Anh interviews Ann and Avgi

Anh Vo: Gender Without Identity is an amazing and dangerous book. As rich as it is, the relationship between gender, especially its minoritarian forms, and trauma can be easily weaponized. 

Ann Pellegrini: This is something we've thought about so much in the writing of this book. There were numerous moments when we thought: should we keep going? We were so concerned about the potential misuse of our arguments. And we spoke about weaponization to some of our comrades, queer and trans people who shared our concerns but who encouraged us to keep going, saying that if we let our worries about how our arguments will be misused stop us, we will never actually be able to make a shift in the conversations that we believe are needed. Moreover, no amount of trying to pick our words carefully can prevent the possible misunderstanding, misreading, misapplication, and outright weaponization. It's such a fantasy that we could ever control the uses of our arguments. 

Avgi Saketopoulou: Even at the proofs stage of the book, we would stop and look at each other thinking, we can still stop this! It was very helpful to be working with Ann on this book, because it's almost like we took turns being afraid and talking each other through it. But we felt so strongly that being able to show that it’s possible to find links between gender and trauma without that necessarily delegitimizing trans and gender diverse experience. That has felt very politically important to us, because in some ways, those of us who have invested in the flourishing of trans and queer life have left trauma discourse to the right and to conservatives, those who seek to conserve the idea that assigned-at-birth genders are the only legitimate forms of gender. This has not served our communities well.  

As analysts, when we work with gender complexity, we only talk about trauma in the context of people being traumatized by transphobia, gender normativity, and cis oppression, all of which are painfully true. But what about people whose gender shifts after some major traumatic events, such as sexual violation, or in the context of severe parental discord? Non-transphobic clinicians have had little to say about that, whereas transphobic ones have been saying a lot, in essence claiming that if trauma is connected to diverse gender-formation, it’s because gender has become pathology. We usually respond by naming the transphobia, but at the end of the day, that is insufficient. We need to be able to push back more substantively than that. 

AP: There is already an argument out there, both in the public discourse as well as in numerous clinical conversations, for this constitutive relationship between trauma and transness or trauma and queerness, which involves a supposed “warping” of what should be naturally straight. To Avgi and me, there may well be a constitutive relationship, but it's of a different order. This is an intervention into the way we think not simply about transness and queerness, but about all gender. We are saying that, in fact, all gender has some relationship to trauma. In this idea, we are building on Avgi’s first book, Sexuality Beyond Consent, and her theorization of traumatophilia; we are also making a claim that we get to do things with trauma. Trauma isn't only what has to stop us in our tracks. Trauma can spin us. Trauma can provide us with some energy that makes it possible for us to transform, to mutate. 

AV: I am so glad that you did not stop going. When hearing about your process, it immediately makes me relate to my own experience being treated as a patient in psychoanalysis. At some point, I had no idea what I signed up for. I did not consent to this experience. Touching my wounds made me realize how much I have been acting out through my artistic experimentation. For a long period, I was so scared that psychoanalysis would normalize me. I am so glad that I also did not stop, because then something else happened. I hope that this something else will happen to the book as it circulates outside of your control. 

Let’s take a step back to unpack from a more foundational level how you approach trauma through Jean Laplanche. 

AS: Laplanche gives us an unusual way of thinking about trauma: not as something that interrupts the subject, but as an irritant in response to which one becomes constituted a subject. When trauma is seen as a disruption to an organized self, as an injury to intactness, the question becomes: how do you go back to stitch up that which was cut up by the injury? In contrast, Laplanche gives us a way of thinking about how it is, in fact, the psyche’s response to that which traumatizes us that organizes us into what we, at any particular moment, come to experience as our self, to understand as our identity—a sense of, this is who I am. In the après-coup, narcissism steps in to churn this into, this is who I have always been, this is my originary being. 

Laplanche doesn't start with a notion that there is something true to the self that gets interrupted by trauma. Let’s take Winnicott’s notion of the false self, for example, for whom the focus is on a true self that is receded, covered over by false self formations. Treatment concerns, then, work that permits one’s full self to emerge. But with Laplanche, there's no sense of a true self, it’s all about autopoeisis, which gives us an extremely elastic way of approaching questions of gender and sexuality that don't back us into the conceptual corrner of needing to figure out what one’s “real” gender or “authentic” sexuality is. This hunt for authenticity gets us in trouble as clinicians. Even in the expansive clinical models that work to be inclusive of trans people, there's still this conservative idea at the epicenter of clinical thinking: that one’s gender has to correspond to something true to the self. That becomes a problem with detransition and how it is politicized these days. The logic goes like this: some people (trans and gender-nonconforming individuals) do not accurately know their “real” gender, mistakenly think they are trans and mistakenly transition only to discover this later and de-transition. In a model of transitioning that is rooted in some true or core gender identity, there’s no room for someone’s gender shifting after transition. You get to transition once, or so the liberal argument goes. Laplanche gives us a fertile theory with which to move away from both the essentialisms of biology, and of an interiorized, true psychological self. 

