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Horsexe: Essay on Transsexuality
Lacanian study of transexuality, tr Kenneth Hylton
- GenresPsychoanalysisPhilosophy
148 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1989
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August 28, 2011
The author wrote a book on "transsexuality" in 1990 after conducting several interviews with transsexual men but not with any transsexual women. Of the men she interviewed, all except one had already had surgery. She doesn't hint at how she discovered, selected, and interviewed these men. It isn't very clear why she was unable to obtain interviews with women or why she thought it was acceptable to publish a book that denigrates a large class of people without a more significant effort to understand them. Granted, it would have been difficult to find such people pre-Internet, particularly if one is not coming from within that community. But how is one to complete a book without first locating one's real human subjects? Poorly, it turns out.
Exactly what is the "transsexual" she reviles? Sometimes she says that transsexuality is defined by the conviction of being the opposite sex and the demand for sex-reassignment surgery; at other times, she says this is merely a symptom of transsexuality. Although she isn't directly hateful or repulsed by her subjects, she is dismissive of transsexual identity and the choice to have surgery.
There are a few small things to be said in this book's favor. Millot observes that transsexuals speak more dogmatically about their gender before they have surgery because they have to justify their decision to others to ensure that they receive the desired help. She knows that not all transsexual men demand phalloplasty and not all transsexual women are sexually attracted to men. So, not everything in the book is wrong. It's a rant with some creativity and vision, and it's worth a look by those who want to have fun picking it apart. That's the main reason someone should read it.
Delivering a stream of opinions like the ravings of a talk host who has forgotten the topic, Millot has no question driving her research, no hypothesis that can be disproved, no methodology, and no thesis. There is an unintelligible chapter about Lacan. The omnipresent "phallus" as symbol refers to anything from mothers, children, boys, girls, sex, desire, patriarchy, unity, and why transsexuals are evil -- that is to say, as a philosophical concept, this "phallus" is utterly meaningless.
In the bulk of the text, she claims that transsexual women pursue an essentialized feminine ideal "free of doubts or questions" while a transsexual man has a more modest goal of being an ordinary, specific man that nevertheless "identifies with male power". But in her four-page conclusion, she admits that her evidence does not support these claims at all. At the last minute, she proposes a new theory: transsexual women want to be The Woman while transsexual men want to avoid being The Woman. She then opposes these women because they allegedly embrace a sexist stereotype and these men because of the way in which they allegedly reject it. The takeaway message is that transsexuals are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
She venerates Robert Stoller, author of Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity, in a long, jargon-ridden chapter where she claims that the transsexual identity/symptom is somehow Oedipal, and which concludes with an admission that neither she nor Stoller can explain exactly what this Oedipal conflict is. She also admits that, although Stoller considered it to be invariant that transsexual men had "privileged relationships" with their fathers, none of the transsexual men she interviewed reported this experience. Furthermore, Stoller's assertion that transsexuals can't "situate themselves without hesitation as men or as women," which "even perverts and neurotics" can do, is the exact opposite of Millot's claim that they are dogmatic and essentialist about their gender -- and she fails to notice it. Only at the end of the book, when she finally concedes that transsexuals are capable of subtlety, does she proclaim that they really "want to belong to the sex of the angels" and rhetorically asks why transsexual men think they want penises anyway. Thus, she says, the deciding factor for someone who picks a specific kind of gender-variant identity (such as a "transsexual" who gets surgery or a "transvestite" who doesn't) may be just the "market forces of prostitution"--in other words, they'll be whatever their clients want them to be. What is her point: that individuals who she defined as having the personal conviction of belonging to the opposite sex really don't have that conviction at all?
She moralizes that transsexuals ought to learn to accept their bodies without surgery but does not seem aware of the existence of people who actually do so. Bizarrely, when she stumbles across one, she dismisses him as psychotic. And, although she quotes Jan Morris on the burden and embarrassment of androgyny, she remains insensitive to Morris's difficulties, and she complains that surgery annihilated Morris's "privileged in-between status." (If she thinks it's so privileged to go about one's daily life when others can't determine whether one is male or female, she should try living it for a week.)
Most paranoid and cutting is Millot's belief that transsexual women are trying to usurp the status of females in general by providing barren vaginas for insatiable male lust. She all but blames transsexual women for setting back women's liberation and says that these people can never achieve feminist solidarity. She points out passages by two transsexual women who criticize sexism, but then she reminds the reader that these people are psychotic, and she changes the subject. Acknowledging that transsexual women may identify as straight or as lesbian, she insists that, in either case, they have no libido, and their only aim in seeking partners is to validate their own feminine identity. Their attempts to become intimate with other women are "mental rapes." (As this seems to fall in line with a particular "feminist" article of faith that all heterosexual expression is rape, there's little chance of defeating it on rational grounds.)
