M. E. O’Brien, Trans Childhoods and the Family Romance

“Trans Childhoods and the Family Romance” explores the role of fantasies among trans and gender non-conforming children of belonging elsewhere as a form of what Freud called “the family romance.” Using material from trans first person accounts with a focus on the experimental memoir of trans activist Cecilia Gentili, the essay explores the use of family romance fantasies in trans children reconciling their emergent experiences of gender with conflicting social expectations. The family romance offers a way of theorizing the subject’s encounters with the symbolic order as articulated in questions of gender difference and biological origins.

M. E. O’Brien is a writer and psychoanalyst in formation in New York City. She has two books, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto, 2023) and the co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She is an editor at Pinko, a magazine of gay communism. She previously completed her PhD at NYU, writing on queer social movements and capitalism. Currently, she works as a private practice psychotherapist, a licensed clinical social worker, and a psychoanalytic candidate at Pulsion.

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