Gender Identity: A Freudian Mistake?
A new biography of the founder of psychoanalysis reveals the unwitting role he played in the birth of 'gender identity'. It's a story of burglary, secret homosexual urges and a bizarre suicide.
If you were looking for the origins of gender identity ideology one of the last places you’d probably start is the work of Freud. Psychoanalysis is normally considered diametrically opposed to gender woowoo. Freud’s therapeutic practices were, after all, effectively designed to help change the mind whereas gender affirming healthcare (sic) seeks to change the body to fit a mental fantasy.
Yet a new book suggests Freud’s work, and the great man himself, may have played a pivotal role in the rise of the delusion de jure. In an irony he would surely have appreciated, it was an unconscious one.
Laura Maud Dillon (aka Michael Dillon) the first transman (ie woman) in the UK to have a phalloplasty may have been the first to compare explictly the ambitions of psychotherapy with what she saw as the goal of early transsexuals like her.
“Surely, where the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the body should be made to fit, approximately, at any rate to the mind…” from Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology (1951)
This notion that these two fields are polar opposites was though always a simplification. It’s not just that Freud’s notion of ‘penis envy’ feels like an early outing for the lesbian penis, complete with its underlying misogyny. Nor that his insistence on infant sexuality has often been used to license the LGBTQ+ lobby’s refusal to treat child safeguarding seriously.
At the heart of the contradictory body of thought that Freud built up and adapted over the years was a conviction that people who felt unhappy might solve their problems if they were able to bring into the light their hidden and repressed feelings. It’s hardly a stretch to see those intellectual fingerprints imprinted all over the trans narrative of a hidden and repressed self bubbling up to the surface to have its day in the sun. High heels and wig at the ready.
Freud himself thought repression was both inevitable and necessary in a civilised society. The spoilsport. His aim, he said, was merely to deal with the medical results of repression in individuals. In the 1960s, however, a highly selective liberationist reading of Freud was presented to the public by counter culture prophets like Herbert Marcuse and RD Laing. Marcuse in particular argued that removing the repression of homosexuality and gender-bending in general was key to the coming Revolution. The one that never came.
Though Freud could never have guessed it both gay rights and the trans movement were deeply influenced by the counter-culture’s take on his work. Earlier in the 1960s the most important intellectual support for the trans movement came from a man immersed in Freudianism. Professor Robert Stoller used the core concepts of Freud to arrive at his theory of ‘gender identity’, a term he invented. His descriptions of everything to do with ‘gender identity’ from sissy culture to paedophilia are rooted in Freud. As are his most interesting works such as ‘Splitting’ about a woman who believed she had a penis. No surprise that ‘penis envy’ raises its ugly head here. So to speak.
When Stoller sought to understand the behaviour of the child-abusing Sambia tribe, in Papua New Guinea in which adult men raped boys as young as ten he also instinctively reached for the vocabulary of Freud and the Oedipus complex. As well as Freud’s insistence that infants were sexual. If we’re looking for Freud’s biggest mistake, look no further than that.
The long-dead Freud can hardly be blamed for the way Stoller and others used his work to support their own pet theories. Obviously. There is though another more direct link between the founder of psychoanalysis and the rise of gender identity ideology.
It’s one laid bare in Freud’s letters to his closest friend, a fellow doctor for whom he may have had powerful homosexual feelings. This was his most significant relationship with another man and was to be destroyed when a troubled student published a book which, though it is little known today, was to prove the seedbed of the ideology we have all come to fear and despise.