Avgi Saketopoulou ✦ Against Transantagonism: Towards a Metapsychology for the Flourishing of Trans Children

In this presentation, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou urges psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed clinicians to let the debate about the validity of trans children take its place in the fossil record of analytic history. It is time, she suggests, to move beyond transantagonism: rather than sparring with colleagues who see trans existence as cause for alarm, we need to be working on developing the psychoanalytic theories we need and do not yet have to work towards the flourishing of trans and queer children. Let us refuse, once and for all, the philanthropy of being “inclusive,” delving, instead, into the difficult task of seeing what pressures trans children and adults put on existing thinking about gender. Starting with the premise that trans children deserve no less than a psychoanalysis that wants their transness and which does not treat their genders as undesirable or inauthentic requires our field to endure the twisting and re-making of our metapsychology’s very foundations. At stake is a psychoanalysis that is responsible and response-able to queer life.

With clinical material, Dr. Saketopoulou will address what stands in the way of a psychoanalysis that works towards the flourishing of trans and queer children, taking on key concepts in child analysis. She will explain why the notion of core gender identity nests a ticking time bomb into the clinical process and why we need to relinquish our attachment to it; how we may reflect on gender not through the rubric of identity but under the aegis of contingency; why thinking about trauma as constitutive of some queer and some trans experience does not have to necessarily capsize into homotransphobia or conversion; how the demand for coherence and continuity overlooks the workings of important heteroclite psychic processes; and how we may think developmentally without collapsing into developmentalism. The implications of this presentation extend far beyond the particularities of trans and queer childhoods, and gesture towards renewed foundations for child psychoanalysis overall.

Originally from Cyprus and Greece, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou (she/her) is a psychoanalyst living and practicing in NYC. She is on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program and her scholarship has received numerous prizes including APsA's Ralph Roughton Award, the Symonds Prize from SGS, and the Ruth Stein Prize from her home institute. She is twice the recipient of the annual JAPA essay prize (in 2014 for her paper on her work with a trans girl, and in 2023) and her interview on psychoanalysis is in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum (Vienna).

Her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) puts psychoanalysis in contact with performance studies, philosophy, and queer of color critique to explore the vicissitudes of overwhelm and repetition. She is co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity (UIT Press, 2023), which includes a re-worked version of the essay for which the two authors received the International Psychoanalytical Association’s First Tiresias Prize. In critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the wake of Jean Laplanche, Saketopoulou is currently working on her next book project provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism. Her love of queers and trans people is rivaled only by her love of motorcycles. She detests transphobes-even the gay ones.

✦ This event is a fundraiser. 100% of tickets and donation proceeds will be directed to The Trevor Project, a nationally recognized organization that provides suicide prevention, advocacy, public education, and community for LGBTQ+ youth. ✦