AP: Laplanche gives us a way to think about trauma with a lowercase t, as well as Trauma with an uppercase T. Laplanche suggests that all of us get set into motion by the outside coming inside. In fact, the contact from the outside even creates the sense of an interior, the division between the outside and the inside. The foundation of what will become the subject is actually allocentric. It starts not just from the other, but from the otherness of the other. The infant is being bombarded with messages from the world that surrounds it. And these messages are contaminated by the sexual unconscious of the adults, especially the adult caregivers that are touching the child into life, feeding, nourishing, cleaning that child. Every touch, every vocalization, even the covering of a blanket that keeps them warm are actually a message soaked with something that exceeds even the parent’s consciousness. The child is tasked with making sense of these enigmatic messages, which are not content that you have to decode. There's no actual message there. But the actual contact creates the sense that there's a message intended for you. The process of making sense of that something coming inside, we could call traumatic. 

AS: It constitutes you, we might say, at the border of your consent. 

AP: Laplanche is making a claim that there's a fundamental asymmetry, especially in the first months of life, between the adult caregivers and this neonate. We're bombarded with things against our consent, creating the conditions whereby we start to become this nascent subjectivity. That's lowercase t trauma. Many of us are also subjected to uppercase T Trauma— the violence is of the social, which may have something to do with our race or our bodily capacity. So, we have a second set of potential Traumas that not everybody is subjected to equally. All of us are subjected to lowercase t trauma, in order to be a subject at all, suggests Laplanche. 

AV: In Avgi's book, you use the word violence to describe the process of lowercase t trauma, too. 

AS: Yes, in talking about what — and how much — occurs at the border of the subject’s consent, we are working with ideas from Sexuality Beyond Consent: the other’s otherness pierces us, indifferent to our consent, and the psyche is forced to respond to that. To respond is to give form to formlessness. How does that happen? By using materials, mythosymbolic codes, provided by the caretaker. This is why Ann was saying that with Laplanche, we're always working with phallocentrism. The subject is always in relation to the social, to the other, to the other’s otherness. Think of the gender panic right now: kids are reading the wrong books, frequenting the wrong internet sites, and get confused about their gender. That contagion model only works if gender is seen as an interior process: then, the outside would warp you. But if gender and sexuality are products of allocentric processes, the fiction that you are sovereign, and contact with the world endangers you, begins to lose its explanatory power. 

AP: All gender is scavenged from, in Laplanche’s language, the mythosymbolic. All of us assemble our gender from what is presented to us culturally, though that does not imply that infants “select” from an encyclopedia of gender possibilities. The most important social ring is the one closest to the infant, their most local community — whether it's the family, the extended family — those closest to the child are offering translations of that mythosymbolic material. So, nothing comes to that infant pure. There are all sorts of mediations. If we think about the scavenging from the social, we could say that maybe all gender is contagious. All gender has caught something from the outside. It's not just queerness or transness that someone caught. Think of the bombardment of images of normative femininity, the beauty ideals of whiteness, of slimness. We have all sorts of people trying to model themselves into and after those images. If that's not the contagion of cis femininity, what is? 

AV: There's a certain creativity involved with relationships to the outside, too. In Gender Without Identity, you call this process autopoeitic self-theorization. 

AP: In her solo book, Avgi talks about this in terms of sovereignty. This auto-theorization is not about the volitional subject who gets to will their theorizations ex nihilo, as if they're uncontaminated by social influences. It's a kind of auto-theorization that you get to craft out of the materials that are presented to you. We did not consent to being gendered, we did not consent to being raced. Nonetheless, we can make something from these materials being presented to us that feels like our own; we can offer our own translation, our own innovative reformation of the materials that are out there. That's what makes it a self-realization or auto-theorization, but it does not start from us. I also think about this with Foucault — it's a kind of agency that happens after the fact of the conditions you didn't get to choose. 

