How Lacanians Shaped My View on the Transgender Bathroom Issue
It’s about doors and what lies beyond them
The weirdest university course that I took during my second master’s degree was Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. The course was taught by a devoted follower of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Typical of English postgraduate courses, the mark (grade) for the entire course was one final term paper. That paper and a remark to it from the instructor planted an idea that I think of often when the subject of transgender bathroom use comes up.
A Brief Decent into the Lacanian Underworld
First, to help make sense of what I’m talking about, I need to give a brief explanation of Lacan’s theory of language and meaning. It’s pretty dense dren, so bear with me and forgive me.
Lacan was an avid devotee of Sigmund Freud. Lacan attempted to blend what he regarded as Freud’s original theories with structuralism — the methodology that we can understand phenomena by identifying the structures that determine them. Within Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, that means that the human unconscious is structured by chains of repressed signifiers, and all human thought and actions proceed from this structure we can’t control.
