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In response to the paper "Nicki, Nicholas, Nicole: Play as Relational Therapeutic Action on the Transgender Edge," Virginia Goldner and Charla Malamed have offered supportive comments and important critiques. Goldner has raised questions about the process of mourning gendered self-states that present themselves earlier in development. This paper, as a response to the respondents, puts Goldner's questions in dialogue with the concepts of après coup and psychic time, problematizing notions about what is past and present vis-à-vis varying gender configurations. Malamed links my lack of explicit disclosure around certain positionalities to creating a space that was dangerous for therapeutic play. Here, I take issue with the concreteness of that position, suggesting that the intersubjective fabric of a treatment—and subsequent democratization of the clinical relationship—is a more appropriate benchmark for evaluating the potential for exploitative dynamics. The nature of risk and safety in clinical encounters is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalytic thinking about gender is shifting in new and exciting ways. Over the past several decades, theories from feminist and queer studies have found their way into psychoanalytic theorizing, challenging heretofore bedrock notions around binary gender and Oedipal development. Even more recently, queer theories of trans phenomenon and the experience of transgender patients and analysts have been receiving attention in the literature. This paper expands on these developments, positing that traumatic—particularly transphobic—experience can have a foreclosing impact on softly assembled gender states, and that play within the psychoanalytic relationship can reawaken traumatically collapsed gender states. Special attention is paid to gender states that exist on the "transgender edge." In considering such experiences, the paper underscores the importance of an ethos of fluidity, fluctuation and movement rather than a phased, vectored developmental identity model in thinking about non-normative gender experience. The potential utility of such an ethos for all persons, regardless of identity, is also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]