Unfaithful Representations Are the Worst When They Pass As Unbiased

May 29, 2025

Overthinking Transgender by Laura Nelson is an incredibly smart but absolutely brutal takedown of Žižek’s piece for The Independent. I highly recommend this article; it ruthlessly deconstructs the “LGBT+ ideologist” strawman used by many psychoanalysis puritans, among which some of the Žižek fanboys are arguably much more misinformed than Žižek himself.

The article raises some pretty incredible but probably obvious points, such as how “LGBT+ ideologists”, in fact, don’t think the landscape of human relationships will be all unicorns and rainbows without the omnimalevolent patriarchy. Despite I don’t think quoting Freud here is particularly fitting, it makes perfect sense that misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia add insult to injury in the sense that their deafening voices definitely can be toned down by a number of ways, and that (most gay and trans) relationships, whether with an other, multiple others, or with the self are already never-ending Sisyphean struggles even without all the discrimination. I myself am very interested in psychoanalysis; I am in analysis, and sometimes I can’t resist the urge to think about problems in a Lacanian lens. Therefore, the apparent naïveness (or worse, paranoia) regarding transgender subjects of many psychoanalytic theorists is very amusing to me.

The main argument I want to restate and develop a bit further here is how unfaithful representations are not inherently harmful, but have the potential to be incredibly misleading when they are perceived, or “pass” as unbiased and general narratives.

This argument is worth remembering for several reasons. The most obvious one is in response to reactions of reactions (I know, the worst kind of alliteration) to mass culture (mis)representations of minorities. People are often weirded out by the idea that merely representing minorities is not enough, and how more progressive activists call for diversity and nuance. “We made a movie about gay/trans/disabled people”, they often say, “and it’s becoming a part of mass culture, is that not enough”? However, it is often the exact problem that a piece of media made for mass culture, as a type of representation, is becoming a part of mass culture. It often encourages outright batshit, if not fundamentally misleading stereotypes even if they genuinely tried to preserve nuance.

Besides circumstances where there are explicit statements of generalization, as it is often seen in documentaries, most people will subconsciously generalize once a piece of media gets popular enough. In addition, something made for mass culture is more likely to succeed in mass culture. A narrative constructed by someone identifying with the mass culture is more likely to be understood by the general population. Media appealing to a perverse pursuit of novelty is more likely to be remembered by the average Joe. Despite being somewhat unavoidable, this is not fine at all in mass culture, but it becomes, I repeat, outright batshit when scholars allow them to seep into their works, constructing complex arguments based on the worst kind of stereotypes.

This is completely counterintuitive considering how obsessed psychoanalysts (at least those I consider to be clinically competent analysts) are with case-by-case, emergent, and developing analyses. It is hard to judge if what is being analyzed is a real, living community of people, an adequately accurate and nuanced profile, or a phantom strawman of a stereotype. People are often so confident when the analysand cannot respond; people are often so confident when the opposition is muted.

So, what constitutes as overthinking, as described in the article? There is certainly much more thought to be had regarding transgender subjects. When the thoughts are based on stereotypical assumptions, however, any amount of thought exceeding the nuance as represented in the stereotype it is based on becomes, in fact, a criminally obvious (and criminally misleading) case of overthinking.

This is a short-short article in a series of short-short opinion pieces. Ideas are of my own except when they are not.