If from Lacan we have learned that the unconscious is structured like a language, from Derrida (1998) we have learned that we always speak one language, the language of the other. Being in analysis is a continuous and ineffable translation. An attempt to invite the other who listens to understand us, or to elude them. An attempt, even if through resistance, to connect. And, with Derrida, we also learn that it is in the impossibility of translation that its exercise is justified. It is impossible to translate, but one can only communicate in translation. This does not mean that language is merely a representation of reality – to assert this implies a belief in an unattainable Real; to deny it suggests that the Real and language are so intertwined that, if the former does indeed exist, we could never distinguish it from the latter. However, recognizing in psychoanalysis that there is no ‘absolute’ reality behind our discursive elaborations does not exempt psychoanalysis from relying on its own fundamental certainties – in other words, on what Wittgenstein, in On Certainty, refers to as hinges. What distinguishes hinges from other beliefs is that any attempt to question them is seen as absurdity, madness, or irrationality.

As an example, Wittgenstein (OC, 244) raises the matter of the body. The statement “I have a body” is nonsense: in order to make it, one must first have a body. In general, we do not announce that we have a body to then say anything further. Having a body is simply taken as self-evident, a starting point. The same applies to gender: when we introduce ourselves socially, it is not necessary to state whether we are male or female. Gender is assigned, even if erroneously, without the person needing to say anything, and through gender assignment a person is humanized or dehumanized. Assigning gender to a body, something that Brazilian transfeminist Viviane Vergueiro (2015) understands as a pre-discursive endeavor, is the exercise of a hinge, of a certainty about what a man is and what a woman is; a hinge rooted in the same “truth” of the sexes upon which psychoanalytic tradition has built its theories.

Based on our experiences as transmasculine analysands and analysts in Rio de Janeiro, we reflect on some questions that have crossed our minds in the midst of our practice and training processes. Far from attempting to criticize the supposed “truth” of the sexes or psychoanalytic conservatism –we know, as Carlos Padrón (2025, 9) wrote, that “Psychoanalysis has not been innocent. It has its own history of claims to socio-political neutrality in both its theory and practice.” –, we are interested in contemplating the absence, or perhaps the excess, of unspoken, but not non-existent, issues regarding transmasculine experiences, which can render a clinical practice for transmasculinities[1] violent. The frequently emerging controversy about Black analysands choosing Black analysts, women choosing women analysts, transmasculine individuals choosing transmasculine analysts, comes into question here.

It is common to hear colleagues complain about this choice made by their analysands, some of whom give up analysis due to their desire to undergo psychotherapy with an analyst who shares similar socio-cultural backgrounds. Commonly, we notice that the desire to seek analysis elsewhere is seen by former analysts as resistance to analysis. In this essay, we intend to argue that perhaps, in some cases, resistance to analysis is, on the other hand, a resistance to racism, transphobia, and misogyny subsumed in the analyst's listening. That is, a resistance to hinges that, in our own way of listening, we fail to interrogate as analysts.

If there is no real, true, and absolute semantic field from which we derive our language, Lacan tells us that instead there are signifying chains, always in relation to each other, never isolated. Free association is like a carousel, in which one signifier pulls another, bringing it to the surface. Free association, as we know, is not in fact “free,” as it is always conditioned by an unconscious associative chain. Free association is not about establishing a logic between signifiers or “rationalizing” the analysand’s speech, but rather about allowing the unconscious to transpire through speech. If we understand the clinic as “a microcosm of society where experimental sociopolitical theories germinate and take root” (Laubender 2025, 17), then the signifiers that emerge in free association, as well as those that mark the analyst's listening, have an intrinsically sociopolitical connotation.

