ABSTRACT In this article, we offer a psychoanalytic reading of controversies over “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (popularly known as ROGD), defined as a sudden expression of gender dysphoria in late adolescence and young adulthood where there had not purportedly been evidence of childhood dysphoric experience. We begin by tracing the emergence of the term in relation to contemporary debates about gender, free speech, and academic freedom. Turning to the psychoanalytic concept of free association, we reframe speech as bound to the unconscious and theorize the ethical qualities of animating this linkage in relation to discussions of gender diversity and ROGD in particular. Our discussion supports theorists, clinicians, parents, teachers, and other caring adults who encounter the term to distinguish between collective anxiety and the labor of thought that involves working through feelings of coming undone in the undoing of cisgender.

The scholarly literature on transgender children spans many disciplines including medicine, law, humanities, the social sciences, and the emergent field of transgender studies. However, the most contentious discipline to claim epistemological ownership over knowledge of the trans child is psychology. In 1980, “Transsexualism” as well as the accompanying child diagnosis, “Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood” (GIDC), first entered the lexicon of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), thereby setting transgender children on a trajectory of being understood in Western discourse as mentally disordered. The DSM, published by the American Psychiatric Association, sets out a common international language and the standard criteria for the classification and diagnosis of all mental disorders and therefore has wide implications for governing the legal, social, and medical experience of trans people. Refusing the construction of gender variance as disordered, a growing chorus of voices in recent years has contested the pathologization of transgender lives and the dominance of medical-scientific narratives about trans experience. Many parents of transgender children, trans adults, and trans children themselves have become outspoken activists, demanding authentic supports and safe spaces for children whose gender expression diverges from their natal sex and the socially constructed meanings attributed to this sex. In turn, scholars, particularly in the field of transgender studies, have interrogated the assumptions that tie particular gender expressions and identifications to biology. Rather than confine the debate about trans children to how they should be psychologically or medically treated, these scholars challenge the social and cultural forces that regulate bodies and restrict or enable diverse forms of gender expression and embodiment. The struggle of trans people, youth, and children for the right to a gender existence not threatened by pathologization, violence, and exclusion may be read as one of the defining questions of our time and is one that is still rapidly unfolding.

The papers of this panel apply psychoanalytic concepts to examine how representations of childhood and adolescence may provide insights into the ways that subjectivities are shaped by discourse, fantasy, and memory. A coming-of-age film about an intersex adolescent is analyzed to critique discourses of

Cast No Shadow (2015) tells the story of 13-year-old Jude Traynor, a kid deemed by his rural community to be a “delinquent” who ruins lives and never sticks to his word. The film opens on a roaring...

One of the very great services a journal can perform is to provide collegial feedback to authors. We are especially fortunate for the quality of reviews done and frequently receive plaudits from authors who appreciate the detailed critique of their work. We pass these along when we can. We believe that this service to individuals and to the journal is also a service in the field. This listing is our way of publicly acknowledging our reviewers’ contributions. To all our reviewers from 1 July 2015 to 30 June 2016, thank you.

This paper draws on psychoanalytic theories of embodiment to theorize the child's creative use of objects and signs to represent a gendered sense of self. Turning to Winnicott's concept of "true self," we extend this symbolic labour to the transgender child to illustrate the psychic processes of embodiment that contribute to a meaningful gendered existence otherwise obstructed by social hatred and transphobia. Through a reading of the film Tomboy, we discuss the conditions needed to support the child's representation of transgender as creative, which, while unique, is also a human act of symbolization.

Editorial for Issue 10, Number 2 (2012).

Hannah Arendt articulates natality as the very "essence of education." Natality expresses the unique capacity of each person to bring about something new in relation to an inherited world. Education's difficult work, in Arendt's view, is not only to introduce students to the truths of the world as it is, but also to nurture the capacity to make this world become something new. But what are the psychic difficulties inherent in allowing subjects to become new people in the aftermath of social traumas such as gender, class and racial inequality? Arguing against educational approaches that universalize identity, I suggest that an ethos of forgiveness supports a cosmopolitan educational project, which articulates the necessity of responsibility across social difference and beyond inherited notions of group belonging. Forgiveness does not replace the demand for justice, a concern that worries many critical educators, but opens us to the interpretive work of forgings new meaning, and new forms of ethical sociality, from the site of difficulty. Forgiveness's work in education is not to dictate a particular sanctioned position, but to generate the conditions for subjects-both perpetrators and victims of social injustices-to continue reconstituting themselves as individuals in the process of becoming. Taking up Clement Virgo's feature film Poor Boy's Game (2007), which explores the aftermath of a devastating racist incident, I suggest that cultural production, which gives narrative voice to the difficult affects of social trauma, offers a curricular model for engaging with the, at times unthinkable, possibility

Informed by the critical humanisms of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy, the authors argue for an orientation to teaching and learning that troubles the continuing effects of dehumanizing race logic. Reflecting on Paul Haggis's Oscar award winning film Crash from 2004, they suggest that the metaphor of racial ‘crashing’ captures what happens when we act out from experiences of racial injury instead of being touched by it. They propose a psychoanalytic pedagogy of emotions as a method for reading representation beyond the limits of detached rational critique. Learning from the affect of racial injury as it is made manifest in representation, they suggest, is an important ethical starting point for generating new insights into what it might mean to live within and beyond contemporary legacies of racial hatred.