By contrast, transsexual men (who, according to her, are always straight) must be genuinely attracted to their partners because (according to her) they take pains to mask their true sex. So, for Millot, true attraction breeds deception, and the desire to feel validated and appreciated is libido-annihilating false attraction -- a dim view of human sexuality.
Since she has had limited contact with transsexual people, the intellectual horrors for which she blames them are usually only inconsistencies in her own assumptions. She complains about the sexism that pervades modern society as if it were uniquely the fault of transsexual men. She ridicules transsexual women for possessing definitions, stereotypes, and ideas of womanhood -- as if thinking about gender were wrong, and as if transsexuals were the only ones who do it! Does she avoid essentializing gender when she claims that sex difference is "real," when she insists that its reality endures despite surgery, and when she uses phrases such as "the female position," "consummately feminine ardor," and masturbation in a "feminine way"? Does she avoid stereotyping gender when she defines a group of which she's never even met a flesh-and-blood example? No and nope.
Lastly, if she objects so strenuously to the flamboyance of transsexual women, I want to know who is the transsexual woman who forced her to put a full-frontal nude shot on the cover of her book.
Exactly what is the "transsexual" she reviles? Sometimes she says that transsexuality is defined by the conviction of being the opposite sex and the demand for sex-reassignment surgery; at other times, she says this is merely a symptom of transsexuality. Although she isn't directly hateful or repulsed by her subjects, she is dismissive of transsexual identity and the choice to have surgery.
There are a few small things to be said in this book's favor. Millot observes that transsexuals speak more dogmatically about their gender before they have surgery because they have to justify their decision to others to ensure that they receive the desired help. She knows that not all transsexual men demand phalloplasty and not all transsexual women are sexually attracted to men. So, not everything in the book is wrong. It's a rant with some creativity and vision, and it's worth a look by those who want to have fun picking it apart. That's the main reason someone should read it.
Delivering a stream of opinions like the ravings of a talk host who has forgotten the topic, Millot has no question driving her research, no hypothesis that can be disproved, no methodology, and no thesis. There is an unintelligible chapter about Lacan. The omnipresent "phallus" as symbol refers to anything from mothers, children, boys, girls, sex, desire, patriarchy, unity, and why transsexuals are evil -- that is to say, as a philosophical concept, this "phallus" is utterly meaningless.
In the bulk of the text, she claims that transsexual women pursue an essentialized feminine ideal "free of doubts or questions" while a transsexual man has a more modest goal of being an ordinary, specific man that nevertheless "identifies with male power". But in her four-page conclusion, she admits that her evidence does not support these claims at all. At the last minute, she proposes a new theory: transsexual women want to be The Woman while transsexual men want to avoid being The Woman. She then opposes these women because they allegedly embrace a sexist stereotype and these men because of the way in which they allegedly reject it. The takeaway message is that transsexuals are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
She venerates Robert Stoller, author of Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity, in a long, jargon-ridden chapter where she claims that the transsexual identity/symptom is somehow Oedipal, and which concludes with an admission that neither she nor Stoller can explain exactly what this Oedipal conflict is. She also admits that, although Stoller considered it to be invariant that transsexual men had "privileged relationships" with their fathers, none of the transsexual men she interviewed reported this experience. Furthermore, Stoller's assertion that transsexuals can't "situate themselves without hesitation as men or as women," which "even perverts and neurotics" can do, is the exact opposite of Millot's claim that they are dogmatic and essentialist about their gender -- and she fails to notice it. Only at the end of the book, when she finally concedes that transsexuals are capable of subtlety, does she proclaim that they really "want to belong to the sex of the angels" and rhetorically asks why transsexual men think they want penises anyway. Thus, she says, the deciding factor for someone who picks a specific kind of gender-variant identity (such as a "transsexual" who gets surgery or a "transvestite" who doesn't) may be just the "market forces of prostitution"--in other words, they'll be whatever their clients want them to be. What is her point: that individuals who she defined as having the personal conviction of belonging to the opposite sex really don't have that conviction at all?
