Trans Childhoods and the Family Romance
Toward a new theory of trans desire
M.E. O'BrienCecilia Gentili was a tremendous force in New York City politics and in multiple communities in struggle. She had far-reaching care relations with many working-class trans women of color, aiding her chosen sisters and daughters in finding housing, medical care, and flourishing lives. After playing a leading institutional role in AIDS public policy advocacy, she led a historic policy campaign in New York State to decriminalize sex work, successfully overturning the “walking while trans law,” an anti-loitering statute that targeted and criminalized trans women of color. She was also a remarkable performer, bringing her terrific charisma to the stage in auto-analysis storytelling. Since her unexpected death on February 6, 2024, thousands of people have attended multiple memorial services, packing churches and halls with songs, screams, and speeches. I had the honor of interviewing Gentili in 2017 as part of the NYC Trans Oral History Project. She offered a rich account of growing up as a trans child in Argentina, being a sex worker, eventually going through rehab, and navigating NYC’s AIDS service organizations first as a client, then an employee, and working her way up into institutional leadership in public policy advocacy. This interview deeply transformed my own thinking about the politics and possibilities of New York City and trans life, and significantly contributed to my turn towards psychoanalysis. Gentili later incorporated some of these stories into her 2023 memoir, Faltas: letters to everyone in my hometown who isn’t my rapist, an experimental, hilarious, and painful account of childhood sexual violence and survival. This following essay is a psychoanalytic reading of her memoir and oral history, around the theme of family romance fantasies.
On a personal note, Cecilia was also concretely supportive of my move into clinical work. I last saw her on a panel where we both spoke, three days before she died. She had already given her assent to my writing this essay. At the panel, she expressed her enthusiasm to read a draft soon. She did not have the chance to do so.
I thank Parapraxis for offering to publish this essay in honor of Cecilia, despite the essay’s obvious stylistic differences from the magazine. It will appear again in a modified form in a forthcoming anthology from Routledge in Autumn 2024 entitled The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Contemporary Times, edited by Vanessa Sinclair, Elisabeth Punzi, and Myriam Sauer.
—M.E. O’Brien, February 17, 2024
Alter at a memorial for Cecilia Gentili at Judson Memorial Church, February 7, 2024. Taken by the author.
Belonging Among Aliens
Until her unexpected death in February 2024, Cecilia Gentili lived as a well-respected trans activist, consultant, and performer in New York City. Growing up as a child in Gálvez, Argentina in the 1970s, Cecilia tried to reconcile how she fit into the social world around her. Following a childhood confrontation with authority figures who insisted upon her assigned gender, she developed a fantasy that she did not originate from her parents. She recounts this story in both an oral history interview and in her published memoir: She would frequently be taken by her family to visit her grandmother in the rural countryside. The area was well-known for UFO activity. On one such drive when she was about five years old, her brother told her they were passing the area where their family first found Cecilia as a baby, abandoned and naked.[1] She recounts the scene in an oral history interview that I conducted with her:
“During the rest of the trip to my grandma’s house, I put two and two together and I thought, this is an area with a lot of UFO activities. I am a girl with a fucking dick. And I was found there? I know what happened here. I was left by mistake by a UFO, and I thought that somewhere there would be a planet where all girls could have penises like me. And for me it was kind of—I think I always found magical ways to deal with reality.”[2]
The story is one of many traces of questions of origins, adoption, and not belonging in her family throughout her published memoir. Her imagining that she belonged among aliens is an example in psychoanalytic theory of the family romance: a child’s fantasy that they don’t belong to their parents, but instead with some other, true family elsewhere. In his 1909 essay, “Family Romances,” Freud describes common forms of this fantasy, and uses his explanation of its basis to make sense of children’s changing understanding of sexual difference, biological origins, and the child’s relationship to their parents.
Various forms of family romances are common among trans children, appearing frequently in first-person accounts, oral histories, memoirs, in clinical work, and on social media. These fantasies share common themes: that there is somewhere the trans child belongs, someone who could understand and make sense of them, and some future time that they will be find acceptance. Gentili’s memoir, along with other references to the family romance gathered from the NYC Trans Oral History Project, can help illuminate how trans children grapple with the gendered demands of caregivers and the broader social order.
The family romance, for Freud and in the trans accounts here, is the child’s response to a confrontation with what Lacan terms the symbolic. Through the symbolic, Lacan theorizes a set of interconnected problematics: the subject’s relationship to and constitution through language and signifiers, paternal lineage and kinship, one’s place in a broader social order, sexual difference and castration, and much else. Through the family romance, Freud identifies and theorizes elements of the symbolic register as confronted by a child.
The family romance offers trans children a means of preserving gendered desire in the face of sexual difference as a social order. It constitutes an imaginary fantasy space through which they attempt to respond to confrontations with gender, both in relation and in opposition to the desires of others. Trans children often face difficult questions about sexual difference, lack of recognition from their parents and other authority figures, and a fraught relationship with the dictates of a gendered social order. Trans children may turn to the family romance as a fantasy to stage these conflicting desires to defend against social expectations. The family romance offers us an opportunity to think with trans children, and to theorize with them how they make sense of the impossible contradictions and fraught demands of the gendered world. Through the taking up of the family romance by trans children, we can begin to trace the vicissitudes of the subject’s iterative encounters and their incomplete psychic reconciliation with the symbolic order.
The family romance offers trans children a means of preserving gendered desire in the face of sexual difference as a social order
Trans Childhood Fantasies
Cecilia Gentili shares with many trans children in often turning to versions of the family romance. In trans narratives, a few characteristics of the family romance circulate, sometimes together, sometimes in separation: a belief that one’s own parents must be in some way false relations, a desire to escape from one’s family and life conditions, a sense that there is somewhere else to go where one’s experience would be more tolerable, and the belief that there are other kinship and familial ties or an alternative social order where one may better belong. As with Cecilia’s account, these fantasies all share a desire to escape some of the demands of this order.
Traces of the family romance frequently appear across first-person accounts by trans adults describing their childhoods and imaginative lives. Many of my trans patients report that they imagined themselves as children within their favorite video game, television world, or fictional universe from childhood books, sometimes through the fantasy subgenre of portal fiction where one is magically transported elsewhere. There a child imagines that they may find some adventure or intrigue, but more often a desired form of recognition and belonging. Others describe being magically linked to other children, families, or places elsewhere in the world, suggesting this other place was where they belonged. Popular depictions of trans childhoods include versions of family romance fantasy, such as the 1997 French-Belgian film Ma Vie in Rose, where the film’s protagonist constructs elaborate fantasy worlds to cope with parental and social opposition to her gender identification.
The New York City Trans Oral History Project (NYC TOHP) is a collection of nearly two hundred oral history interviews with trans and gender non-conforming New Yorkers, available as an online public archive. The author previously worked as a coordinator for the project. In the archive, several versions of family romance fantasies appear.
One version is the same as Gentili’s: identifying as an alien from another world. Nogga Schwartz said that beginning in first grade, when asked “Are you a boy or a girl?,” Nogga would respond: “I’m an alien from another planet. I’ve come here to observe your race. You’re failing miserably.” Hazel Katz said: “Everything is so weird and it doesn’t make sense and it feels like you’re an alien. Or, I feel like I’m an alien half the time.” Many other interviews mention childhood identification with non-human characters in popular culture.
