Beyond binary What can be learned from trans* and inter* people about gender

In this article the author takes the transgender controversy as an opportunity to examine and question psychoanalytic conceptions of gender and gender identity more closely. These conceptions function as the analyst's implicit theories, generating more or less conscious and elaborate notions of masculinity and femininity that feed into and determine the analytic process. Using Freud's model of a "constitutional bisexuality " it can be shown that body sex ( "sex ") is a construction that is nowadays widely accepted just like the concept of gender. Biological sex is itself composed of various factors, each of which can be regarded as "male " or "female ". In their diversity, however, they are not exclusively "male " or "female " but have a wide variety of mixture ratios. Body sex is therefore both "male " and "female ". A binary demarcation, on the other hand, appears to be a problematic reduction, and a definition of identity also follows social expectations rather than psychological requirements.