In sociopolitical scenarios related to transmasculinities, there is a noticeable epistemological and terminological gap, at least in Latin American contexts, and especially in the health field. This gap is highlighted in the research Mi Salud Transmasculina Importa (My Transmasculine Health Matters), conducted by transmasculine activists and researchers in a coalition between Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru, and published in 2025. This gap can even be traced in psychoanalysis, in one of the most prominent studies on transsexuality, by psychoanalyst Robert Stoller (1982), who associates transsexuality with a symbiotic unity of mother and infant –in that case, only trans women would be considered. Or even in efforts to associate transsexuality with the Schreber case, as did Laure Westphal (2015), and with the case of Corinne, as did Lacan (1976). In other words, transmasculinities, along with various other forms of gender dissidence, are disregarded, which is evident even in the most prominent cases of pathologization and transphobia, and which, nevertheless, produce no less harm on transmasculine subjectivities. In short, it is not because there are no extensive terminologies, diagnostic criteria, or case studies on transmasculinities that we do not exist in psychoanalysis. On the contrary, silence can speak volumes. It continually diverges from any aspect of incongruity.

Thus, in the psychoanalytic and sociopolitical spheres, the absence of terms that signify transmasculine experiences results in a semantic void, hindering our ability to express ourselves in contexts where that language is dominant. If we only speak one language, the language of the other, Derrida (1996, 69) points out that “this monolingualism of the other certainly has the threatening face and features of colonial hegemony”. However, to think from the perspective of absence may imply an overly normative or hegemonic stance. Absence, here, refers to the semantic framework of human language, and aligns with what Derrida (1998, 70) names phallogocentrism, a centrality in an ideal of humanity –congruent and masculine, not trans at all–, notably evident in the aforementioned hypotheses on the origins of transsexuality.

Instead of absence, we could write of a suffocating excess, an overflow of meanings that we encounter whenever we attempt to address the violence that confronts us, or our desires and embodiments. In dialogue with fellow transmasculine analysts and analysands, we realize how, in a “cisnormative clinic,” so to speak, we find ourselves in a perpetually introductory place. The effort it takes, as analysands, to describe something so deeply ingrained in our experiences becomes the focus of an analysis that shifts from the subject (trans) to the analyst (cis), or rather, to their excesses. In other words, we need to continually remove ourselves from a position in which we are initially placed, whether it be that of penis envy, or a kind of contemporary hysteria, or of a desire to fit into the archetype of the heterosexual, cisnormative man. In clinical practice, we realize that, often, the analyst’s idea of what a “man” looks like is already set in stone, long before we even begin to speak. Here, we refer to the common transmasculine experience of, for example, having to ‘come out’ to their therapist, and hearing, in response, “I would have never guessed.”

It is important to reflect on whether, to some extent, the analyst’s perception of the transmasculine analysand –in this case, a cisnormative perception –significantly shapes their clinical approach as well as their interpretation of the analysand’s words. This is what we call a veil: a not-so-thin layer that hinders our ability to translate ourselves with our language – which is always the language of the other. We are faced with a dual translation. Before translating ourselves, first we need to translate the world we live in. As if in a socio-pedagogical manner, first we must explain what happens to us when, for instance, we seek medical care, when we are disrespected here and there because of our names –or rather, of transphobia. And explain why these situations are violent. It is often requested that we educate on the significance of violence, or even on violence as significant. We must explain that the world we inhabit is not the world the analyst inhabits, even though it is. We are compelled to reveal the world, to unveil a world that is tangible to us but symbolic to the analyst.

Rather than encountering the other’s attentive listening, we encounter their excessive speech: the discourses produced about us take the form of a deluge. The exercise of analysis becomes a continuous attempt to swim to the surface seeking air, an image portrayed by Susan Stryker (1994) in her letter to Victor Frankenstein: lungs filled with water, the anguish of suffocation and the desperation that pushes us to the surface, but when we reach the thin layer separating the sea from the surface, there is only more water. “I will die for eternity,” writes Stryker (1994, 247), in her eternal submersion. “I break the plane of water’s surface over and over and over again. This water annihilates me. I cannot be, and yet –an excruciating impossibility –I am” (Idem). The monster cannot be, and yet it is. It needs to be.