NYC TOHP narrators often reported experiences of not belonging in their families of origin, sometimes coupled with the desire to escape, hide, disappear, or to be without family ties. Jay Toole was often raped by their father and brother, and began to hide on a grassy hill across the street from their home, where they imagined “nobody could see me.” Their first memory was sitting in a tree, realizing “no one was going to take care of me and I had to do it myself.” Genevieve Tatum always felt she was “different,” that “no matter how close I got to other people, there was always that sense of detachment.” Some narrators, like Renee Imperato, saw changing her family name as a way of disowning her family and her experience of abuse and violence from her father.
These fantasies of leaving one’s family can include imagining a place that might be more supportive. Many narrators reported childhood fantasies of escaping their family and place of origin through establishing other ties. For Dean Spade, this took the form of what he later calls the “romance myth,” the fantasy that a romantic relationship would enable him to flee the violence, alcoholism, and lack of emotional support in both his birth and foster families. He wanted “to leave, and go far away.” As a child, Bianey Garcia saw cinematic depictions of the city and imagined New York would be a place they could “become a trans woman,” unlike Mexico. Shannon Harrington similarly felt deeply limited by growing up in Arizona, and was “itching to break out. To go somewhere else to live a life.” Dean Spade’s interview was one of the few where questions of social status—a central component of Freud’s formulation—figured in childhood family romance fantasies. For Spade, it took the specific form of “social climbing,” making a concerted effort at school to obscure the poverty of his family from classmates. Spade followed their mother’s aspirations that he marry into wealth. In adolescence he abandoned this plan, but still “wanted to get out of Virginia and like, leave this world.”
Narrators also report seeking out fictional fantasy worlds as children, as providing a way into reimagining sexual and gender difference. Naomi Clark frequented a bookstore where she would read science fiction and fantasy novels for hours. At eleven years old, Clark moved to Japan and encountered the “mind-blowing” extensive themes of magical sex changes in Japanese comics, “a fucking gender swap fantasia.” Image Object “loved books,” and “read a lot of fantasy and fiction and dabbled in writing.” Pauline Park said she would “bury myself in books.” Son Kit developed an adolescent love of “fandom gay erotica” that provided Kit’s introduction to “queer anything.” JD Davids was a “voracious reader” because JD was “a pretty lonely kid.” Yanyi found life unable to sustain their interest; he “read a lot of like, fantasy novels,” imagining the fantasy book he would write. Zephyr D Merkur Herrera “discovered fantasy as a genre,” and was particularly enamored with a novel describing the copasetic relationship between the protagonist’s father and his father’s dragon companion. Lauren Simkin Burke describes the importance of reading for them as a response to the lack of agency for children:
“[Reading] was a way to experience more than you could experience in your day to day reality . . . I think that childhood is challenging. You have no power. Everyone is telling you what to do . . . I was like, biding my time until I was able to have a little more agency in my life.”
Many extended their love of fantasy fiction into creating their own fantasy worlds. Federico Jalwa would make up “imaginary stories of escaping . . . mimicking fantasy tales.” Evan would “delve into into my own fantasy world” amidst his family’s “turmoil and some trauma.” El Roy Red “really created a world for myself,” later leading to Red’s work as a writer.
Other narrators describe the moment of meeting others that they identified with, forming chosen family, or discovering a supportive queer- or trans-affirming community for the first time. Although these are not childhood fantasies, they are fulfillments of a form of the family romance, articulated as desires to find positive alternative kinship relations. Paris Milane described a friend she lived with after leaving her family as her “real sister.” Genevieve Tatum found in a queer neighborhood that “you’re just one big, happy family.” These new relations, however, often fell short of the desired fantasy. J Soto referred to his “chosen family”, but said that they were never a “replacement for blood relatives.” In describing the extensive mutual aid relations of New York’s Kiki ballroom scene, Gia Love said, “it’s like the family aspect. You know? I’m providing people with a space” because “some people don’t have family . . . New York is the escape.” In the ballroom scene Love describes in depth, trans and queer youth of color identify their relationships with each other with familial titles: “house mother,” “house father,” “house sister.” Love’s interview emphasizes that these chosen families can become fraught sites of conflict, as participants repeat their childhood traumas.
For some narrators, the family romance is wrapped up in the actual reality of being adopted, living in the foster care system, or otherwise under the family policing system. Trans children are disproportionately overrepresented in the foster care system. For NYC TOHP narrators, actual separation from their families of origin intensify and complicate family romance desires. Dean Spade connected his desire to flee the world to the violence of both his birth family and multiple foster parents. For him to leave Virginia depended both on and was complicated by the survivor’s benefits available to him through lacking a legal guardian. Pauline Park was born in Korea but was adopted by a white American family. She spoke of the challenges of her group of all-non-white siblings growing up in an “all-white Southside of Milwaukee” to a “Christian fundamentalist family.” Knowing that she was adopted and being racially out of place became tied up in a complex way to Park’s cross-gender identification.
This interviews from NYC TOHP include narrators with widely varying experiences of trans childhoods. Some, like Cecilia Gentili, share an experience often over-documented in writing about trans children: identifying strongly with their chosen gender from an early age, sharing that gender identification with caregivers and facing considerable opposition, and eventually moving to find a more supportive queer and trans community. However, elements of the family romance are also articulated by trans narrators who did not have any defined clarity on their gender as children and instead came to understand themselves in their chosen gender much later in life. Some elements of the family romance are also articulated by narrators with comparatively supportive parents, or those who had the chance to encounter queer or trans people relatively early in life.
Shannon Fawkes reported that similar family romance stories were widespread among the trans youth they work with. Fawkes is a Midwest radical trans activist who ran a support group for trans and gender non-conforming youth for twelve years in Northwest Ohio. In a interview I conducted with Fawkes on the topic, they reported that trans youth frequently believed themselves to be one of a broad range of non-human creatures: fairies, mutants, aliens, and human/animal hybrids . The youth drew from popular culture for their fantasies, and varied from apparently sincerely believing these fantasies to seeing them as only a fictional identity for gaming and role-playing. In the queer youth group that Fawkes ran, these children could find peers who joined in their fantasies of belonging elsewhere and of having non-human traits in their bodies and souls. Fawkes described that as the youth found more social acceptance and support from peers, parents, and authority figures for the gender identity, they would often move away from their fantasies of non-human belonging. The fantasies served as a transitional support when belonging was not easy to find.
Trans people imagining that they belong among non-humans is not limited to childhood. Trans studies scholar Abram J. Lewis has documented extensive references to alien kinship by trans activists in the gay liberation era of the early 1970s, themes reappearing frequently in the later work of trans artists. Angela Keyes Douglas, founder of the Transsexual Action Organization (TAO) in 1970, frequently referred to UFOs and extra-terrestrials. She said TAO would “welcome extraterrestrials as liberators,” and practically “protect and assist extraterrestrials” upon their arrival . Douglas began to be interested in UFOs as an adolescent. She wrote in her memoir: "Sex and UFOs came into my life about the same time. My feelings about sex were ones of shock and disbelief.” Douglas was deeply moved to discover that one of her closest friends was a “reptilian, transsexual ET,” and was confident that otherworldly forces were operating to aid the cause of trans rights. Trans philanthropist and activist Eric Erickson actively funded research to communicate with dolphins, and declared his pet leopard as a life partner. While often dismissed (not without warrant) as psychosis or eccentricity, Lewis argued that these other-worldly experiences are a major component of the archive of trans history, and require expansively rethinking approaches to the historiography of trans activism.
