Women & Queer Psychoanalysts, No. 5.
Avgi Saketopoulou, Greek-American psychoanalyst practicing in New York, Avenali Chair in the Humanities at UC Berkeley (2025–2026), and one of the key figures bringing Laplanche's theory to the United States.
She and Ann Pellegrini co-wrote a paper, submitted it to the oldest journal in international psychoanalysis, and won the inaugural Tiresias Prize. Then they added a footnote: welcoming transgender subjects into psychoanalysis and acknowledging the harm the field has done to queer and trans people. The journal told them to remove it. They refused. The book that was never supposed to exist — Gender Without Identity (2023) — was born from that refusal.
Sexuality Beyond Consent, published the same year, went further: people are drawn back to the places that once hurt them. Not out of self-destruction, but because the old translation has gone rigid, and only by being shattered can a new one begin.
She co-founded P-HOLE (Psychoanalytic Hub for Online Liberatory Education), a queer psychoanalytic education platform with over 500 students across 45 countries. In 2025, a canceled talk on transgender experience turned into a 500-person gathering that raised $60,000 in a single evening.
That night, she said to the trans people in the room: Find your own people.