Gender Without Identity

Winner of the 2024 Silver Medal for LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Offers a radical theory of gender formation and its ongoing mutations

Gender Without Identity challenges the argument widely embraced by rights activists and many members of the LGBTQ+ community that gender identity is innate and immutable. Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini chart another path towards the flourishing of queer and trans life. Positing that the idea of an innate core gender identity is simplistic, problematic, and, even, potentially harmful to LGBTQ+ people, they instead argue that gender is something all subjects acquire.

Trauma, they provocatively propose, sometimes has a share in that acquisition. In their way of thinking, lived trauma as well as structural and intergenerationally transmitted traumatic debris may become a resource for transness and queerness. Such a suggestion importantly counters conservative accounts that identify trauma as disrupting or “warping” some putatively “normal” gender. Rooted in the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, in queer and trans of color critique, and in the authors’ extensive clinical experience with queer and trans people, Gender Without Identity offers a radical theory of gender formation and its ongoing mutations.