Throughout these accounts, trans children yearn for an alternative to their families of origin, often in the form of escaping from humanity and human society altogether. To really understand the subtle logic of these fantasies—how they link questions of sexual difference, social authority, violent transphobia, paternal lineage, and language—requires a close reading of Freud’s essay.
These fantasies of leaving one’s family can include imagining a place that might be more supportive
Freud's “Family Romances”
In 1909, Freud contributed a section to Otto Rank’s volume Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden. Only with its second German printing was Freud’s essay given a title—“Der Familenroman der Neurotiker,” literally “The Family Romance of Neurotics.” Rank’s collection, with Freud’s essay, was translated into English four years later as Myth of the Birth of the Hero. Freud’s contribution found its way into English as “Family Romances.” The shifts in the essay’s translated title touch on unacknowledged ambiguities between the specific and the general which are already present in Freud’s essay: the category of neurotic as both a psychopathology and a means of theorizing human psychic life generally; and the family romance as both a particular trope and as broadly relevant to childhood daydreams. At just under fifteen-hundred words—four-and-a-half pages in the Standard Edition—the essay is quite succinct.
Freud had previously referred to “family romance” in his letters to Fliess. In the “Draft M” letter on May 31, 1897, he cites the “romance of alienation (cf. paranoia) . . . as a means of illegitimizing the relatives in question” as an example, followed by a dense account of the construction of unconscious fantasy. In a letter from October 15 of that year, he comes upon “the invention of parentage in paranoia” in the self-analysis of his own dream, which helps to illuminate a link between Freud’s mother and a nurse that abruptly disappeared from his life. In a letter dated June 20, 1898, he writes that the “so-called” family romance is universal to neurotics. Here, Freud identifies the family romance as both a means of “self-aggrandizement” and a “defense against incest.” He contends that the (presumably bourgeois) neurotic draws the trope of illegitimate children from the “lower social circles of servant girls,” particularly in cases of seduction by a servant. The family romance appears twice according to Freud, both as a “fantasy about the mother” and as a “real memory of the maid.” In this early formulation, encounters with class difference in the form of sexual seduction are essential to the constitution of the family romance. In these early letters, the violent rivalry with the father and sexual desire for the mother is already at play in the family romance of the unconscious landscape of neurotics.
The 1909 essay offers both a clear exposition of a particular psychic phenomena and a subtle set of theoretical pivots and leaps. Freud’s focus in the essay is a particular conscious fantasy among children, as reported by his adult neurotic patients when recounting their early life. Having come to a “low opinion” of their parents, the child imagines that they must be adopted. They replace their parents by others in a fantasy, imagining their true parents are of “higher social standing.” Freud’s examples are taken from the remnants of feudal society which were still present at the time in Central Europe: a “Lord of the Manor,” or a “member of the aristocracy.”
Freud opens the essay with “the liberation of the individual” from parental authority as both “most necessary” and “most painful.” Neurotics are those who have failed to adequately accomplish this generational separation. Already in the first paragraph, Freud has established several key coordinates which the rest of the essay grapples with: the problem of social authority and the social order as incarnated in the parents, the fraught difficulty for subjects needing to come to terms with their relationship to this order, and the broader social and psychic stakes in the problem of lineage.
Freud then moves to the problem of gender identification. The child identifies with “the parent of his own sex.” Freud specifies that at this early inception of the family romance, “the child is still in ignorance of the sexual determinants of procreation.” Although no semantic distinction between sex and gender was available to Freud, sexual differences in the absence of an understanding of procreation points to gender as an appropriate concept to understand this moment of Freud’s theorizing of the child’s early and “momentous wish” to be like their parents.[3] Paired with the nearly contemporaneous essay “On the Sexual Theories of Children,” the children at this previous phase of gender identification may not even be aware of anatomical sexual difference. For Freud, the child initially enjoys a total imaginary, gendered identification with their parents. This identification is expressed through a wish to become like them and to share in their characteristics.
The rupture from this gendered identification with the parent occurs when the child discovers “the category to which his parents belong.” Here, Freud locates the neurotic’s family romance at the moment in which the child intuits a feature of the symbolic order: the placing of individuals within categories—in this case, the treating of their specific parents as among a class of parents. This then allows the child to engage in comparison with other parents, recognizing for the first time their inadequacies, and allowing the child’s growing sense of slights at a perceived non-reciprocation of his affection. The disappointments made possible through the parents’ placement within a symbolic category gives rise to the fantasy of the family romance. The rupture quickly takes on a gendered cast. The child primarily directs their hostility towards the parent of their own gender. With his not infrequent passing misogyny, Freud suggests that girls have weaker imaginations and are less in the grip of parental rivalry.
The family romance emerges as a wish fulfillment in the face of these mounting disappointments and new knowledge. The family romance’s initial asexual ambitious motivation is expressed by the child imagining themselves as belonging to a higher social status. As the child begins to understand the basics of procreation and “sexual processes,” the fantasy shifts in contradictory directions. The child can no longer question their maternal origin, but their paternal lineage is still in doubt. As the child understands the role of sexual difference in procreation, patrilineal descent remains as a preoccupation. At this phase, the family romance serves the child’s desire for erotic intimacy with their mother through imagining her in a variety of illicit affairs. The family romance proves versatile, serving a diverse range of psychic wishes.
In a concluding twist, Freud reads the stated hostility toward one’s parents in the family romance as an expression of devotion. The child’s imagined regal parental figures bear the attributes of their earlier exalted esteem of their own parents. The child’s family romance links their earlier idealization of their mother and father with their later disappointments. The fantasy, Freud argues, persists in even normal adults, through the appearance of the parental figures in dreams in the form of “the Emperor and Empress.” Freud’s short essay offers a peculiar and complex theorization of the relationship between sex and gender, and imaginary identification and symbolic location.
Otto Rank puts Freud’s argument to use in his analysis of mythology. He draws attention to the family romance trope in a cross-cultural survey of mythology, including in the fable of Oedipus, in the biblical story of Moses, in the Hindu Mahabharata, and in the epic of Gilgamesh. Freud returned to his family romance essay thirty years later in Moses and Monotheism. He used the difference between Moses’s story and his original account of the typical family romance—namely, that although Moses’s family of origin is humble, his adopted family is of exalted royalty—as a key pivot in the book’s argument that Moses was an Egyptian who adopted the Jewish people to advance his discredited Egyptian monotheistic sect.
The family romance proves versatile, serving a diverse range of psychic wishes
Uses and Abuses of the Family Romance
“Family Romances” was never particularly central to the canonization of psychoanalysis. There is a scattering of literature that addresses the essay. Here, I briefly summarize the major trends in this literature, focusing more on essays of particular relevance to this argument.
Like my attention to Cecilia’s memoir, one current of psychoanalytic writing on family romance focuses on popular-cultural and literary analysis. Phyllis Greenacre extensively develops one theme, namely, how the family romance in children can serve to cultivate an inner fantasy life and, later, to foster creativity and artistic expression in adulthood. This inner space for the child’s fantasy is recognized by Tabin as maintaining a defensive protection against social expectations: “The family romance serves so well because it is a personal secret of a fantasy that one can keep in mind, thus feeling free to conform to outer reality.”
