Beyond the binary: Essays in gender. By ShariThurer, United Kingdom: Phoenix Publishing House, 2023, 124 pp. £15.99. ISBN 978‐1‐912691‐87‐6

The publication of Beyond the Binary, edited by Shari Thurer, is a welcomed development in an emerging area of psychoanalytic study on non-binary gender identities. Beyond the Binary is a product of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute's (BSPI) Library Committee. At the behest of the Library Committee, Thurer was tasked with forming a group to study ‘the history of the BPSI's and the larger analytic community's changing views on homosexuality (sic)’ (Teusch 2023, xv). This book on psychoanalysis and gender non-binary identities was the result of this study group and the fourth in the series from the BSPI. The direction and impetus for compiling this work are important. Few psychoanalytic resources are available on non-binary gender identities. In fact, there is a deficit in psychoanalytic research regarding gender non-binary identities and experiences. As such, this was a monumental undertaking. Beyond the Binary attempts a counter-discourse in the midst of a massive anti-trans movement. In the past few years, transgender identities have been at the centre of political conflict. In the United States, states across the nation have passed hundreds of anti-LGBTQ laws, with a strong focus against transgender people. Anti-transgender politicians have pushed to limit access for transgender people from policing bathroom use, restricting access to HRT, to limiting access to identification cards that reflect their gender identities. Of critical importance for clinical professions, laws now exist purporting to protect children by limiting access to health care for gender transition. At the core of this anti-trans movement is bigotry against transgender people. This wave of bigotry has had a tremendous effect on the lives of transgender people. In the United Kingdom, a similar series of events has unfolded with anti-trans legislation fronted by politicians purporting to protect women and children from transgender people. Under such intense political pressure, the psychoanalytic field needs unflinchingly courageous books organized around these topics. However, the resulting text, Beyond the Binary, has left much to be desired. Rather than providing a detailed account and presentation of the central issues faced by non-binary people, the book reads as though it is a project report from a DEI committee made up of mostly cis gender people. Perhaps the central idea is most clearly stated by Harry Spence and Robin Ely, ‘We count ourselves probably too old to expect to alter that reflex [to gender people] in this lifetime, but we are sympathetic to the urge to diminish, even abolish it’ (Spence and Ely 2023, 68). While demonstrating an openness to cultural shifts around the gender binary, with a few exceptions, the volume reads as rather out of touch with the gender non-binary experience. Setting the tone as the first chapter, ‘Psychoanalysis Meets They’ by Shari Thurer spends 9 out of the 23-page chapter on a glossary that includes multiple outdated and potentially offensive terms (Thurer 2023, 5–13). Although some of the terms may be helpful for clinicians uneducated in LGBTQ identities, others are not terms people outside of specific communities should not use or are just plain wrong. For example, Thurer includes the terms like ‘aggressive’, ‘boi’, ‘butch’ and ‘stud’ that are truly not the kind of language a person wants to hear from a clinician outside of their community. Similarly, terms included such as ‘QTPOC’ in the book should be shifted to the more inclusive widely used ‘QTBIPOC’, and terms like ‘crossdresser’, defined in the text as ‘individuals who present their gender in ways that are traditionally associated with people of a gender different from how they were assigned at birth’ (Thurer 2023, 7), are often considered offensive by trans people. Curiously, the terms central to the book such as ‘gender non-binary’ and ‘gender non-conforming’ do not even appear. The result is a chapter that reads as written by someone who does not understand LGBTQ communities. The volume contains two personal accounts by gender non-binary people. First, Robin Haas provides an autobiographical narrative on their coming to terms with being non-binary. Next, Francesca Ely-Spence provides details of their experience and thoughts on coming out as gender non-binary. These personal narratives are essential to grasping the complexities of non-binary experience, and Haas and Ely-Spence's bravery in self-disclosure is of note. However, the insight these authors provide is rather problematically interrogated in the chapters that follow their respective contributions. In the chapter following Haas, Rita Teusch psychoanalyses the narrative in ‘A Clinical Reflection on Being Non-Binary’, and although identifying Haas' traumatic experience of gender misidentifications and concluding that clinicians should not pathologize non-binary identities, the analysis by Teusch