For Stryker, a trans body is a monstrous one, and to monsters is assigned a threatening excess, an excessiveness. This attribution is clearly not restricted to transmasculine experiences, especially considering that Stryker writes about her experience as a trans woman. In this field of excesses, the immigrant is portrayed as an intruder and a troublemaker; the travesti[2] is depicted as overly expressive and loud; intersex people simply cannot exist, being surgically “corrected,” sometimes weeks after birth, and without their consent; sex workers are seen as promiscuous, a threat to morality and the family; and the list goes on. In the intersection of transmasculinities, a good example of this menace is the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier (2020).

In her book, she argues that there is a transgender epidemic (craze), especially among trans men, given that those affected by the trans epidemic are children assigned female at birth. Transmasculinities, then, distort the purity of femininity. This is similar to the argument put forward by trans-exclusionary radical feminism that trans men have succumbed to patriarchy. If we associate monstrosities with transmasculinities, it is because, in a way, certain monstrous traits resonate with us, especially in relation to their resurgence, their nonconformity with a single, unilinear form, and their continuous capacity to unravel hinges.

The origins of the term are interesting: monstrare and monere, from Latin, to show and to warn. But these functions are not exercised in isolation. They always reveal something, and to someone. This perspective on ‘monsters’ is therefore human-centered; humanity is the subject of this monstrosity. The monstrosity attributed to us reveals, to Shrier’s dismay, a contagious, epidemic potential (despite the silence surrounding transmasculinities), as well as the impossibility of us being entirely contained –after all, monsters constantly reappear, as Jack Halberstam (1995, 15) wrote, “the monster is always invited in, but never asked to stay.”

Regarding gender transgressions, their association with monstrous figures was noted by Foucault (2003) in Abnormal, showing how, between the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, violations of natural law, considered characteristic of monsters, were attributed to intersex people. There was an intrinsic connection between monstrosities and criminality: the criminal was, above all else, a monster, a violator of natural rights, and who should therefore be restrained. Perhaps the most well-known attempt to justify this premise is that of Cesare Lombroso, who sought to substantiate his theory that there is a natural condition of criminality, a predisposition to delinquency. Attributing monstrous qualities to transmasculinities is ambiguous. Historically, as we have seen, it is difficult to find suitable terminology, even in the preliminary diagnostic records on trans people, which are abundant. If, on the one hand, the monster is excessive, transmasculinities, on the other hand, seem not to exist, but still pose a threat. And so we have a paradox.

We cannot forget the story of Victor Frankenstein, who created his monster with one goal in mind: to control his creation, to prove that it is possible to generate life from a collection of body parts. Similarly, transsexuality, as a diagnostic category, is created with the aim of control, of curtailing life. For Stryker (1994, 241), Victor sought only to “subject nature completely to his power.” Producing life, in this sense, means controlling it, being the master of nature, bending it to one’s will. Producing the monster means possessing it. This production does not concern the monster, but the human, who confers upon himself the status of omnipotence –possession and control over the other, over the other’s language. Similarly, we observe this purpose in the rhetoric that creates nomenclatures, classifications, institutional protocols, and definitions regarding trans individuals. It is inconceivable, in this cystem[3], that we can define the world; it is only conceivable that we are subject to the meanings assigned to us by the figure sitting across the table, examining us as if on a scale of humanity.

The creation of monsters occurs simultaneously with the creation of control mechanisms, but it is not limited to this maintenance: it also aligns with the search for a truth of the sexes, or the reiteration of a central certainty around this supposed truth. If the monster is considered excessive, perhaps we can challenge this statement and say that, although it is constructed by a restrained, white, normative, and polished image, humanity is excessive. After all, it is the human who makes the monster; it is from humanity that monstrosity transpires. When transmasculine philosopher Paul B. Preciado delivered his speech Can the monster speak? in 2019, at the 49th Conference of the École de la Cause Freudienne in Paris, the challenge of monstrosity was met with untimely and conservative reactions. “The prospect of a monster with a life and will of its own is a principal source of horror for Frankenstein,” thinks Stryker (1994, 241), as is the idea of a trans person who disagrees with medical assertions about themselves, who opposes its fantasies from which their image is constructed by the human gaze.