Another body of literature addresses the relationship between family romance fantasies and actual adoption, both historically and in an adopted child’s “genealogical bewilderment.” In their 1991 essay, Thomas M. Horner and Elinor B. Rosenberg ground the family romance in the extensive reality of actually-existing adoption, foster parenting systems, child selling, and other practices through which children were raised by those other than their birth parents. They see the prevalence of family romance variations in the folklore of Medieval Europe as a reflection of the reality of mothers dying during childbirth, of wet-nursing, and of foster care. Children face dilemmas of uncertainty with respect to “their personal origins, their kin, and the nature of social bonds,” which “although far from being uniformly patterned, are universally present.”
This use of the family romance by trans children finds parallels in Ken Corbett’s exploration of the “nontraditional family romance,” where children from queer and other non-traditional families develop novel and creative means of making sense of the question of biological origins and kinship. Drawing from Judith Butler, Corbett argues: “No one develops outside a system of norms, but no one develops as a simple mechanical reiteration of such norms.” Corbett locates the family romance as the site where the child begins to understand new facts about parental sexuality, their own conception, sexual difference, and generational change. Corbett shares this attention to new knowledge as the motivation for the family romance with Freud and a subset of literature on the family romance, most notably Klein.
Most psychoanalytic writing on the subject treats the family romance as an elaboration and specification of the Oedipus complex. In this literature, the family romance is treated as a stage in a normative trajectory of development, one whose persistence is pathological. This is most clearly argued in Anna Freud’s 1949 essay “On Certain Difficulties in the Preadolescent’s Relation to His Parents,” where she locates the family romance as a key developmental stage emerging shortly after the breakdown of the Oedipus complex, leading to a “more ruthless disillusionment” in preadolescence. Similarly, Helene Deutsch proposes that the family romance is a means of compensating for feelings of inferiority brought on by the Oedipus complex. Here, status anxiety and status fantasies provide an antidote to the fraught parental relationship following the passing of the Oedipus complex. Philip R. Lehrman correlates various iterations of the family romance to different developmental trajectories. Linda Kaplan identifies several variants of the family romance across multiple developmental stages. Though her argument is distinct, it shares with Anna Freud’s a normative framework of development. For Kaplan, there is a pre-Oedipal version of the romance (initiated by the loss of infantile omnipotence), delaying the advent of Oedipal guilt. In the Oedipal phase, the child has full awareness of their parents as sexual beings, and fears retaliation for incestuous wishes.
Herman Westerink and Philippe Van Haute challenge this reading of “Family Romances” as fully integrated with Freud’s later theories of the Oedipus complex. In their close reading of the essay, they note that the Oedipus complex is not mentioned in Freud’s essay, nor does the essay start by focusing on a conflicted relationship with a controlling father. Instead, they locate the 1909 essay at a pivotal cusp of Freud’s thought, written concurrently with “On the Sexual Theories of Children” and just before “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy.” In the 1905 edition of Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud argues that there is no inherent, natural relationship between the sexual drive and its objects. Infants experience sexual drive, but in an autoerotic form without an object. It is not until puberty that sexual life is normatively organized, requiring the overcoming of many obstacles and detours. Westerink and Van Haute note that “Family Romances” shares this divide between infantile and adolescent sexuality. Unlike his writing from only a few years later, the child does not yet fully sexualize their relationship with their parents. When writing “Family Romances,” Freud still held that the adolescent sexualization of parents depends upon “the knowledge of sexual difference, reproduction and descent (Abkunft)—a knowledge first established in puberty.” But Freud rethought this point; in the study of Little Hans written within a year of completing the manuscript of “Family Romances,” he argues that children are capable of clear object choice.
Westerink and Van Haute argue Freud’s essay is on the cusp between two contrasting accounts of the child’s sexuality: the first depends primarily upon sexual knowledge and self-preservation; the second, upon the Oedipus complex and childhood sexual object choice. The letters to Fliess make it clear that Freud was not fully consistent on these points. When writing “Family Romances,” Freud was grappling with questions of childhood sexuality and considering multiple conflicting answers. This transitional moment in Freud’s changing theorization strangely parallels another cusp described within the essay itself, faced by the child of the family romance: between an early objectless sexuality that soon includes a non-sexualized gender identification, and an adolescent sexuality that depends on acquiring new knowledge of sexual difference and the social order. This point in Freud’s work is helpful for understanding the fraught questions facing trans children. For trans children, discovering the sexual organization of society as articulated within and through the familial order can be devastating. The family romance provides a means of enduring this fraught moment of unwelcome knowledge and the symbolic order it articulates.
Questioning Developmentalism
Stage-based developmental frameworks such as those that dominate psychoanalytic writing on the family romance have been particularly insidious for trans analysands and for the psychoanalytic theorizing of trans life. Such frameworks often imply a normative trajectory against which a patient’s experience is contrasted as pathological. When taken up in this way, developmental frameworks have often been used as part of the very process of gender discipline against which a trans child may first turn to the family romance. When psychoanalytic theory and practice treats transgender people as deviations from a proper developmental course, the field acts in the service of the most violent and regressive logics of the objectification of the patient into a symbolic order.
Although he does not write about the family romance directly, Lacan offers a counterpoint to the preponderance of normative Oedipal developmental frameworks in writing on the family romance. Insofar as the family romance has something to do with the child’s encounter with the symbolic order, “the category to which his parents belong,” Lacan cautions against treating the symbolic as historically arising at a particular stage of development. Side-stepping a developmental framework that seeks out a genetic origin of the symbolic to the Oedipus complex or a stage in psychosexual development, Lacan treats the symbolic dimension as always-already engulfing the subject and constituting the subject’s pre-history, even prior to birth. In his seminar on January 11, 1956, Lacan challenges us to not be overly fascinated with the first entry into language:
“The young child whom you see playing at making an object disappear and reappear, who is thereby working at apprehending the symbol, will, if you let yourselves be fascinated by him, mask the fact that the symbol is already there, that it is enormous and englobes him from all sides—that language exists, fills libraries to the point of overflowing, and surrounds, guides, and rouses all your actions—the fact that you are engaged, that it can require you to move at any moment and take you somewhere—all this you forget before the child being introduced into the symbolic dimension. So let us place ourselves at the level of existence of the symbol as such, insofar as we are immersed in it.”
Regardless of a patient’s ability to symbolize (as understood by various psychoanalytic schools), the symbolic has already played a fundamental constituting role in positioning a child in the social world of their family, society, and language. This caution against assuming a developmental and temporal trajectory is essential in the argument that follows, and I return to it towards the essay’s end.
Developmental frameworks have often been used as part of the very process of gender discipline against which a trans child may first turn to the family romance
Cecilia Gentili's Faltas
Cecilia Gentili’s memoir, paired with her interview with the NYC Trans Oral History Project, provides an extensive exploration of family romance fantasies for a trans child. In her NYC TOHP interview, Gentili briefly discusses her childhood followed by her move to the Argentine city of Rosario at seventeen years old, where she was a sex worker and entered into a social network of other trans women. Eventually, Gentili moved to the U.S., where she continued sex work in Miami, San Francisco, and New York, during which she struggled with drug addiction. After a residential drug treatment program, Gentili became an outreach worker at a HIV/AIDS health clinic. Despite her relative lack of both education and English literacy, Gentili proved capable, and moved up through various non-profit positions. She eventually became the Director of Policy at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), one of NYC’s largest HIV service organizations. It was during her time at GMHC that I met Gentili in 2017, and interviewed her for NYC TOHP. After she left GMHC, she became a non-profit consultant, further developed her practice as a stage performer, and played a leading role in a campaign to decriminalize sex work in New York State. Gentili’s death was a devastating event for NYC’s trans communities, and for activists across multiple movements.
