Customer Reviews

Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism

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Continues in the proud psychoanalytic tradition of arrogantly disregarding anything trans people have to say about their transitions. In this case, do judge a book by it's awful, objectifying cover.

I like this book written by a therapist who is open minded. She understands what trans people go through. The book may be technical at times but manages to describe well the experience of people who transgress the categories of male, female, or straight. Plus the information on hysteria and the history of sex change is very well done.
I learnt how a psychoanalyst can help patients who challenge our conventions about gender. I recommend this book.

"Please Select Your Gender" is well written, complex and reflective of how Patricia Gherovici's writing is well adapt to Lacanian thought. In her book Gherovici offers a new geometry that leans on Lacanian theory within which one may situate transexuality. Through case examples, the book asks us to consider a seemingly contemporary question that touches on the problem of hysteria and sexual difference. As the cover suggests, language and the body do not get along, an inherent split that gives rise to various solutions (symptoms) to settle this inevitable discordence. The author reminds us how taken as a broad geometry, psychoanalysis may help each subject create (narrate) their own version of gender in a way that opens access to desire. This book is an important contribution to psychoanalutic thinking about gender in its aim to move away from foreclosing questions of pathology and diagnosis to broader reflections on embodiment and subjectivity.

What I like in this smart book is the way Lacanian concepts prove their relevance to the field of "gender trouble." Gherovici's concrete examples are illuminating, easy to follow, and provide not only with a historical survey but with clinical vignettes showing that transgender questions are complex. The chapter on transgender memoirs is wonderfully astute. Neither Butler nor Freud are totally right, on her account, but she negotiates adroitly with theory and clinical practice. I felt that her acumen was always on display. A must read book about the current politics of sex-change.