AS: When Ann talks about the materials that are scavenged from the outside, the idea is not that one sees a trans person or a drag queen, and then simplistically decides ‘I may be trans, too’, identifying with transness in a straightforward way, as if transness is something one mimetically adopts. At stake is a queer kind of agency, which is not that of a centered, willful subject, but a process which involves the psychic labor of how we use materials from the outside, materials put at our disposal from without and which can be worked in ways that produce experience that feels ours. This is not about imitation or appropriation but about how psychic life works, by weaving codes through translational processes. Cis people who feel at ease with their gender, for instance, in a way that makes it non-remarkable, that makes it feel natural, have also undergone psychic processes that congeal into this sense of truth and  authenticity. Part of how that happens is through this exercise of queer agency, which is how the unconscious manifests itself. Queer not in the sense of gay, but in its etymological sense of deviation — in the sense that it's slanted. It issues, to reference Laplanche, from a perch that the ego does not command. 

These scavenged materials get sorted together inventively, through a process that is very much experimental — and you see if it takes after the fact. Cis-genders have a lot of institutional and relational support, which means that they “take” more easily. That's one way to think about why people with more atypical gender concoctions need queer community, because gender is also a social and relational process. 

AP: Sturdy. If one is sturdy enough…

AS: Sturdiness is a good word, and we use it a lot in the book. There's sturdiness in looking for places that can support or help you experiment with your gender. Sometimes that gender will take, sometimes it will not and what that means is there's a lot of innovation in gender-becoming, a lot of trying things out before one someone may settle in what their gender is, at least for the moment. That process also involves breakdown of previous gender forms, undoing, and redoing them before something feels good enough for now. This involves taking liberties with oneself to offend the norms that have been given to us, which is part of how inventiveness and auto-poeisis proceed. Such liberty-taking is not a problem — even as some queer communities, too, can have tight protocols as to how one is trans or non-binary in the “right way”. But queer agency is about the unconscious throwing it all up in the air and we then watch how it lands. Is it livable or not? Does it bring pleasure or not? 

 AP: What we are describing is also true of normatively-gendered and normatively-desiring subjects. This is not just about transness and queerness. However, if you are cis and straight, there's a whole network of support that patches up fissures in your experience and identity. I use the term identity very loosely, because we are arguing for a loosening of the grip of the term identity. One of the places in which cis and straight people get patched up in that way is, of course, psychoanalysis. Historically, psychoanalysis has offered straight and cis people ways to talk about the miseries of their heterosexual gender, the difficulties of what it is to be a gendered subject in the world. Psychoanalysis has addressed those vicissitudes and struggles, but not with the idea that if you are someone who has been assigned female at birth and you are struggling with femininity, you must actually be trans. 

Psychoanalysis does not try to convert struggling heterosexuals and cis people; it sees their struggles as part of the human condition. We want a psychoanalysis that can offer queer and trans people the same resources that allow for vicissitudes, struggles, miseries, and trauma without that recognition somehow invalidating transness or queerness. Trans and queer people should get to have all the feels, including negative feelings. That's why we're very influenced by recent, exciting work in trans-negativity in this project. 

AV: I want to come back to this term experimental, which is very relevant in the experimental dance context. It is so important that you are describing it through this lens of queer agency that is about this process of throwing it in the air and moving through the feeling to see if it takes or not. Oftentimes, when I think about artistic experimentation, it can fall into the realm of action. That is why I am very hesitant to bring up how you talk about gender in the book as a “wildly improvisational process,” which might sound a little too willful. 

AS: Indeed, talking about it this way invites this risk. For example, the idea that something is improvisational can sound too conscious or willful of a process, get flattened into a prescriptive: you should now improvise or experiment. This is not what we mean by experimentation: it’s not some task of experimenting, which turns this into a linear, progressive project. As you point out, that would be a stunningly impoverished reading of what we are trying to do. 

In talking about wildly improvisational processes, we are also talking about things that are messy and anarchic, because improvisation involves a lot of doing, undoing, and redoing – though, importantly, none of this is a conscious, willed process. Rather, it is messy and difficult. And it produces some forms of gender that can look unimpeachable but are actually quite fragile (as is the case with some cis genders), while other forms of gender (whether trans, non-binary, or cis) may be capable of taking the heat of distress, upset, or failed relationships. The latter, I would argue, can be robust in ways we don’t usually associate with gender. 

AV: The book itself does provide some hints of how to move through this. I'm thinking specifically of one case study where you, Avgi, evaluate that you have failed this one particular patient. As you sit with that failure, you say something along the line of, if you had done it differently, you would have waited, rather than interpreted. I find that to be such an important call—to just wait. Using these words like experimentation and improvisation can create this illusion of action. The task is to do and the time is now. Whereas the book is full of messiness, negativity, failure, pain; of having to wait and just let that soak in. 