Her 2023 memoir, Faltas: Letters to everyone in my hometown who isn’t my rapist, offers an in-depth account of her childhood relationships, told through a series of letters. The family romance is woven throughout the book, appearing in multiple forms. The most explicit example of the family romance is the one recounted at the opening of this article, the belief that she had been left by aliens. She describes the scene again in the novel, with minor variations from her oral history interview. On the drive when she was about five years old, her brother pointed out railroad tracks as they passed, whispering: “That is where we found you.” He described her as found alone and naked. “You are not my brother,” her brother said to Cecilia. In response, Gentili writes: “If he was telling the truth, this explained so much. I had always felt like I was not part of this family.” She wondered if she was “some kind of new Moses,” recognizing the parallels between her fantasy and other family romance myths previously identified by Freud.
When arriving, she told her loving grandmother about her newfound realization:
“I am an extraterrestrial. Do you see all the spaceships being spotted in the sky around us? They are looking for me, Grandma. Claudio told me I was found by the railway, and I just found out in school that what I have makes me a boy, and I just couldn’t tell them I am not. They would not understand because they are not like me! But I am from a planet where girls like me have peepees! The lady called it penis.”
That evening, her grandmother helped her back a bag, and they went out to spend the night in the desert, waiting for aliens to return to pick Cecilia up and take her to where she belonged. The aliens did not come, her brother’s story did not fit with their mother’s frequent account of Cecilia’s difficult childbirth, and Cecilia returned the world where girls with penises do not easily find their way.
Condensed into this passage are multiple threads of the family romance. The fantasy’s immediate use here is clear, and relevant for many examples of trans children turning to the fantasy: Gentili was not being accepted or supported by her family, who largely rejected her self-understanding as a girl. As a means of holding fast to her sense of her gender and of preserving her gendered desire, she found a fantasy that explained her physical differences from other girls. This fantasy also allowed her to imagine that there is a place where she belongs, providing a supportive and necessary distance from parental authority. This use of the family romance does not necessarily depend on Gentili’s particular experience of having an early and well-defined identification with her chosen gender. For a child that will only later identify with a non-assigned gender, a similar use of the family romance could emerge out of inchoate or partial gender dysphoria, including a vague sense of not quite fitting.
Using Freud’s essay and Lacan’s Seminar III, Faltas offers us even more for understanding the use of the family romance beyond this logic of belonging. Here, I focus on five facets of the family romance, using Gentili’s memoir: the family romance (1) as the product of a conflictual encounter with the social organization of sexual difference; (2) as a means of reconciling and defending against knowledge of biological origins and their social meanings; (3) as both the rupture and preservation of an idealizing identification with a parental figure; (4) in relation to the limits of belonging, here specifically through childhood sexual violence; and (5) in relation to death and social violence.
(1) Confrontation with the order of sexual difference: “The lady called it penis”
In both her memoir and interview, Gentili tells another story immediately prior to recounting the trip to her grandmothers. A couple of weeks after beginning school, the young Cecilia was confronted with a forceful education in the gendered order. She was called into the principal’s office, where her teacher, a psychologist, and her mother were also gathered. She writes:
“Mama was there. My first thought was she was giving me up to another family. I felt relief and sadness at the same time. I loved her, but I already knew at that age we were not a good match. I hoped they would send me to a rich family. I didn’t care if they were bad people, just as long as they were rich!”
After this initial iteration of a family romance fantasy, Cecilia then briefly considered that the meeting may be the result of the army taking over the government, with the intention of explaining to her that they now lived in a different province. Instead, the assembled authority figures presented Cecilia with a schematic drawing of sexual genitalia. Gentili writes of the diagrams:
“They were weird; I didn’t understand them at all. As an adult, now, I see them clearly, and I know what they were intended to schematize. But at the time I was only five or six. I had no idea what I was supposed to be seeing.”
They diagrams offer a new form of sexual knowledge, one articulated by institutional authority. The psychologist explained that she herself had a vagina, and asked Cecilia to identify which drawing corresponded to her own genitals. Cecilia wasn’t sure, asking herself, “What did I have?” (p. 25). She tentatively chose the penis, saying she could be wrong. Her mother quietly cried throughout the scene. The psychologist then explained that because she had a penis, she was a boy and had to use the boy’s bathroom.
Here is a moment of collective institutional violence, seeking to discipline young Cecilia’s gender identity and expression. By this point in her life, Cecilia’s gender identification was already established, though it is less clear whether she declared it to others or would have articulated it to others in the terms that she did in adulthood. But at five years old, she is already regularly using the girl’s bathroom, styling her school uniform to be as feminine as possible, and seeking out relationships and activity where her femininity is partially acknowledged by others. Where much psychoanalytic literature focuses on the process of gender formation and identification—an important theoretical and clinical question—in this case, like in Freud’s essay, the family romance emerges after the initial establishment of her gender identity. The fantasy here comes into its fullest fruition when authority figures reject and attempt to forcefully correct her gender. Her mother, Gentili explains elsewhere, does not particularly understand or support her childhood gender expression, but appears relatively powerless in this scene in the face of an outside authority, represented by the principal, psychologist, and a teacher.
Cecilia turns to the family romance in response to her confrontation with the order of sexual difference. This is not instigated by an encounter with corporeal reality in the form of seeing her own genitals or that of a family member, as Freud identifies elsewhere, but specifically as insisted on by institutional authority. It is not anatomical difference itself that constitutes a primary problem for Cecilia, or what Lacan calls the real. For Cecilia the problem is the social organization of sexual difference, as enforced and imposed upon her: a dimension of the symbolic. The problem for her is not that she discovers that she has a penis, it is that “the lady called it a penis,” with imposed social meanings and implications. Even prior to genital diagrams, Cecilia’s first thought in seeing the authority figures in the meeting represents a partial family romance—that her mother was giving her up for a rich family, because they “were not a good match”—recognizing both their authority over her family and the class stratification and poverty of her household. It is the structural character of sexual difference as constituted and enforced by social authority that leads Cecilia to turn to the family romance fantasy.
This distinction between gender identification and sexual difference as a social order, already subtly present in Freud’s essay, is of broad significance for trans children and likely for gender as a general phenomena. One significant moment is when the child first has an imaginary identification with a parent that includes a gendered dimension—“the child’s most intense and momentous wish” to be like “the parent of his own sex.” This first moment cannot primarily be about sex as an anatomical category, because the child does not yet understand procreation or possibly even anatomical difference at all. But the family romance does not emerge until a second moment, when the child, according to Freud, recognizes their parents as belonging to “the category to which his parents belong,” as positioned within a symbolic order beyond them. It is here that gender as parental identification gives way to sex as a social category in which one is placed, willingly or unwillingly. The family romance for Freud enables the child to bridge this earlier identification and the symbolic moment of the category; the family romance is a response to an encounter with the symbolic and the social organization of sexual difference.
(2) Biological origins: “Confusion and strife around the question of who the fathers might be”
Cecilia faced multiple forms of parental absence. Her father disappeared for an extended period and when he returned he remained completely psychically unavailable. Though she no longer doubted that her mother gave birth to her, she remained doubtful throughout her life that her mother was at all maternal, that she fulfilled the role of a mother:
“Whenever I write about Mami it seems like my words carry the feeling that she was a bad person. Do I need to say that she wasn’t? Though I am sure we can both agree that . . . I was going to say, “We can both agree that she was not a good mother,” but I think it’s closer to say she was just not a mother. She had the love and empathy of a good soul, but she was never motherly. I wonder where that absence came from?”