But psychoanalysis itself has long resisted psychoanalytic conservatism. Carolyn Laubender (2024), in The Political Clinic, exposes the efforts of psychoanalysts in Europe and the Americas to oppose a supposed neutrality of the clinic –including in relation to the authoritarian political regimes that emerged in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s – and to defend the political implication of psychoanalysis, understanding it as a powerful political instrument. There seems to be, in this effort, a recognition that if the monster appears in the clinic, so too does the human, albeit as a specter or a semblant. And if the monster is a human creation, then the human, who intends to listen to it as such, does nothing more than listen to his own creation.

At this point, it would be tempting to suggest a Frankensteinian clinical practice, traced by human fragments that transmute into a monstrous figure. However, doing so would merely reiterate a name that we recognize well and excessively, the Name-of-the-Father. In this case, the name of Victor Frankenstein, whose creature only spoke the name of its creator, Victor, the name-of-the-Law. In other words, the only name that fit in its mouth, that forged the movements of its tongue, was the name of the one who sewed it up.

Here is something Preciado conveyed during his speech. Comparing himself to the Kafkaesque character Red Peter (Rotpeter), Preciado explains that the monster bears the mark of humanity. Red Peter, an ape, is captured by humans and given a name. Red Peter, because during his capture, he is wounded by a graze shot to the face. The redness of his blood led humans to choose, as his name –representing both his domestication and, as with surnames, the patriarchal lineage –precisely that which would refer to the mark of violence. Trans people face a similar challenge: to reproduce, for those who produce and reproduce diagnostic categories, precisely what they want to hear from their creation, and, at the same time, to deviate from these names that are imposed on us, which seem to drain us of any possibility of life beyond the diagnosis: monster, perverse, hysterical, pathological, anomalous.

Here, although we recognize this monstrous conception of deviance, when we refer to gender transgressions as monstrous, it is not the monster constructed by the human gaze that we turn to. Rather, we refer to the poem I, Monster Mine (2021), by sudaca trans poet Susy Shock (2021), in which she claims her right to be a monster, decentralizing the human from her narrative; and to the notion of “monstransity,” by Brazilian poet and scholar Abigail Campos Leal (2021, 63), who “does not ask for permission, does not demand recognition, she just asserts herself.” In other words, our writing is of monsters who, in a way, follow a different direction from that traced by Preciado’s monster; it is of monsters whose narratives address neither the human nor their profound chain of absences.

Perhaps we could speak not of a clinic of absences, but rather of a clinic of excesses. After all, “the refusal to employ a proper name is, still, a practice of naming” (Laubender 2024, 2). Names are excessively present. In relation to transmasculinities, although we face a profound terminological absence, we are faced with an overflow of names to signify us.  From associating transsexuality with psychosis, perversion, and penis envy, hypotheses about the origin of deviance abound. It seems that humanity is constantly questioning the origin of monsters, forgetful that its origin lies in their own roots.

It is common, when we highlight this scenario, to hear that pathologization, today, in psychoanalysis, is an exception, or a matter of the past. It is worth recalling a 2017 paper published in the Latin American Journal of Fundamental Psychopathology, entitled A epidemia transexual: histeria na era da ciência e da globalização? (“The Transsexual Epidemic: Hysteria in the Age of Science and Globalization?”). In this paper, authors Jorge and Travassos (2017, 318) write that “New forms of hysteria are emerging today, but perhaps the most frequent of these is transsexuality, which has invaded medical practice [...]”. Although with the supposedly good intention of questioning the ‘truth of the sexes’ through an association of transsexuality with hysteria, it is striking that this association follows in the footsteps of a psychoanalytic conservatism that cannot escape the veil of cisnormativity.

