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Everybody speaks about gender and gender theory. It is amazing that nobody is concerned by the origin of the modern meaning of gender. Gender appears in English in the 14th century, and comes from the French gendre. An ancient meaning of gender, almost forgotten, the state of being a male or a female, reappears modified in 1955. Nobody, neither dictionaries nor books entirely dedicated to gender, quotes the founding text of John Money. For various reasons, Money is now discredited. But the main reason is the conve nience to use gender as a joker; everybody can use it, giving it the meaning which serves one's ideology. It could be the relationship between sexes, or the feminine condition, or the critic of social norms; it will be the denial of biological reality: human procreation is sexed. Gender is simply the social status based on sex constructed by all societies, either they recognize two sexes or more. These statutes include always arbitrary clauses. Chiefly "a differential valence", a belittling of women. Nevertheless the existence of sex differences cannot be denied: inequality of rights only begins when differences are prioritized. Changing biological sex is impossible; but social statutes can be invented for difficult situations, created by biology or other cause, that hurt people: disorders of sex development, transsexualism, etc. But to claim that the choice of biological sex is a human right is an aberration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When four-year-old Antoine walked into my consulting-room, I was far from imagining that he would plunge me, at my own risk, into the cauldron in which LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersexed and Queer) culture is concocted. Queer in English has connotations of "bizarre" and was used to stigmatize homosexuals before being proudly taken up, first by homosexuals themselves, then in transgender circles as a characterization of an undifferentiated identity, with no specific sex/gender, or with one or the other, or with both simultaneously. It could be said that being queer means that one has got rid of gender, experienced as a straitjacket. Antoine wanted to be a girl ; he began to show me how one's sexed identity is constructed. Freud had explored sexuality and issues related to sex ; gender identity had not at that time been invented. It was invented in 1955 by John Money, who is so disparaged nowadays. The term became so widely used that it ended up denying biological reality. Two years earlier, in 1953, Harry Benjamin had coined another term that really caught on - "transsexualism" - to describe the irrepressible feeling of not belonging to the sex in which one was born and the wish to change one's sex via a hormono-surgical transformation of one's body. Then things moved away from the "transsexual phenomenon" to the polymorphous "transgender movement", leading to the claim that the choice of one's sex/gender is a human right. Every child has the right to choose whether to be a boy or a girl. The freedom to choose one's sex is put into the same category as that of choosing one's object of sexual love. What can psychoanalysts do in the face of such a tidal wave ? They have no power to stem it, but perhaps they can make it easier to understand [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]