Gender detransition: a case study

Within the last decade, there has been a sharp global rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender. More recently, there appears to be an increase in the numbers of young people detransitioning or returning to identifying with their natal sex after pursuing medical transition. A case is presented of a young woman who pursued a gender transition and returned to identifying as female after almost two years on testosterone. The author considers and critiques the affirmative model of care for gender dysphoric youth in light of this case.

Transgender medicalization and the attempt to evade psychological distress

In this paper the author argues that trans-identification and its associated medical treatment can constitute an attempt to evade experiences of psychological distress. This occurs on three levels. Firstly, the trans person themselves may seek to evade dysregulated affects associated with such experiences as attachment trauma, childhood abuse, and ego-alien sexual feelings. Secondly, therapists may attempt to evade feelings, such as fear and hatred, evoked by engaging with these dysregulated affects. Thirdly, we, as a society, may wish to evade acknowledging the reality of such trauma, abuse and sexual distress by hypothesizing that trans-identification is a biological issue, best treated medically. The author argues that the quality of evidence supporting the biomedical approach is extremely poor. This puts young trans people at risk of receiving potentially damaging medical treatment they may later seek to reverse or come to regret, while their underlying psychological issues remain unaddressed.

Transgenderism and transformation: an attempt at a Jungian understanding

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.