She moralizes that transsexuals ought to learn to accept their bodies without surgery but does not seem aware of the existence of people who actually do so. Bizarrely, when she stumbles across one, she dismisses him as psychotic. And, although she quotes Jan Morris on the burden and embarrassment of androgyny, she remains insensitive to Morris's difficulties, and she complains that surgery annihilated Morris's "privileged in-between status." (If she thinks it's so privileged to go about one's daily life when others can't determine whether one is male or female, she should try living it for a week.)
Most paranoid and cutting is Millot's belief that transsexual women are trying to usurp the status of females in general by providing barren vaginas for insatiable male lust. She all but blames transsexual women for setting back women's liberation and says that these people can never achieve feminist solidarity. She points out passages by two transsexual women who criticize sexism, but then she reminds the reader that these people are psychotic, and she changes the subject. Acknowledging that transsexual women may identify as straight or as lesbian, she insists that, in either case, they have no libido, and their only aim in seeking partners is to validate their own feminine identity. Their attempts to become intimate with other women are "mental rapes." (As this seems to fall in line with a particular "feminist" article of faith that all heterosexual expression is rape, there's little chance of defeating it on rational grounds.)
By contrast, transsexual men (who, according to her, are always straight) must be genuinely attracted to their partners because (according to her) they take pains to mask their true sex. So, for Millot, true attraction breeds deception, and the desire to feel validated and appreciated is libido-annihilating false attraction -- a dim view of human sexuality.
Since she has had limited contact with transsexual people, the intellectual horrors for which she blames them are usually only inconsistencies in her own assumptions. She complains about the sexism that pervades modern society as if it were uniquely the fault of transsexual men. She ridicules transsexual women for possessing definitions, stereotypes, and ideas of womanhood -- as if thinking about gender were wrong, and as if transsexuals were the only ones who do it! Does she avoid essentializing gender when she claims that sex difference is "real," when she insists that its reality endures despite surgery, and when she uses phrases such as "the female position," "consummately feminine ardor," and masturbation in a "feminine way"? Does she avoid stereotyping gender when she defines a group of which she's never even met a flesh-and-blood example? No and nope.
Lastly, if she objects so strenuously to the flamboyance of transsexual women, I want to know who is the transsexual woman who forced her to put a full-frontal nude shot on the cover of her book.
April 30, 2022
The few chapters dense on psychoanalytic theory were interesting. Transsexualism as a psychotic structure that binds the RSI is seriously worth considering. As usual, however, Lacan must be rescued from the cult of 'Lacanianism', of which the hysteric Millot worships at the altar. There are interesting, some may even say symptomatic, moments in the first chapter where Millot pokes at the patriarchal assumptions transsexuals (ie: transwomen) form of their perceived gender. Then, with a nudge and sly wink, she asserts that, of course, 'we' know this to not be the case. A rather substantialising move from the sex which does not exist. The last two-thirds of the book are practically unreadable, and will make you forget that Lacan's genius was to decouple Freudian theory from its genital and familial localisations. 'All male transsexuals hate their penis', 'all male transsexuals are loved too much by their mother', 'transsexualism is distinguished from transvestisism by its desire for surgical intervention'. Not even the American ego psychologists were this farcical.
September 10, 2020
this book is Bad but also a stunning example of the way phobic anxieties demolishes one’s ability to form a cogent argument
January 7, 2023
Just bigotry given a rope and left to run off the cliff of complete non comprehension. Viciously transphobic and a willing hemming in of Lacanian thought for plainly ideological and disgust-driven "reasoning".
Embarrassing for her.
Embarrassing for her.
August 7, 2024
This is not a good book. Parts of it are good—Millot’s explanation of the Oedipal process and the psychotic structure is excellent, as is her discussion of the role of the Other in the construction of identity. But her engagement with the issue at hand, the question of the “transsexual symptom” and its relevance to clinic practice, is reductive and sloppily argued.
Initially, Millot is careful to note that transsexuality does not necessarily/inherently involve psychotic symptoms, nor denote a psychotic structure. But only a few pages later she gives her hypothesis as being that the “transsexual symptom” has the “structural function [of providing] a substitution through which psychosis is avoided.” I’m not sure how to marry these two claims together.
According to Millot, it is the psychotic subjects' “demand” for transformation, their identification with “The Woman” that makes it possible---in the absence of the Name-of-the-Father---for them to tie together the R/S/I. But for the neurotic and the perverted subject, who haven’t foreclosed the NotF, the three registers are knotted firmly together already; the Transsexual Symptom does not, and arguably cannot, provide the same function for them. So what is going on here, structurally, for these subjects?
