by Tobias Wiggins
in The Global Anti-Gender Studies Dictionary

This entry traces the origins, evolution, and political uses of autogynephilia, showing how a pseudo-scientific concept has been mobilized to pathologize and delegitimize transgender women. It examines Blanchard’s typology, its uptake in gender-critical discourse, and the empirical evidence that refutes it. The piece situates autogynephilia within broader anti-gender rhetoric and transmisogynistic epistemologies.

by Tobias Wiggins, Jess A. Joseph, Tavi Bishop
in Studies in Gender and Sexuality

This article introduces a special issue on trans lives within psychoanalysis, theorizing two interlinked concepts: transpectres, the caricatured figures that haunt and produce gendered life; and cisteria, a defensive formation that organizes contemporary anti-trans panics. Drawing on histories of hysteria within and beyond psychoanalysis, it relocates pathology away from trans subjectivity, toward ciscentric psychology and its associated structures of power. The analysis traces how state security regimes—such as the trope of the “trans terrorist” as “Nihilistic Violent Extremist”—consolidate authoritarian control while generating lethal conditions for trans life. The authors develop “threat psychoanalysis” as a trans method, reading cisteria across intrapsychic, relational, and sociopolitical registers while refusing respectability politics or demands to prove trans innocence. The article concludes by introducing the special issue’s contributors, whose clinical, theoretical, and creative interventions co-imagine a shared transpsychoanalytic experiment in play, feeling, critique, and shared world-making.

by Tobias Wiggins
in Studies in Gender and Sexuality

This poem, written from the position of the analysand, stages the analytic encounter as a site reshaped by queer and trans embodiment, discourse, and erotics. Through an intimate and fragmentary address, it explores the porous boundary of the transference, its ambivalent mixture of love and aggression, and the ruptures unique to subjects who arrive already misrecognized. In this way, “Transformative Cuntertransference” moves through the quotidian afterwardness that structures the analytic situation, yet inflects it differently when the trans/sexual enters the frame.

by Tobias Wiggins
in The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond

To “gird your loins” is a common idiom with a comical edge, a metonymic and thus anticipatory expression. It is both a gendered and sexed declaration, meant to warn of upcoming difficulty or strenuous undertaking. In this chapter, I explore the institution of clinical psychoanalysis and its resolute loingirding against transgender people, despite some of its most fundamentally queer and gender nonconforming premises. In so doing, I contribute to a growing body of scholarship that challenges psychoanalysis’ fundamentally destructive quotidian clinical transphobia. In particular, I address the under-considered issue of transgender people’s systemic exclusion from the status of “psychoanalyst.” The institution’s girding against trans subjects has, thus far, been primarily disputed by cisgender psychoanalysts. Their efforts have been instrumental in a setting where it has been otherwise impossible for transgender people to be heard. However, as these disruptions of long-worn norms begin to take hold and rouse change, the most rudimentary move of meaningful professional inclusion has simply not taken place. As Wark (2023) writes her call for reparations: “Dear Psychoanalysts, I’m going to assume nearly all of you are cis, even though you may have trans patients. There are so few trans analysts. And why is that?” This talk provides an overview of the state of the profession, charting the lasting effects of a shared psychoanalytic cis-tuation, highlighting how trans-led interventions are restricted, peripheralized, or split-off as “not really psychoanalytic.” Ultimately, I argue that transgender people’s biggest asset is their still unfaltering irreconcilability with clinical psychoanalysis in its present form.

by Tobias Wiggins
in Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse People

As the previously sanctioned pathologization of gender non-conforming identities is rapidly challenged within medical models, many transgender people are newly seeking out affirming mental health care. In turn, guidelines for trans competent psychotherapeutic practice are being developed to help practitioners best respect client self-determination, to better understand the multi-facets of gender identity, and to identify challenges to effective treatment. Yet many of these resources have overlooked the identification and management of what emerging scholarship has called transphobic countertransference (TCT), referring to the ways in which a clinician’s unconscious prejudice can be felt, and potentially acted out, within the consulting room. This chapter normalizes two underdiscussed elements of clinical work with 2TNG populations: first, the undeniable presence of transphobia within the consulting room; and relatedly, the impact and uses of TCT in psychotherapy of any orientation. Clinical transphobia is framed here as an “unresolved issue” that gains utility only through its identification. Borrowing from Hansbury’s (2017) foundation, I define psychotic TCT as a set of infantile affective distortions, and contribute two additional common forms of TCT to this conceptualization: perverse TCT, relating to the internalized law and omnipotence of diagnosis; and neurotic TCT, in which the clinician’s previously held gendered meanings and social learning materialize. Ultimately, this investigation aims to help cisgender therapists better recognize their own distinct and heterogeneous reactions to 2TNG gender difference in the consulting room and, further, to curtail potential enactments.

by Tobias Wiggins
in Studies in Gender and Sexuality

This article borrows from the lessons of dystopic science fiction to analyze fantasies that surround gender variance and perversion in the psychoanalytic clinic. Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is used to substrate Lacan’s formations of perversion and their relationship to the paradoxical nature of desire. Lacan’s idiosyncratic handling of perversion formulates an essential truth about the problematic nature of human desiring, a problem that must be creatively mitigated. This article postulates that quotidian difficulties of desire manifest symptomatically in psychoanalytic and psychiatric work with transgender patients through clinical expressions of transphobia. These claims are illustrated with a close reading of a 1948 clinical case study with a transgender analysand. The case pays special attention to the patient’s pencil drawing, produced while in treatment, which visually represents their gender.