Perhaps, between one signifier and another, we find the bonds of normativity, and it is beyond these bonds, and beyond the limits of its vocabulary, that we can find the multiple and diverse experiences of transmasculinities. Our excessiveness, so threatening to cisnormativity, contrasts with the excess of this same normativity in our lives. Considering the political nature of clinical practice, we understand that not only does the analysand’s speech contain political content to be analyzed, but that the analyst’s listening also has its political content. In our dialogues with other transmasculine individuals, we identified a discontentment with feeling compelled, in their experiences of analysis, to continually explain the processes of violence to which they are subjected, almost as if to justify that violence exists, that it does not result from penis envy, or from a symbiotic relationship with the mother, or anything of that nature. This is not to say that all problems are external rather than internal, but that there may not be such a clear dissociation between public and ‘domestic’ spheres in clinical practice.

As Laubender (2024, 20) explains, “every act of analytic interpretation that parses the psychic from the social, delimiting the supposed proper object of psychoanalytic work, entails a political calculus,” and this delimitation of the “object of psychoanalytic work” contains its own hinges. Although, at a first glance, every conception of monstrosity is a human conception, Stryker (1994, 240) invites us to appropriate monstrosity, just as the words queer, marika, bixa, crip, freak, and so many others have been appropriated by gender-sex-dissident people, people with disabilities, and people with body modifications. “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” she writes. Whether it be Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who threw bricks at the New York police during the Stonewall riots; or Brenda Lee, who challenged the State’s negligence by founding the Palácio das Princesas (Palace of Princesses) in São Paulo in the 1980s, strengthening community ties through hospitality and becoming an exponent of harm reduction in Brazil; whether dissolving the veil of the clinic, as Paul B. Preciado did in his speech Can the monster speak?, different incarnations of the monster take different forms and come from different places, but they all resurface, reinvent themselves, appropriate language –always the language of the other– and distort it. No hinge is immune to the monsters that inhabit it. Let us question the hinges of psychoanalytic praxis.

Perhaps what we find in a “cisnormative practice” is an overly human ear for monstrous speech; perhaps what we need is a monstrous ear. If humans produce the excesses of monsters, one possible idea for a monstrous ear might be to listen to the excesses in humans. May we examine our pursuit of origins and reflect on what motivates us to engage in it. Our excesses must be revealed, named, and ultimately brought into our analysis. Perhaps, as analysts, before listening to the words of the analysand, or even as we listen, we could also listen to our own gaze, to what comes to mind when we wonder what a “man” looks like, what that means to us, and where it takes us. We can reflect on our own genders, and question where they came from and where they are headed. If a monster, from a monstrous perspective, is that which is in constant transformation, which does not end within itself, a monstrous ear is one that transforms, that does not rest on the hinges to which it has become attached. For us, this is the meaning of being in constant learning in psychoanalysis. Perhaps we could see that, beyond the overly human monster evoked by Preciado –which, even so, generated considerable repercussions –there are monsters that, as Abigail Campos Leal wrote, do not request permission, do not claim legitimacy. That said, we may wonder: How can we monstrosify the treatment, rather than treat the monster?

Footnotes

[1] By the term “transmasculinities,” we refer to trans people, usually assigned female at birth, whose gender identity leans toward the masculinity spectrum (i.e., using pronouns considered masculine, such as he/him), which may also include non-binary people (who may, i.e., use neutral pronouns, such as they/them). This does not mean that all our experiences, gender expressions, and physicalities are identical and homogeneous, nor that we cannot explore our femininity. It is important to be mindful of the plurality of transmasculinities, particularly in matters of race, class and sexuality. We use this term as an umbrella term, as it encompasses a wide range of experiences with which we relate to. There are many forms of masculinity and femininity, and identifying with the spectrum of masculinities should not be seen as something univocal.

[2] Transfeminine and Latin American gender identity.

[3] A neologism that combines cisnormativity with system.

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February 4th, 2026