Millot concludes the book by charging the transsexual with “[choosing] not to leave open the question of his desire.” The “other path” that she suggests as an alternative to medical intervention is psychotherapy, the “success” of which seems to be measured in terms of the subject’s ability to question their identities and, crucially, “give up the idea of hormonal and surgical transformation.”
Whether or not this is a justifiable conclusion, Millot does a disservice to her work by refusing to explicitly engage with the premises it rests on. Does gender surgery alwaysrepresent an attempt to intervene at the level of the real, for alltranssexuals? If not, why should we conclude that it is inevitably doomed to fail, that it occurs only at “exorbitant” cost to the subject? And for all that, why should we think that it is the role of the analyst to persuade their patients either way--- why is a treatment only successful when it manages to dislodge transsexual identity?
When discussing her treatment of several “female” transsexuals, Millot reports that “[t]he response to my proposals for discussion” was inevitably met with a “demand for the recognition of transsexuality.” Here, as in the rest of the book, it is hard not to wonder if this uniform response tells us more about the position Millot-as-analyst has adopted with respect to her patients than it does about transsexuality.
Initially, Millot is careful to note that transsexuality does not necessarily/inherently involve psychotic symptoms, nor denote a psychotic structure. But only a few pages later she gives her hypothesis as being that the “transsexual symptom” has the “structural function [of providing] a substitution through which psychosis is avoided.” I’m not sure how to marry these two claims together.
According to Millot, it is the psychotic subjects' “demand” for transformation, their identification with “The Woman” that makes it possible---in the absence of the Name-of-the-Father---for them to tie together the R/S/I. But for the neurotic and the perverted subject, who haven’t foreclosed the NotF, the three registers are knotted firmly together already; the Transsexual Symptom does not, and arguably cannot, provide the same function for them. So what is going on here, structurally, for these subjects?
Millot concludes the book by charging the transsexual with “[choosing] not to leave open the question of his desire.” The “other path” that she suggests as an alternative to medical intervention is psychotherapy, the “success” of which seems to be measured in terms of the subject’s ability to question their identities and, crucially, “give up the idea of hormonal and surgical transformation.”
Whether or not this is a justifiable conclusion, Millot does a disservice to her work by refusing to explicitly engage with the premises it rests on. Does gender surgery alwaysrepresent an attempt to intervene at the level of the real, for alltranssexuals? If not, why should we conclude that it is inevitably doomed to fail, that it occurs only at “exorbitant” cost to the subject? And for all that, why should we think that it is the role of the analyst to persuade their patients either way--- why is a treatment only successful when it manages to dislodge transsexual identity?
When discussing her treatment of several “female” transsexuals, Millot reports that “[t]he response to my proposals for discussion” was inevitably met with a “demand for the recognition of transsexuality.” Here, as in the rest of the book, it is hard not to wonder if this uniform response tells us more about the position Millot-as-analyst has adopted with respect to her patients than it does about transsexuality.
September 1, 2016
A waste of my limited time on this world that is functionally "The Man Who Would Be Queen" but somehow worse.
March 13, 2020
bizarre book. millot identifies MtFs as examples of Lacanian psychosis, attempting to castrate themselves as sacrifice ('proven' by historical eunuch cults, and caused by small-scale communal acceptance) to overcome confused oedipal-gender boundaries. Her view essentially seems to claim MtFs are entirely autogynephilic in response to bad mother-son relationships, and reduce femininity to lack-of-phallus (she calls this metonymy). Conversely, FtMs she understands as having legitimate dysphoria, or rather innate discomfort with femininity (accepted for reasons she doesnt explain) and that they are usually functional and comfortable as men (whereas for Millot, MtFs are deluded prostitutes). She concludes that FtMs may signify an angelic third gender (for no given reason other than that complete transition seems impossible) and that they only chose being male to avoid being female. In all this is a product of the uglier side of the psychoanalytic academia in 80s, hinting at but failing to coherently argue contemporary TERF posotions, nor succeeding at either utilizing her lacanian tenets or explaining the trans phenomena. I still really like the title, but it was a choice by the translator and not millot herself.
September 28, 2025
This text is incredible and predicts the current state of gender relations legally and culturally about 40 years early. Everyone giving this book 1 star is either illiterate, unfamiliar with the psychoanalytic canon (psychosis is not a pathological categorization, there is no normative healthy structure), an idiot or intellectually dishonest and are probably misogynistic to boot given that Deleuze has a similar premise (becoming woman being tied to schbreber's psychosis) and everyone cheers ?
June 1, 2022
Requires strong familiarity with analytic theory and literature and Lacan's work, without such background you will end up like the other reviewers here: lost and confused.
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