The relative absences of both her father and mother were likely among the disappointments that led Cecilia to imagine she belonged among aliens. After that fantasy passed, their psychic absences remained unresolved problems.
In Freud’s essay, the question of biological origins is central to the child’s turn to the family romance. The family romance is a dimension of the evolving sexual theories of children through which they try to explain their own origin. The problem of origins, in Freud’s framework, is a challenging one for children, and the family romance serves as an intermediary way of theorizing what he will later describe as the primal scene. Specifically, the family romance takes a different form before and after the child begins to understand the biology of procreation. As the child understands the basics of biological procreation, they come to no longer have doubts about their mother, but maintain uncertainty about their father. This enables the child to begin to explore various sexual fantasies about their mother.
Following the structure of Freud’s essay, Gentili’s memoir similarly marks a difference between the initial fantasy of believing that she was left by aliens and a later reflection on the uncertainty of paternal relations. She writes in a letter to her deceased grandmother: “I am not questioning the legitimacy of your motherhood here. That you were the mother was always clear, despite all the confusion and strife around the question of who the fathers might be.” The confusion about fathers is multiple, both doubts about Cecilia’s father and more substantiated doubts about the fatherhood of her grandmother’s children. These doubts later preoccupy Cecilia and her cousins, one of whom receives ongoing support from the green grocer, whom she and many others suspect to be her true grandfather.
The problem of doubt about fatherhood includes both the imaginary experience of paternal absence, and a symbolic dimension which puts into doubt one’s place in social life. Intergenerational symbolic inheritance, embodied in part by the paternal name and paternal lineage, is a psychic problem in the constitution of neurosis. In Lacan’s essay, “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth,” he understands the Rat Man’s neurosis to be rooted in an inherited mythology of his own origins. The Rat Man’s father’s story of conflicted interests in a poor girl and a rich girl structure the Rat Man’s compulsive and apparently nonsensical behaviors. In one Lacanian clinical technique, an analyst asks the patient for their associations with their names. The subject confronts the problems of patrilineal descent, generational debts, and biological origins as a mode of what I term encountering the symbolic.
Trans people face these problems in particular and challenging ways. My trans female patients contend with the multiple meanings of rejecting both their assigned position in a lineage of patrilineal descent and the expectations and obligations that their parents placed on them through it. To declare oneself as not male is often to reject one’s place in a line of fathers and male ancestors. Trans men, by contrast, may wish to enter into a familial relation of patrilineal descent, but they are often not welcome to do so. Even to change the name given by one’s parents can be to complicate and reject familial expectations, including symbolic debts and expectations. The complexity of these symbolic questions can manifest in fraught and conflictual relations with actual fathers and grandfathers.
(3) Idealization and identification: “They are looking for me.”
For Freud, prior to the family romance is an earlier moment of strong gendered identification with the parent. In his essay, this moment is not explored directly as it is not remembered or reported by the child. Instead, it is reconstructed from the traces that this moment leaves in the family romance itself, through providing the idealizing material which is later incorporated into the family romance fantasy. For Freud, this primarily takes the form of the aristocratic, high-status and wealthy character of the imagined other family. This earlier idealization expresses itself in the family romance in gendered terms: “when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women.”
Freud’s analysis is helpful for identifying how an earlier idealizing identification may shape Cecilia’s fantasy. Like Freud’s account, Gentili does not clearly mark this earlier moment of idealizing gender identification. A few hints suggest earlier more positive identifications with her family members. Her father returns after a lengthy disappearance; Gentili says little about him before his absence, but after she suggests that he is changed by becoming “no more than a body that slept and ate with us,” implying that he had possibly once been something more to her. Her grandmother was consistently loving and supportive; though not calling her a girl she allowed Cecilia to act femininely. When she first reports her alien realization to her grandmother, her response is one of understanding: “I love you,” her grandmother replied. “That makes so much sense. I just don’t know how to help you. Do you want us to wait for them tonight?” Cecilia “felt such relief”: “Yes, Grandma. I knew you would get it.”
Later Cecilia discovers her grandmother had a close friend who was secretly intersex, with both a vagina and a penis. Gentili also positively references her mother’s femininity, and was able to later establish a positive relationship with her mother once Cecilia moves away from the area. Cecilia even makes associative links between the aliens and her closest female relatives: when her mother was not depressed, they would sit outside trying to identify UFOs; Cecilia confided her alien fantasy with her grandmother.
These traces also appear in her fantasy. She initially hopes that the family she may be given up for is rich. She tells her grandmother that the aliens spotted in the sky are “looking for me,” that they desire her return, and are seeking her out. Among these aliens, her anatomy would not distinguish her from other girls; she would belong and would be accepted as a girl without the imposition of a mismatched gendered order. By imagining other kin relations, Gentili identifies the characteristics that stand in for ones that she may have felt in an earlier, more devoted moment to parental objects. Unfortunately, Cecilia does encounter a surrogate parent who offers many of these characteristics, at great cost.
(4) The limits of belonging: “He saw me as I was”
The subtitle of Gentili’s memoir identifies the figure whose absence as an address haunts her epistolary work: her rapist. Her rapist was a father in her neighborhood who established a multi-year sexual relationship with Cecilia. Cecilia clearly identifies the relationship as extremely harmful, coercive, and non-consensual. But she also explores her childhood investment in the relationship, and the reasons that motivated her to enter into and stay in the relationship beyond the force of coercion.
In the book’s opening letter addressed to the rapist’s daughter, Cecilia describes what she encountered when first entering their home: the signifiers of familial stability, with its class, gendered, and sexual logics:
“I envied your TV. I envied everything. That house looked like the house a family lived in. There was furniture and it indicated: family. I think I fell into some kind of reverie, thinking of how my life would be if I lived in this home, if your parents were my parents. I would be happy, watching TV in your dad’s lap, wearing a cute pink dress while your mom smiled at us from the kitchen, where she was preparing dinner.”
It was at this moment that Cecilia’s rapist first touched her. Her rapist was the first person and, for years, the only person, who unambiguously affirmed her as a girl:
“And there was one other thing he knew: I was a girl. He understood my femininity as normal, and used that, too. I remember the first time he laid eyes on me: I saw it, I saw he would give me that thing everyone else was denying me. He saw me as I was, and I didn’t have to explain how I felt inside because for him it was visible. He saw I was Cecilia. He saved my life and ruined it forever.”
She felt completed, experiencing an idealized unity:
“He called me his ‘little girl!’ You know when you put that last Lego in whatever shape you are making? Or add the last piece to a puzzle? That kind of satisfaction I had never had, and that is how I felt. Something completed me. Something was just perfect.”
He framed their sexual activity in familial terms: as appropriate between fathers and daughters, but that Cecilia’s father shamefully would not provider her. The novel includes a great deal on their relationship, how Cecilia made sense of it as a child and later as an adolescent, and how it shaped her subsequent romantic relationships.
