent told me in a personal communication. ‘I can’t remember being happy but for two years that I was involved in a homosexual relationship. That happiness was not in the sexual aspect, but of being the ‘man’ and of being with people who accepted me as I was. I don’t consider myself gay. I only consider myself ‘straight’ with a woman’s body structure.’ (Cromwell 110-11)

A biologically determinist reading of this passage would conclude that the lesbian correspondent has claimed an FTM identity primarily as a means of avoiding her own internalized homophobia; a transcentric reading would champion the correspondent’s assertion that he was never a lesbian, since he always identified as male, and that a lesbian relationship would be unsatisfying because it differed so greatly from a heterosexual or gay male partnership. A Lacanian reading, however, would have to start with the presence or absence of the phallus in any sexual relationship spurned or pursued by the FTM correspondent. Although pinning down the precise meaning of the Lacanian phallus is nearly as difficult as pinning down the elusive phallus itself, I will attempt a brief gloss of Lacan’s “Signification of the Phallus”, as the essay holds many threads linked to the matter of transsexuality, particularly in the realm of pre- and post-transition object choice and sexual orientations.

Lacan begins “Signification” with a return to Freud, and to the castration complex, which he envisions as a “knot” installing in the male subject an “unconscious position without which he would be unable to identify himself with the ideal type of his sex [...]”. Without this complex, Lacan suggests that men would not properly socialize, would not be able to relate to a female sexual partner, and might not feel any sense of responsibility for “the child who may be produced by this relation”. He then asks a critical question: why must [men] assume the attributes of that sex only through a threat— the threat, indeed, of their privation?”(281) The question cannot be answered by “any reduction to biological givens”,(282) since an actual biological castration fear would not need to be described in the mythical language of the Oedipal story. If so, the presence of a castration complex is not predicated on one’s biological sex, a point elaborated by Judith Butler’s “Lesbian Phallus”.

Lacan, however, while acknowledging a “relation of the subject to the phallus that is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes”, would prefer that we maintain a clear gender distinction when considering a series of questions related to the castration complex and its role in the psychically different development of boys and girls, noting first that “the little girl considers herself, if only momentarily, as castrated, in the sense of deprived of the phallus” and blames first the mother, then the father, for this castration. This leads Lacan to ask why both little boys and little girls imagine the mother to possess a phallus “as the phallic mother”, only to experience the full weight of the castration complex “on the basis of [the] discovery as castration of the mother”. Finally, Lacan points out that both boys and girls elide the issue of the vagina as being the “locus of genital penetration” by masturbation of their phallic organs—the clitoris, in the case of girls. A suspicious méconnaissance is noted in this studious avoidance of what must on some level be already very clearly understood(282).

Lacan sites this méconnaissance on the relationship between the signifier and the signified, which together constitute the phallus, which itself is and is not the penis. The signifier “has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming through that passion the signified”(284). That is to say, the penis comes to stand for the phallus by weight of the heavy social/libidinal investment in it as such, but the penis itself was originally only the signifier, albeit the “privileged signifier”, the sign that pointed to something, not the thing itself. The subject is installed in the symbolic order by the linguistic fusion of the penis and the phallus, the signifier and the signified, by the “double play of combination and substitution in the signifier, according to the two aspects that generate the signified, metonymy and metaphor” (285)

The subject’s possession of the phallus is dependent on the Other, “because it is there that the subject, by means of a logic anterior to any awakening of the signified, finds its signifying place”(285). The phallus, as with the child before the mirror, only understands itself by what it is not, by its reflected/constructed imaginary other. Language itself, the symptom and genesis of the phallus, likewise originates in the other and is beyond the control of the subject. If the mother is the original Other, and if the love of the mother is simultaneously the original desire and source of anxiety for all children, the phallic stage of both boys and girls is quite understandable: “If the desire of the mother is the phallus, the child wishes to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire” (289). Inevitably, children must move from attempting to be the phallus to a modified relationship with her—and thus with all others.

