ABSTRACT
Gender identity refers to how we experience and express our gender whereas sex refers to a biological differentiation that underpins the cultural attribution of gender roles. Whist biological sex is binary, gender need not be constructed as such. This chapter briefly outlines some of the more prominent classical and contemporary psychoanalytic views on transgender. Classical theorists have typically conceptualised transsexuality within a normative essentialist position reading it homogeneously as only a sign of psychopathology. A very generative source of thinking on the subject originates from North American analysts. A theoretical conceptualisation of transgender in 2021 cannot be reduced to either a pathology or a creative act in any absolute sense in all cases.