AP: The waiting that Avgi is talking about in describing the case of this young child, Ory, is not about making the patient wait. We also use the language of patient affirmation. There is this approach of a watchful waiting that some clinicians are taking with regards to trans subjects and, in particular, trans kids. We don't know yet what your gender will really be, so we’ve got to slow you down, hold on, just wait. That is waiting as an imperative passed from the clinician to the patient — the patient affirmation kind of waiting for which we are advocating is different: it’s saying that we need to wait, so that we do not rush to fill in what we think we know. It is to stay really close to the patient's experience, because we do not know what is going to unfold. Neither does the patient. It is about dealing with our own anxiety and desire to rush. It is a slow process. It is not the temporality of every day. Some people come four times a week. What does it mean to give oneself over to a process that has no foreordained conclusion? 

AS: To say this slightly differently, we think of waiting here as a resource, not in the way that clinicians who are engaged in what I call anti-trans clinical activism think of waiting; that is, that trans children should wait indefinitely before qualifying for transition services, if at all. 

Ann’s point is that this is about the therapist’s waiting. With Ory, the child whose clinical case we discuss in the book, a child who was very timid and held back, the work permitted a burst of hope and pleasure to arrive in the room. These were then interrupted by the sadness and the danger of their mother’s anxiety about their gender: that’s where I didn’t wait. In retrospect, I think that Ory did not actually need me to see how much his parents were constricting him, true as that was; he needed me, I think, to be present with him while experimenting, and the therapy room was the space where he actually escaped that constriction. I wanted to talk about the trauma of gender policing when what Ory needed to do was observe, celebrate, and therefore support his gender-which is what the orchid, the talk about fabrics, his moving me around the room making me touch this or that thing were about. The problem is that I was too preoccupied with how he was being cut down. Not that it is unreasonable to pay attention to such constriction: any clinician can see how I got there, it is not a big leap to want to mark a patient’s pain. But that was my preoccupation at the moment, not where he was at. That is my mistake, then: I am not patient in that stage of the treatment to stay with his pleasure, I want to offer him something else, something I think he needs — recognition of his pain, rather than the pleasure of his experimentation. 

AP: Maybe you focused on “the trauma” or the constrictions, and not on what he himself was already able to do with what was being passed onto him, through intergenerational transmission, and the constrictions of the immediate family, and the wider culture that he was part of. In some sense, this is a case that happened before the development of your clinical thinking about traumatophobia versus traumatophilia. In thinking about the mistake, this has also allowed for a different way of thinking about the relationship between trauma and intergenerational transmission in the book. You did not yet know what is now in the book. 

AS: That is true. And, using that idea, that trauma can become a generative energy, that it can be spun into something else, I always have the hope that Ory will come back to see me at some later point. When you work with children, sometimes they come to see you in adulthood, to process earlier moments or to continue the work. I do not know what this experience with me meant to him. I still wish I had waited, and I regret I didn’t. Still, I am curious about what this very sturdy child may have spun out of his experience with me. 

AP: I'm thinking about theory-making, not the auto-theorization we were talking about earlier, but theory-making as in the making of this book. So, there was this case that Avgi came to describe as a “failure,” though we do not know what Ory may have done with it… One of the things that Avgi did with that failure is she has been thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it. She wrote this case presentation, which then became the basis for our theoretical work that is in this book. In other words, this book’s theory-making also came out of disappointment or failure for us. 

And the book in its entirety was a response to our own traumatic experience in another way, too. Avgi and I together worked on a paper around Ory’s case, which won a prestigious prize in 2021, the Tiresias Award, given by the International Psychoanalytical Association. It was the first time they had given a prize recognizing work in gender and sexual diversity, which shows us how out-of-touch psychoanalysis still is. The award came with the possibility of publication in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the oldest journal in the field, founded by Freud himself. We submitted the paper, and it was accepted. We were given revisions, we went through edits. A year later, we handed in what we thought was the last version. We added acknowledgments and another section about the social context. Then suddenly, everything changed. Ultimately, the offer of publication was withdrawn because we refused to take certain sentences out of our acknowledgments. It was super draining and puzzling. There were implied legal threats. It consumed an entire summer trying to figure out what was going on. We suddenly had an article. What were we going to do with it? 