Gentili’s account challenges the centrality of belonging as an idealized endpoint of many conventional trans narratives. Not supported by one’s parents or immediate social context, it is often imagined that the trans child eventually encounters a supportive community, one where their gender is affirmed and embraced by others. They fulfill the wish of the family romance as shared by many trans children: they will find a place that they belong. For many, including Cecilia, this dream is partially realized later in their lives, with much benefit. Adult trans people often have much more opportunity to pursue lives where they are in relation to other trans people and to cultivate trans-affirming community, resulting in improvement for their mental health and wellbeing. But belonging and recognition can also be means of harm. Cecilia’s rapist uses her desire and need for gendered belonging to establish and maintain a relationship of child sexual abuse, with negative consequences for Cecilia’s life. It is not simply a false belonging; her rapist desires her as a girl, recognizes her as Cecilia, and sincerely affirms her femininity, alongside and inseparable from the violent sexual abuse. This is a necessary corrective to the predominance of simplified and idealized accounts common in representations of trans life.
It is also a brutal, concrete example of a more subtle and general problem of the family romance. Belonging is also always a question of the desire of the other. The family romance is taken up by trans children as a fantasy of belonging, of a different world where they may experience social acceptance. For trans children, the social organization of sexual difference may be particularly violent and harmful, and a better more trans-affirming social world may be possible and desirable. Yet the family romance also marks or covers over a fundamental alienation of the desire of the other, the impossibility of a fantasy of full self-congruence. The family romance attempts and fails to resolve forms of alienation that operate in both imaginary and symbolic registers. To encounter the world as a system of social categories that exceed oneself is to be subject to social authority, alienated through a language that is never one’s own. But the fantasy of escaping this symbolic alienation—a longing for full belonging and recognition which amounts to a false repetition of an idealized relationship with an imagined pre-symbolic parental object, often depicted in the family romance as a return to one’s true exalted parents—is equally an experience of subjugation and self-alienation, with potentially horrific consequences. The very act of belonging is also always a moment of self-alienation, of constitution through the desire of the other, as made possible through an impersonal order of language.
(5) Social violence: “Those children were sold”
As with Horner and Rosenberg’s recognition that the family romance bridges psychic life amidst prevalent social violence, Gentili’s interview and memoir locate her family romance in a broader context of a counter-insurgent war. When Cecilia first enters the meeting with her principal, psychologist, teacher, and mother, she thinks that it may be somehow related to changing provincial boundaries resulting from a recent military seizure of the Argentine state. In her oral history interview, immediately after her story of awaiting her return to be among aliens, I ask Cecilia about the political context in Argentina at the time. In her description of Argentina’s “Dirty War” and her family’s complex relationship to the political context, she quickly cites a specific feature of the war:
“People were being kidnapped and killed and that pregnant people were being kidnapped and their children were stolen from them and then they were killed, and those children were sold, and everything that was not totally in line with the dictators and dictatorship that was going on was simply eliminated.”
Among the many egregious human rights violations of the Dirty War and its varying facets of political terror, here Cecilia refers to one closely related to the family romance: the practice of murdering left activists, stealing their children, and then giving their children as adoptees to military families and those friendly to the regime. Cecilia’s childhood fantasy is, at least in her adult recounting, deeply tied up with the broader context of the child theft as mass terror that was happening around her.
Violent, involuntary separation of parents and children has been a central feature of racial capitalism for centuries. Black feminist scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Angela Davis, Tiffany Lethabo King and others consider the practice of separating enslaved mothers and children as central to the racial and gender order of plantation slavery, with lasting implications for U.S. racial politics of the family. Separation of families and children was central to the system of boarding schools for indigenous children established through the U.S. and Canada, resulting in the mass death of many children and many others being allocated to white families as domestic workers. Recent organizing and scholarship have focused their critique on the “family policing system,” recognizing the anti-Black violence of the child welfare policies. Trans children are disproportionately subject to the family policing system, and face high levels of abuse by both parents and institutional caregivers. As the interview with Shannon Fawkes details, among the trans youth that they worked with, family romance fantasies often overlapped with actual separation from their parents, and living in foster arrangements with extended relatives or relative strangers. Many of these children had faced extensive trauma and violence throughout their lives.
The family romance both reflects and attempts to cover over this violent social order. Children, even when their understanding is fragmented and partial, turn to the family romance to both incorporate and defend against a society of racial capitalism where the murder of parents, the separation of children and parents, and the use of mass violence to police family life is widespread.
This violent social context of Gentili’s life and the world of racial capitalism may appear for the subject through questions of death and mortality. In Lacanian theory, sexual difference is constituted by distinct relationships with an absolute limit necessary to language and subjectivity. Generally this limit is understood in terms of castration, sharing with Freud a recognition that differing attempts to respond to the problem of castration constitutes the split of sexual difference. This limit that constitutes sexual difference could also potentially be theorized as death. The symbolic poses but cannot answer the question of death. The signifier represents something in its absence; our names represent us after our death; through the family name the dead continue to structure the lives of the living. The absolute limit of death that haunts the symbolic may also be constitutive of sexual difference. In an evocative passage from his seminar on May 30, 1956, Lacan suggests the symbolic constitution of sexual difference is also the position from which we view our mortality:
“The two sides, male and female, of sexuality are not given data, are nothing that could be deduced from experience. How could the individual situate himself within sexuality if he didn't already possess the system of signifiers, insofar as it institutes the space that enables him to see, at a distance, as an enigmatic object, the thing that is the most difficult of access, namely his own death?”[4]
The family romance is used by the trans child to create and maintain an inner space for the preservation of the child’s desire
Retheorizing the Family Romance[5]
The family romance is a means through which trans children attempt to use a fantasy to reconcile and defend against new knowledge. This new knowledge arrives in the form of the desire of the other; it is as articulated through a social order which places the children in categories of sexual difference. The family romance is used by the trans child to create and maintain an inner space for the preservation of the child’s desire.
Like many of the family romance fantasies of trans children that I’ve found, and in contrast to the claims of Freud’s essay, Cecilia does not primarily frame the family romance in terms of other parents as specific imagined people. Though she has a brief wish to be adopted into a wealthy family, social status and wealth do not figure as centrally for trans children’s accounts as they do in Freud. Cecilia’s main fantasy that she belongs among aliens is common for trans children, yet does not follow the specific logic that Freud details. Where for Freud the mark of the social order in the family romance manifests through the (cis) child’s understanding of feudal remnants of social status hierarchies, for trans children it often takes the form of being a member of a species where their gender incongruities no longer mark a distance between their sense of themselves, social expectations, and social acceptance.
What accounts for this difference? There are obvious concrete and contingent factors: Freud’s social context was dominated by concerns with class position and the tumultuous historical clashing of multiple modes of production with their accompanying status hierarchies. Further, higher social classes would not likely provide trans children with greater opportunities for acceptance. But there is another, more challenging possibility: that the family romance is always a response to the violence of the social imposition of sexual difference, but cis children are able to repress this and substitute the problem of sexual difference for a phallic fantasy centered instead on social status. Freud’s essay, with its multiple references to questions of sexual difference as confronted by the child, offers traces of this other potential interpretation. Freud repeatedly returned to the problem of how children respond to, cover over, and are transformed by the encounter with sexual difference and knowledge of biological reproduction. Written shortly before “Family Romances,” his essay “On the Sexual Theories of Children” is centrally focused on the fantasized theories that children generate as a means of making up for and defending against knowledge of sexual difference.