Gender and sexual difference “turn around a ‘to be’ and a ‘to have’ [position], which, by referring to a signifier, the phallus, have the opposed effect, on the one hand, of giving reality to the subject in this signifier, and on the other, of derealizing the relations to be signified”. The symbolic position “to have” is necessarily replaced by a “to seem” to allow men to preserve their sense of phallic possession and allow women to act as if they do not represent its lack, thereby structuring the stereotypical behaviors of both(289). As with the mirror stage, the subject’s self-love is only possible through the desire of the other; with such high stakes for both subject and other, “it is not enough to be subjects of need, or objects of love, but that they must stand in for the cause of desire”(287).” This desire to be desirable is transferred onto the phallus, which is, after all, “the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire” (187). The specular act of “seeming” male or female thus takes on tremendous importance, since it is by the signs of gender that observers may determine whether you are, or have, the phallus.

FTMs, who may experience emotions ranging from ambivalence to outright loathing of their female genitals, are not necessarily obsessed with the idea of possessing a penis—or “phallus” in medical terminology—, even though it is quite true that for a large number “the organ that assumes this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish” (290). While this is on a practical level often due to the expense, risk, and poor results of currently available technologies, Butler might also argue that FTMs have to no small degree already achieved the phallus upon passing from “seeming” female to “seeming” male, from being someone else’s phallus to having their own. Butler’s discussion, however, centered around the lesbian phallus, a queer phallus that would be rejected by heterosexually-identified FTMs; assuming that the phallus as an effect of acculturation will develop differently according to socialization, how is the FTM phallus different than or similar to the lesbian phallus, or to the male phallus?

Indeed, if men are said to “have” the phallus symbolically, their anatomy is also a site marked by having lost it; the anatomical part is never commensurable with the phallus itself. In this sense, men might be understood to be both castrated (already) and driven by penis envy (more properly understood as phallus envy). Conversely, insofar as women might be said to “have” the phallus and fear its loss [...] they may be driven by castration anxiety. (Butler Bodies 85)

If Butler is correct, why are FTMs seeking to assume the fragile, already-castrated mantle of masculinity? Could the motive of a castration anxiety be linked back, once again, to the fear of the loss of mother’s love? If an FTM already identified as male prior to the events leading to the castration complex,then the disappointment upon recognizing the mother as castrated would be doubly traumatic, since the alienation from the self and the distance from desire would be redoubled in his own body at puberty when his fate as phallic marker, rather than phallus possessor, is made manifest.

If the symptoms, anxieties, misidentifications and repressions of assuming one’s assigned gender identity in an atmosphere of Oedipal or existential guilt are universal experiences in postmodernity, what is it that compels FTM transsexuality? Clinically, transsexuality has been thought to be a symptom of repressed homosexuality; let us take FTMs seriously when they adamantly reject this theory. Lesbians have their own relationship to the phallus which operates in an almost diametric opposition to that of FTMs:

If the morphological distinctness of “the feminine” depends on its purification of all masculinity, and if this bodily boundary and distinctness is instituted in the service of the laws of a heterosexual symbolic, then that repudiated masculinity is presumed by the feminized morphology, and will emerge either as an impossible ideal that shadows and thwarts the feminine or as a disparaged signifier of a patriarchal order against which a specific lesbian-feminism defines itself. In either case, the relation to the phallus is constitutive; an identification is made which is at once disavowed.” (Butler Phallus 87)

Clearly, FTMs embrace, rather than discard, the phallic identification. It is, rather, femininity that they disavow, and in this disavowal, they reveal the same sort of constitutive identification with the feminine which lesbian-feminists experience with the phallus. Like biological men, those FTMs who vehemently seek the “purification of all femininity” in their identities have in fact repressed the deepest secret fear: that they are already castrated, and that the psychic boundaries so carefully constructed between the genders are more porous than even genderflexible transqueers are often able to comprehend.

