Cisteria!: A Psychoanalysis against Anti-Trans Panics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article introduces a special issue on trans lives within psychoanalysis, theorizing two interlinked concepts: transpectres, the caricatured figures that haunt and produce gendered life; and cisteria, a defensive formation that organizes contemporary anti-trans panics. Drawing on histories of hysteria within and beyond psychoanalysis, it relocates pathology away from trans subjectivity, toward ciscentric psychology and its associated structures of power. The analysis traces how state security regimes—such as the trope of the “trans terrorist” as “Nihilistic Violent Extremist”—consolidate authoritarian control while generating lethal conditions for trans life. The authors develop “threat psychoanalysis” as a trans method, reading cisteria across intrapsychic, relational, and sociopolitical registers while refusing respectability politics or demands to prove trans innocence. The article concludes by introducing the special issue’s contributors, whose clinical, theoretical, and creative interventions co-imagine a shared transpsychoanalytic experiment in play, feeling, critique, and shared world-making.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".