Freud recognized in his developing theories of castration that sexual difference is experienced by the child—cis and trans alike—as a traumatic rupture. The cis child is able to more thoroughly cover over this rupture through fusing their imaginary gendered identification with the parent of their sex with their symbolic placement in a social order of sexual difference, through a partial and imagined congruence between their internal experience of gender and external expectations. Through this fusing of gender identification and placement within sexual difference, the cis child is then able to repress the problem of sexual difference altogether, replacing it with a phallic fantasy centered instead on social status in class society. The repressed problem of sexual difference, for the cis person, later reemerges in the neurotic symptom. This repression, perhaps, is less available for the trans child. The rupture of sexual difference persists, and the gap remains between imaginary gender identification and their socially assigned sex and its meanings. The trans child may then turn to a more drastic fantasized solution: alien kinship and an escape from human society altogether, with its accompanying codes of sexual difference. The trans child, for whom the problem of sexual difference may be much more intractable and persistent, can use the fantasy of alien kinship to maintain an internal distance between their own desire and the social expectations imposed upon them.
This use of the family romance by the trans child corresponds to elements of Lacan’s understanding of fantasy. For Lacan, fantasy is always partially defensive. The structure of fantasy is a way of staging the subject as divided with respect to the Other, using the object cause of desire, the object a. Because the object a belongs neither to the subject nor the Other, it can serve as a separation. The trans child, too close to the social demands imposed by their parents, must produce an internal fantasy that opens up a gap in which the child’s desire can survive. The family romance, perhaps, is always a fantasy constructed by the child to defend against sexual difference. For the trans child, this is more starkly apparent because it is less successful.
Returning to Lacan’s emphasis on the symbolic as constituting the pre-history of the subject rather than as a solely a developmental phase, trans children have to construct their gender and this fantasy space that preserves their desire using preexisting cultural forms. A child may come to experience something new about their gender at some developmental juncture, but that gender order precedes them altogether, imposed consciously and unconsciously by all those around them from before birth and throughout their life. The trans child may reject gendered expectations from parental caregivers, but they do so using the very material of gender expression and identification. Trans people take up, rework, and constitute themselves through existing gendered signifiers.
The subject’s encounter with the symbolic is iterative, repeated, and as a logical rather than developmental phase. On multiple occasions throughout the subject’s life, they confront, learn, reject, or work with new knowledge about multiple interconnected questions that situate them into a symbolic order. These need not occur only at a specific phase of childhood. The family romance, in various guises, could similarly be taken up at any moment where the subject is confronted with a dimension of the symbolic order that disrupts and complicates previous identifications, that disappoints previous idealizations, or that poses in a new way the intractable questions of birth and death, origins and ends.
Like all subjects, the trans person must navigate their relationship with gender with respect to a sexual order that exceeds them. Sexual difference is a fundamental problem of human existence, impossible for anyone to fully resolve. It appears in neurotic and psychotic symptoms. It constitutes human psychic life. The trans child’s family romance is one way to survive and evade the full force of this violence of sexual difference.
Conclusion: Listening for Desire
This article is not meant to offer a definitive theory of gender, nor a full theory of the symbolic. Instead, it uses Freud at this theoretical conjuncture of his work to identify the particular uses that trans children make of the family romance. Like this moment in Freud’s evolving theories, these children are at a cusp between different dimensions of sex and gender identification. For Cecilia at five years old, she already strongly identified with femininity and girlhood, but did not yet know how to relate to the figures of authority that dictated the meaning of sexual difference. Such moments between conflicting and partial accounts of sexual difference reappear, in various forms, throughout trans narratives. The family romance is a provisional fantasy that gives way to the subject finding other ways of relating to gender and sex, but it can also serve as a strategy for reconciling conflicting knowledge that the subject may repeatedly return to.
In these senses, there is a provisional and transitional character across three registers in this essay: in Freud’s changing theories of childhood sexuality in 1909, for these children at a moment of developing sexual knowledge, and in this essay’s effort to contribute to a fuller theory of sexual difference that could adequately speak to the experiences of trans lives.
Cecilia, like many trans children, used fantasy to survive a harsh and violent world. For her, fantasy was a powerful tool to postpone a capitulation to the social order of sexual difference, and its interwoven contexts of mass state terror, predatory sexual abuse, and profound social exclusion. Through her fantasies, she was able to preserve and cultivate something of her desire. Through this desire, Gentili was eventually able to play a powerful and far-reaching role in movements of trans people and sex workers in New York City, touching and transforming the lives of many thousands of trans people and others. Her memoir can be read as an attempt to bring the fierce wisdom of her adult life back into relation with her childhood, with the place of her origin, and with her family in which she could not belong. The child-Cecilia called forth to aliens to rescue her; through her life in trans liberation movements and through the creative act of her testimony, an adult Cecilia responded. Throughout her life in writing, organizing, performing, and speaking, Gentili claimed a radical subjectivity of her own desire, one that demanded and pursued fundamental changes in the social world.
Psychoanalysis, however violent and horrific its history in working with trans people, can also foster a space for articulating trans desire. In the gap between social expectations and private fantasy, between the symbolic order of sexual difference and the imaginary identification of gender idealization, between a normative developmental trajectory and a child’s refusal to confirm, something of the subject’s desire can emerge. By theorizing with and alongside trans life, psychoanalysis can challenge longstanding harms and biases in the field, and rediscover the radical kernel of the practice. In doing so, psychoanalysis can offer something back to trans narratives, returning speech in an inverted form, potential theorizations that can speak to the complexity and richness of trans life. Psychoanalysis is powerfully suited to listen carefully to trans desire, to foster and facilitate its unfolding, aiding the trans subject to speak and act toward the remaking of the world.
Acknowledgements: My thanks to those who read and provided extensive and thoughtful feedback on this essay, especially Loren Dent and Myriam Sauer. Thanks to Vanessa Sinclair for commissioning this piece, and Hannah Zeavin for proposing its publication in Parapraxis. I am grateful to all the narrators of the NYC Trans Oral History Project, who courageously and publicly shared the narratives of their lives, their brilliance, and their wisdom. I also thank Shannon Fawkes for agreeing to a research interview. My deepest gratitude, and to whom this essay is of course dedicated, goes to Cecilia Gentili. May you rest in power.
[1] Throughout, I refer to Cecilia Gentili as Gentili when referencing to her as an adult author and interview narrator, and Cecilia when describing her in childhood, partially in keeping with her self-referencing herself as Cecilia at moments in the memoir.
[2] Gentili’s interview was through the NYC Trans Oral History Project (NYC TOHP), a project discussed further later. NYC TOHP interviews are cited using the three-digit number assigned to their interview in the project, and page numbers from their posted transcripts. NYC TOHP interviews are posted under a Creative Commons license that permits essays like this. All interviews and transcripts can be found online at https://nyctransoralhistory.org.
[3] The differential meanings of “gender” and “sex” have been extensively debated in the fields of feminist politics, queer theory, and sexology. In this essay, I inconsistently put the terms to provisional use to mark a particular distinction—between gender as identification and sex as a categorical place in the social order—without the intent to assert these as general definitions.
[4] This passage is one of a few in Lacan’s work that can be read as compatible with an affirmation of trans experience. For others, see Gherovici’s Transgender Psychoanalysis. Lacan is also widely read, not without reason, as condemnatory of transgender identity, gender transitioning, and trans women. This essay is not meant to defend Freud and Lacan as necessarily in support of trans life, but to identify something in their projects that is of use in making sense of an aspect of trans experience.
[5] A number of its ideas in this section were offered by Loren Dent in response to reading an early draft. Errors are of course my own.