As the papers collected in this issue of Sitegeist demonstrate, thinking otherwise and resisting mainstream discourse, does not come without significant risks and challenges. The conference proved to be emotionally taxing and intellectually provocative. How to strike the balance between retaining the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis to explore trans and genderqueer experiences, whilst not allowing this framework and perspective to cancel out those very experiences and identities? What, for that matter, would such a balance even look like? It is one thing to have theoretical differences – a preference for phenomenology, a greater accent on object relations, an insistence on Lacanian metapsychology – and quite another thing when these differences directly bear upon the nature of an identity that has borne witness to a history of marginalisation, silencing and pathologization. The risk for unintended symbolic violence, of colonising the experience of another with an alien language and thereby setting up an ‘us and them’ dichotomy, was pervasive. However, if trans and genderqueer experiences risked being subsumed by psychoanalysis – and the history of its encounter with psychoanalysis attests to this fact – then the opposite was equally true: how might psychoanalysis open itself up to being reconfigured by trans and genderqueer experiences, without also losing its identity?
It is this mutual dialectic for both psychoanalysis and the trans and genderqueer experience, between the losing and retaining of identity, that this special edition of Sitegeist aims to capture something of, negotiating a perilous ethical and political path that is the open encounter with respective otherness, that seeks to understand without such understanding doing violence. All the pieces collected in the edition speak eloquently for themselves, so there is no need to summarise and introduce them. The papers presented in this volume, from Dina Al-Kassim, Henry Strick, Sheila Cavanagh, Damian McCann and Juliet Jacques, were all presented at the conference. In their very divergent preoccupations, forms and styles, they all reflect something of the variety of thinking-through and responding to this ‘perilous path’, addressing many different questions raised by the trans and genderqueer experience, clinically, politically and theoretically.
Unfortunately, due to prior publishing commitments elsewhere, we were not able to include papers presented to the conference by Domenico Di Ceglie, Julie Walsh and Dany Nobus, that further fan out the breadth of critical, creative, clinical and theoretical positions that were represented over the two days. However, we are delighted that, in the latter section, we are able to introduce two outstanding new papers, from trainee-clinicians at The Site, who were involved with either running the conference or who have subsequently responded to the conference. The first is a paper by Laura Chernaik, reflecting on the contribution she made to the conference art exhibition, using this as a jumping-off point from which to freshly theorise aspects of non-binary identities, in conversation with Donna Harraway, Lacan, Bion and others. The second is a piece by Guy Millon, detailing and reflecting upon some of the challenging experiences and dilemmas that he has encountered working in a Gender Identity Clinic service in the South West of the U.K.