There May Be Another Way to Read This Story: An Autotheoretical Account of Transition, Detransition, and Retransition

From a first-person narrative describing transition, detransition, and retransition, I describe my experience with gender and sexuality. In providing these experiences, I implement the feminist methodology of autotheory. This methodology uses personal experience through narrative and poetry as a mode for theory production and a device to critically examine oppression. As a psychoanalytic model of inquiry, this methodology has not been used for investigating transgender experience. The experience of gender transition is rarely described in the first person in psychoanalytic literature. This lack within the psychoanalytic field has resulted in psychoanalytic representations of transition that negatively impact transgender people. My experience covers an elaboration of both problematic conceptions of gender and sexuality within psychoanalysis, the difficulties associated with trans-exclusionary radical feminism, and coming to terms with gender and sexuality through queer activism. Implementing this narrative form, I speak back to psychoanalysis via an autotheoretical feminism purposed for relational psychoanalytic thought. In conclusion, I provide a means to grasp trans experience through psychoanalytic formulation. I propose the processes of gendered experience are relational and malleable within communities; embodied through systems of violence and oppression; and personal-political experiences.