One of the things we did with it was this book. We churned this really horrible experience into something. The argument is actually better in this book because we got to extend it. But would I prefer to not have had that experience? For sure. Am I really happy with what came out of it? Even more. That would be another example of how theory-making comes out of experiences that we did not get to choose, that indeed have been miserable, even traumatic. We can do things out of that as well. 

AV: Throughout this interview, doing has been coming up a lot — how we can do things with trauma. I am also thinking about gender performativity, and its formation around doing. In my own experience being in psychoanalytic treatment, doing does not take priority when it comes to creativity. It is more about this feeling that you can create, rather than the actual creation itself. 

AP: Action is a really strange category in psychoanalysis, because there is a long tradition of psychoanalysis saying: Don't act out. Speak. Speaking is posited as not just the opposite of, but also the solution to, the problematic acting out. This has a homophobic and transphobic history, because it situates the seeking of gender transition in the domain of action, of acting out. It would also be acting out to have a homosexual relation rather than sitting with your analyst and talking about your same-sex desires so they may be resolved. Who is allowed to act and have it be seen as just what you are doing in the world? When is action troublemaking—the wrong kind of action in the wrong kind of place? 

AS: Nor are we saying in a facile way, you need not be worried about your trauma, why not just do something with it? Our call is about being more attentive to the things that subjects already do with their trauma, just like Ory was already doing something with the blend of anti-semitism, patriarchy, and his mother's intergenerational trauma. The generativity of trauma is something that psychoanalysis has not had a lot of tolerance to think with, especially when it produces something that is non-normative; psychoanalysis has struggled to think about how trauma may be woven into our understanding of ourselves. 

In the clinic, too, such connections between trauma and queerness, for example, can make someone feel very ashamed, as if “good gender” is a some stand-alone, pure thing, unalloyed by experience. This is what the ideology of a core gender identity, and of gender as true and authentic to the self, produce. I have sat in the consulting room with many patients who worry that if a sexual violation has had something to do with their gender and sexuality, that makes their gender untrue or makes their sexuality into a symptom. So in talking about traumatophilia, we are speaking to clinicians, but also want to intervene in wider conversations, to offer more expansive and more complex tools with which to think about how gender acquires its experiential texture. We do not need to be weighed down by imagining we owe fidelity to some fictional, authentic gender that is innate and untouched by culture, experience, or trauma. Letting go of this imperative to be “true” or “authentic” may actually enable people to be in their genders with more pleasure and more joy, not having to protect or validate them all the time. There is nothing true or untrue, right or wrong about anyone’s gender: gender just is. 

AP: To go back to our notion of queer agency in the context of trauma, to suggest that trauma may have contributed to your gender and sexuality does not mean it is something that just “happened” to you, turning you into a passive subject. To be sure, these are materials that you did not choose, but you have done something with after the fact. This is a different way of talking about development. We are trying to offer an account of how gender is acquired or develops over time without this tipping into developmentalism. Developmentalism has a telos, the homotransphobic form of which is that it is always already unfolding into heterosexual cisgender. So, let’s get this person back on the straight track! What we have had so far for those who want to affirm queerness and transness – and to do so in developmental terms — is to say that this process of change over time is always already unfolding into the truth of this person being queer, the truth of this person being trans. This developmental path may not be straight, but it is still straightforward, in the sense of being linear and unidirectional. 

In the end (and telos means the end), the end is founded in the beginning. It was always already there in the subject, just waiting to spring to life. But we are trying to think about the development of gender and sexuality over time, with multiple determinants and multiple possible destinations. These multiple determinants mean that things could be assembled in different ways by different people. Moreover, things could be assembled in different ways by the same person across their lifetime. It is a different way to think about causality. It is not the causality of if A then B. It is the contingencies of how someone becomes. 

AS: If you subscribe to this understanding of gender as an acquisition, then you have to let go of the notion of prediction. You step off the self-righteous perch of granting gender-related services, for example, by ascertaining someone’s “true” gender. What we are proposing involves signing up for a version of gender that cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed: there are no protocols by which you decide that one’s gender is right or wrong. You are opening yourself up to something that could be constantly shifting. 

As human beings, we like stability and we like to keep things settled and set in place. But the more you commit to things in yourself being set, the tighter you are wound to think this way, the more you become stalled. And, in fact, it is that very “stalling” that comes under pressure for some cis people in their encounters with trans subjects: for some cis people that encounter reveals to you your own constriction, and a lot of anxiety can be generated by that. We oftentimes see that anxiety being psychically managed in problematic ways: the disturbance to one’s own self-stability that can arise in the encounter with a trans body can defensively morph into a cis person doubling down and trying to control the other — their gender, their expression, their access, their rights. That is where hatred comes in and how we see these increasingly restrictive policies on the legislative level recently. 

