ABSTRACT
While popular debate revolves around such everyday issues as access to public toilets and whether or not children should wear gender neutral clothes at school, a cognitive analytic understanding of gender diversity in all its social, political and historical complexity is discussed in this chapter.
It explores the inter- and intra-personal issues associated with gender diversity, and how CAT therapists can think about and work with these issues within the wider context in which they exist. A particular focus is the conflicting attitudes of governments, the medical profession and society in general towards gender diversity and how this affects the lives of gender variant people. The particular ‘knots’ that tie up the lives and identities of those whose gender does not conform to the binary ‘norm’ are described and some of the particular strands are disentangled.
Clinical case material is used to illustrate how this complexity might be addressed in therapeutic work from a CAT perspective. A CAT understanding of the self as socially formed is used to reformulate an understanding of historically constricting societal and medical views of sex and gender through to the present today.
