From Moral Malevolence to Autonomous Performance

What does it mean to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex within social contexts that present simplistic, often banal, definitions of gender and presume heterosexuality as the norm? Various coalitions of lesbian, feminist, gay, and more recently gender ambiguity liberation movements have sought to address these questions from an activist stance. The landscape of psychotherapeutic theory as it applies to gender and sexuality has the chance of being reshaped by over three decades of activism and liberation. This article seeks to contribute to a transactional analytic framework for understanding and working with gender and sexuality by referring to contemporary ideas from outside our discipline, in particular, queer theory. The discussion involves a queer examination and critique of selected transactional analysis literature and a guide to a transactional analytic therapy informed by queer concepts for clients of nonheteronormative sex/gender/desire.