Although FTMs are, for the most part, not lesbians, the unavoidable residue of female socialization can be read in both groups. Lacan recognized the effects of gender socialization in the “Signification of the Phallus” with a few brief comments regarding homosexuality. While gay men’s sexuality, true to their sex and their possession of the phallic signifier, continues to be “constituted on the side of desire”, lesbians continue to play out the drama of phallic lack, which creates in all women “a disappointment that reinforces the side of the demand for love.” (290) What is the FTM transitional process if not an essentially feminine disappointment in the lack of a phallus?

The FTM concern with specular “realness” and being “seen” for his “true self” resonates with Lacan’s extremely apt assertion: The fact that femininity finds its refuge in this mask, by virtue of the fact of the Verdrangung inherent in the phallic mask of desire, has the curious consequence of making virile display in the human being itself seem feminine. (291) Any posturing or act of ‘seeming’ may be read as feminine, if concern for being seen or perceived in a certain way is understood psychoanalytically as an effect of demanding love and wanting to be desired; in Freudian terms, FTMs could In this sense, and directly proportionate to their level of masculine identification, FTMs—and the hyper-masculine men with whom they identify—can be said to be more psychically feminine than heterosexual women, queer femmes, or butches who retain a female identity.

Butler’s lesbian phallus, offering as it does the “occasion [...] for the phallus to signify differently” and presenting an “alternative imaginary” to the “hegemonic imaginary” provides one possible solution to the FTM claim of “body-part dysphoria”, when she asks for “not a new body part, as it were, but a displacement of the hegemonic symbol of (heterosexist) sexual difference” (90-91). Given that gender duality and overvaluing of the penis-as-phallus are symptomatic of the culture itself, should not careful thought should be given to the problematic practice of refocusing this cultural dysphoria back onto individual transgressive bodies? Perhaps it is time for FTMs and sympathetic medical professionals alike to seriously re-theorize the “transition” process, which medically recuperates the ambiguously gendered in the service of “cultural and ethical” norms.

Footnotes:

1 The transgendered community engages in debate as to terminology, with many alternate descriptions in use. Following psychoanalytical terminology, this paper will use the term “transsexual” to refer to female-to-male self-identified transgendered/transsexual individuals who utilize hormones and surgical techniques as part of their effort to present a masculine appearance. See Cromwell 19-30 for a more in-depth discussion of the politics of transsexual terminology.

2 Butler Gender, 44

3 Grosz, Psychoanalysis 267-71

4 Although the HBIGDA does not specifically distinguish between MTF and FTM transsexuals in its Standards of Care, FTMs themselves recognize a clear distinction for a variety of reasons. (Cromwell 45, 138-140) This paper, as stated, will focus on the FTM experience of gender and sexuality.

5 “It was easy to believe that I was as I saw myself. But when I reached puberty the girl-turning-woman caught up with my image of the boy-turning-man” (respondent quoted in Cromwell, 107)

6 See Cromwell 31-38 for a transcentric effort to unhitch sexuality from sex and gender in the service of desexualizing transsexual identity.

7 Association with lesbians and lesbianism is an obvious marker of femaleness, one which many FTMs actively reject, seeking out exclusively straight women or gay men as sexual partners (Cromwell 110-11) Cromwell himself dislikes the word transsexual specifically because it implies a prior femaleness. (29)

8 One respondent in Cromwell’s text suggested “hermaphrodyke” (127)

9 See Butler “Conscience” for a similar account of Althusserian interpellation/subject formation.

10 According to this theory, a moth takes on the coloring of its predators not to escape predation, but because of a mistaken identification with the predatory other.Caillois suggested that this was due to the moth’s desire to be its predator, an essential inability to discern between self and environment, between the specular image and the thing itself. The child destined to identify as FtM may have suffered trauma intimately connected to her gender, and attempts to resolve this damage with mimicry.

11 Apropos of the gender positioning of specularity, Derrida’s “The Law of Genre” states , “The Law is in the feminine.”

12 This may also assist in explaining why some masculine women feel comfortable with a butch identity, while others claim a transsexual identity.

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