AV: Letting go of stability and certainty is a lifelong project and does not happen overnight. 

AS: Absolutely. 

AV: This idea of gender being allocentric is so radical, though. It makes so much sense for me thinking through the Vietnamese language, which makes it impossible to conceptualize gender through the lens of self-affirmation. With English, you can make the claim, I am this, my pronoun is that. Whereas in Vietnamese, pronouns are always contextual and relational—in relation to age, to gender, to the formality of the relationship. It speaks to this moment in the book where you say that gender is not a private language; it always implicates us with others. 

AP: What you are describing — gender as relational — just makes so much sense. How do different linguistic possibilities shape gender possibilities? Even the protocol of my pronoun is… gets caught up in the notion of gender as private property that I am safeguarding. If you misgender me, you have somehow stolen something from me. I am not talking about people actively and consciously disrespecting someone’s gender pronouns; that is not okay. I am talking about the ways in which we might misrecognize someone in everyday life, not because we are being callous or disrespectful. What does it mean to believe you can go through the world and think you are never going to be misrecognized, not just with respect to gender? What congeals around gender such that we think we can commandeer the world? Is there something colonial about the ways in which we think we can grasp a gender and assert our claims over it? Kadji Amin says some really interesting things about that in a fascinating 2022 article, “We Are All Nonbinary: A Brief History of Accidents.” I both will respect the protocols whereby someone wants to tell me their preferred gender pronouns, and also – with my Foucault hat on! – wonder about the cultural context within which such statements are meaningfully made. 

AS: Talking about cultural context, I am thinking of how people do not know how to pronounce my name. A lot of well-meaning American interlocutors very kindly ask me, how do I say your name? Did I say it right? And when they don’t, but I want to get it right, tell me again, and I know comes from a place of wanting to be respectful. But if you do not grow up speaking Greek or Cypriot, you are just not going to be able to pronounce the “g” in Avgi in the right way. That inability, to me, is okay, wanting to make the effort and failing still. I do not expect to be addressed in the precisely minute version of what speaks to me. That is different from people who make no effort or who ask me if they can call me something else because they can’t pronounce my name.

What I am trying to speak to is that there is an irreducible gap between us as human beings that cannot be closed. It cannot be closed by respect or good intention; it will always overcome us. The question is how to relate to each other around that gap. And how to do so without without trying to level difference, but by bearing the differences between us I know I do not say everybody's name right; however much I try, there are enunciations that my mouth cannot produce. Recognition and affirmation have nowadays become mandates that exert their own violences, which is not to minimize the violence of purposeful misrecognition, where somebody purposefully misgenders a person – as if they are marking the other person’s “deception,” which is not “tricking” them. There is a fundamental, unclosable gap between subjects: it is a matter of ethics to respect that gap, to accord it the dignity of its existence without trying to eliminate it, as the rhetorics of recognition and affirmation falsely imagine is possible. 

AP: I want to draw on something Judith Butler argued in an early essay (“Imitation and Gender Insubordination”) about what it means to come out of the closet and disclose one is a lesbian. Butler wanted to highlight the opacity of such a claim: you come out of the closet only to enter another one. Before you did not know I am one (a lesbian), they write, but after you do not know what I mean by lesbian. We could put this insight to work to think about third-person singular uses of the pronoun “they.” Let's say you get the pronoun “they” right of someone who is non- binary. But that does not mean that you know what that person means by it or how it resonates for them. Nor, and this is Butler’s further point, does the person who uses “they” themselves understand fully what that pronoun means and does for them. It is in excess of their own self-understanding. The “I” is also opaque to itself. That is one of the things that psychoanalysis teaches us. There is always a gap between subjects no matter how hard we try. And there is a gap inside subjects, too—the splitting in ourselves. 

AS: I am thinking of what you were saying about Vietnamese pronouns. I have heard well-meaning liberals, when confronted with such linguistic differences, responding to this difference by treating it appropriatively. I think of a Western’s subject seemingly open-minded response to such linguistic richness and can imagine someone asking if it might not be better if American English adopts the same linguistic conventions. This is the sort of thing I feel impatient about—about subjects who relate to difference by wanting to have it all, to appropriate, to own everything, you want your hands on everything. What about sitting with the delight that is difference and becoming curious about what it illuminates about you?