denies Haas's agency and self-knowledge and instead leaves the reader with the feeling that the analyst knows best, not the individual themself. This is incredibly damaging and only reinforces the negative belief that those who are gender non-binary, gender non-conforming or trans do not truly know themselves. They are instead presented as confused and in need of an outside force to translate their own personal experiences. We are not sure of the utility of such a narrative. It feels incredibly dismissive and reasserts oppressive hierarchies within psychoanalytic practice, which seems antithetical to the overall project of the book. In the chapter, following Ely-Spence, their parents Harry Spence and Robin Ely discuss their ‘Thoughts by parents of a non-binary individual’. In this chapter, they discuss their difficulties in understanding Ely-Spence's non-binary experience. The resulting picture painted between the personal narratives and responses appears to develop an estranged and tense relationship between psychoanalysis and non-binary experience. By far, the most pertinent and insightful entry to this volume is Oren Gozlan's chapter titled ‘Transsexual bibliography’ (Gozlan 2023, 87–99). Gozlan provides a detailed interdisciplinary bibliography of contemporary and influential books and articles on gender transition. Although Gozlan uses the somewhat outdated and misapplied title ‘transsexuality’ (87–99) to describe the work, a common term used in psychoanalytic literature for transgender subjectivity, the articles and books provided are wide ranging and robust, covering many of the most critical texts on transgender experience. Gozlan's bibliography is a welcome contribution that can form a strong research programme for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between gender identity, sexual orientation and the emergence of gender non-binary experience. The authors of the other chapters would have done well had they begun after educating themselves from this bibliography. It is uncontroversial to state that psychoanalysis has committed injustices against LGBTQ people. These harms are well documented and widely discussed within contemporary psychoanalytic literature. In the United States, it was not until 1999 that the American Psychoanalytic Association issued formal opposition statements to conversion and reparative therapies (Drescher, 2008). It was not until 2019 that the American Psychoanalytic Association issued an ‘Overdue Apology to LGBTQ Community’ for its role in pathologizing ‘homosexual and transgender identities’ (APsaA, 2019). In the United Kingdom, the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) issued its first non-discrimination statement in 2011 regarding the analytic training of ‘homosexual orientation’ (BPC, 2021). However, it was not until 2021 that the BPC issued a ‘Statement of Regret’ for its treatment of ‘homosexual’ people (BPC, 2021). At the same time, unlike these apologies and recognitions of harms for ‘homosexual orientations’, psychoanalytic societies have continued to allow transgender people to be the object of debate. While the intent of these statements and apologies sought to make amends with LGBTQ people, the impact has instead deepened divisions within psychoanalytic thought on differences between the ‘homosexual orientations’ and ‘transsexuality’. Public discourse on treatment has brought psychoanalysis to the fore through the controversies around the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) for treatment of transgender youth. This controversy came to a head in 2020 when former patient of the GIDS, Keira Bell, sued Tavistock and Portman for her treatment of gender dysphoria, which she claimed was unable to consent to as a 16-year-old minor. Although Bell lost her case on appeal in 2021, the controversy ultimately resulted in Tavistock and Portman shuttering the GIDS in 2023 and greatly altered the provision of NHS services. Most recently, the release of Hillary Cass' (2024) NHS commissioned report on transition services for children and young people in April of 2024 has influenced new NHS policy to greatly restrict the use of gender affirming treatments for trans youth. Such decisions to curtail the provision of gender-affirming services are highly political. Given the sordid history of psychoanalytic treatment of LGBTQ people and our contemporary push to rectify historical injustices, psychoanalytic practitioners should oppose such mistreatment of transgender people. At the same time, psychoanalysis has perpetrated these harms against the LGBTQ community, little attention has been given to gender identities and experiences outside of the gender binary. For us, the writers of this review, this hits home. One of us, Yola Gomez is a trans man, and other is gender non-binary, Paddy Farr. For these reasons, Beyond the Binary helps to fill a gap in psychoanalytic understanding that has been greatly neglected. Unfortunately, although the book holds a lot of promise, it is not the book we have been waiting for.