By Tobias Wiggins
in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community, L. Erickson-Schroth (Ed.)

Sidebar essay on perversion for the this iconic resource guide for transgender, nonbinary, and gender expansive people.

by Tobias Wiggins
in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child

Keira Bell’s case against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust challenged the notion that children can consent to certain forms of gender-affirming care, and the subsequent trial has sparked global effects. This paper considers the unconscious fantasies and anxieties that surround both this trail and trans childhood more broadly. Although psychic phenomenon, the normalized defenses of adults continue to inform policy, healthcare, and have a significant impact on the materiality of trans lives. Drawing from Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, I argue that gender non-conforming children become an extension of their caregiver’s subjectivity and provide a unique container for adult’s projected, unbearable thoughts and feelings. In particular, Young-Bruehl’s use of three Freudian personality structures is helpful for tracing symptomatic expressions of childism and conceptualizing the different unconscious motivational forces behind otherwise disparate, public discourses of concern for the child’s wellbeing.

by Oren Gozlan, Jordan Osserman, Laurel Silber, Hannah Wallerstein, Eve Watson & Tobias Wiggins
in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child

In March 2021, Hannah Wallerstein and Jordan Osserman facilitated a live dialogue over Zoom on the subject of transgender young people, with four psychoanalytic clinicians and thinkers. The conversation draws on short essays submitted in this section of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child as a springboard for discussion. It has been transcribed and edited for length and clarity, and is reproduced here. Questions explored include the differences surrounding gender identity in childhood versus adulthood, the use of medical interventions for children experiencing gender dysphoria, the tension between psychoanalytic neutrality and affirmation, and the ethical stakes of working in this field.

by Tobias B. D. Wiggins and Erik Woodams
in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

Transgender peer-­ to-­ peer support groups can provide an invaluable space for healing by fostering collective knowledge, resource sharing, and supportive self-determination. Historically, transgender people have facilitated these grassroots mental health and gender transition supports within their communities, picking up the slack where providers and healthcare systems have either fallen short, or worse, have actively sought to bar access. Peer models emerge from these community-­ based movements but have also started to become more formally integrated into some state-­ funded models of healthcare. The following article investigates the impacts of clinical work conducted in institutionally funded, peer-­ to-­ peer transgender mental health support groups through a narrative-­ driven conversation between the authors: a transgender service provider and a transgender service user. Drawing on our shared experience, we discuss the benefits and shortcomings of this innovative, yet delegitimized form of healthcare provision for transgender people.

by Tobias Wiggins
in Transgender Studies Quarterly

Transgender people have long been associated with sexual perversion. For example, many early versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) infamously categorized any gender variance as sexual deviance or paraphilia. This article therefore investigates the taxonomical movement away from the transgender subject as perverse toward the current diagnosis of gender dysphoria, which instead consolidates the transgender subject as distressed and suffering. Through an unconventional use of psychoanalytic theories of perversion, I argue that DSM-5’s new diagnosis criteria work defensively, functioning as an antidote to the clinician's anxiety in the face of difference. When separated from stereotypical acts and identities, perversion proves to be quite valuable in understanding clinical transphobia. In particular, Freud's writings on fetishism and disavowal reveal some of the unconscious roles at play in the repeated medicalization of trans people and the restricting of transition-related resources. Through the donning of a fetish object, disavowal acts to ignore an upsetting reality while the traumatic truth remains intact. An analysis of Chase Joynt's video installation, Resisterectomy, provides grounded narratives of gendered surgery and illness that disrupt anticipated affects, temporalities, and curative measures.

by Tobias Wiggins
in Sex, Sexuality, and Trans Identities: Clinical Guidance for Psychotherapists and Counselors

This chapter examines how transgender people have been historically positioned “next to” sexual perversion in psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and cultural taxonomies, and how these proximities continue to shape contemporary transphobic fantasies. Bringing psychoanalytic theories of perversion into dialogue with trans studies, the chapter interrogates the lingering pathologization of trans/sexuality. It concludes with an analysis of Skyler Braeden Fox’s pornographic film Hello Titty!, showing how community-based artwork re-narrates desire, mourning, and the pleasures of corporeal transformation.

by Tobias Wiggins
in Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings

This chapter explores the viral affect of Chris Crocker’s “Leave Britney Alone!” within Killjoy’s Kastle, examining how queer emotional excess circulates as both ridicule and collective attachment. Through affect theory and feminist hauntology, it considers how contagious feelings move between bodies in the installation. In the Kastle, Crocker’s presence enables a shared moment of queer grief, fear, and political possibility.

by Tobias Wiggins
in Transgender Studies Quarterly

This chapter uses psychoanalytic notions of inheritance to read Vivek Shraya’s I want to kill myself, tracing how trauma, desire, and “wrongness” become passed down through marginalized lives. It examines the film’s exploration of racialized, queer, and trans mental health, where familial and sociopolitical legacies shape suicidal feeling. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Shraya’s work reveals inheritance as both burden and resource, opening a novel space for survival.