As a trans person stuck in a highly transmed, gatekeepy and pathologizing healthcare system, i’ve been through my share of psychotherapists (not really, i will have to go through at least two more ffs) and Freudians are the fucking worst. I mean, that’s not entirely correct, Jungians appear to be the same but nazi and i’m glad i never had a run-in with one of those freaks, but jfc do Freudians make my skin crawl. And when i ask around in local trans groups, hey, what’s your experience with this and that guy, yeah, the psychoanalytically oriented ones aren’t the ones any of us trust.

I get it, he’s got some nice ideas when he’s not doing his straight ass pulls and blatant mysogyny, he’s also an excellent prose writer and the charm of his Vienesse German even carries over into the English translations, i can give him credit for a lot of things. A lot of things outside of psychology. Yes, he was right about the constructedness of social norms, but you do not need Freud for that, any psychologist with the tiniest bit of background in leftist acedemia understands that part already, it’s been kind of at the center of all humanities for the last decades. Psychology doesn’t need more Freud, it needs more intersectional anticapitalism to understand that some people just have entirely different experiences than those within the normative framework that defines the illusion of normalcy in our system. And i know a psychologist who does that, and she’s got nothing to do with Freud, she just does the usual evidence-based cognitive behavorial therapy slop, but she’s read enough feminist theory and queer theory and anti-racist theory to understand where her biases lie and how to treat people correctly when their very existence is at odds with how society is “supposed” to work, and i’ve never seen anything like that from a Freudian, even though there’s ofc Freudian leftists. But even those appear to be permanently stuck with overvaluing and centering the experience and the intellectual idiosyncrasies of a single cishet dude that are just super fucking misleading about how the human mind works, that perpetuate a very lopsided and hierarchical doctor-patient relation and that mostly work on making the wildest assumptions about your patients and always one-upping and controlling them.

the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.

I can’t agree with this at all, as an ethnic minority I have seen way too many reactionaries among those who have been oppressed their entire lives.

Being a minority and having direct experience of discrimination do increase one’s revolutionary potential, but class also plays a substantial role (I’d argue an even larger one just from personal experience) as well as the ideological superstructures being imposed upon us.

Ultimately there are a lot of collaborationists across every segment of minorities, both within the imperial core and in the global south.

i feel like its generally the case. the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.

In my experience this depends on stealth vs not-stealth. The stealth people wanting to blend and capable of it tend to deradicalise because they can fit into existing society, those that can not tend to hyper-radicalise because they need society to change for them.

Both you and Tastysnack clearly have the best interest of yourselves and fellow trans comrades at heart. Sometimes passions can run hot, and we are reminded of the importance of solidarity. <3

❤️

I thought you were using “their” as plural possessive, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been in an English class, ha. What’s important is that I understand you’re respecting people’s pronouns, regardless of the holes in our knowledge of grammar. :)