Women & Queer Psychoanalysts, No. 7.
Griffin Hansbury, transgender man, psychoanalyst in New York.
At twelve, he saw a transgender woman for the first time, outside the post office in his hometown. He rode his bicycle all over town looking for her. He never found her. Thirty years later, he wrote the scene into a novel — what the woman taught the protagonist was not "you can change too," but "you already are."
Psychoanalysis spent a century writing about trans people: from pathologizing, to suspicion, to cautious "openness." Hansbury was the first openly transgender man to publish a paper in a psychoanalytic journal. The title was "The Masculine Vaginal" — detaching "vaginal" from the female body and returning it to all genders. Another paper, "Unthinkable Anxieties," traced a hundred years of cisgender analysts' fears when encountering trans patients. The problem was never the patient — it was the analyst's anxiety that could not be thought.
He began testosterone injections in 1995. He spent a decade writing about the gentrification of New York under the pen name Jeremiah Moss, until he came out under his real name. He said: "I have to keep writing, otherwise I can't feel myself."