





















































For an Epistemology of Transition: Paul B. Preciado, Psychoanalysis and the Regime of Sexual Difference


Elementa
Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology 
and Empirical Perspectives

2 
(2022) 

1-2

Transitions

Edited by Tommaso Sgarro

First Section

Tommaso Sgarro
Editorial I – Transitions: New and Different Perspectives 9

Tommaso Sgarro
The Human “Historicity” as a Permanent Transition 13 
in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría

Luis Roca Jusmet
François Jullien: The Double Transit of Human Life 27

Jordi Riba Miralles
The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis 37

Alessia Franco
For an Epistemology of Transition: Paul B. Preciado, 51 
Psychoanalysis and the Regime of Sexual Difference

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Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives

Second Section

Tommaso Sgarro
Editorial II – Governing Transitions 67

Pierpaolo Limone - Maria Grazia Simone
Becoming Support Teachers at the University of Foggia 71 
During the Pandemic. An Exploratory Survey

Francesca Finestrone
Music: For a Sustainable Community and the Promotion 85 
of Well-being

Gennaro Balzano - Vito Balzano
Educating for Transition in Work Contexts 101

Giuseppina Maria Patrizia Surace
The Future We Want: The Transition to Adulthood 111 
of Unaccompanied Minors

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For an Epistemology of Transition: 
Paul B. Preciado, Psychoanalysis 
and the Regime of Sexual Difference
Alessia Franco
Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro” (Italy)

doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2022-0102-fran
 alessiafranco1990@gmail.com

Abstract

This paper aims to illustrate Paul B. Preciado’s thought on the epistemology of transi-
tion, which should take over from the current epistemological regime of sexual differ-
ence based on heterobinarism. Starting in particular from the lecture given by Preciado 
in Paris in 2019, we intend to focus on the main axes of Preciado’s thought on the 
topic: first and foremost, the necessity of the denaturalization of gender with respect to 
biological sex; the denunciation of the normalization and medicalization endured by 
trans or intersex bodies, “deviants” with respect to heterobinarism; the ethnocentrism 
and necropolitical power of medical and disciplinary institutions vis-à-vis “deviants” 
and “monstrous”; and the concept of “transition” elaborated by Preciado as a decoloniza-
tion with respect to the epistemology and disciplinary institutions of the current regime 
of sexual difference.

Keywords: decolonization; epistemology; gender; intersexuality; Paul B. Preciado; 
psychoanalysis; regime of sexual difference; transexuality; transfeminism; transition.

1. The word of Peter the Red, monsters and mutant 
bodies

On the occasion of the École de la cause freudienne’s International Days 
on Women in psychoanalysis in November 2019 at the Palais des Congrès 
in Paris, Paul B. Preciado spoke before the academy, represented by 3,500 
psychoanalysts. In the opening of the volume in which his paper is published 

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Alessia Franco

(Preciado, 2020c), Preciado reports that he was greeted by an audience that 
was skeptical, when not irate. Before calling on psychoanalytic medical 
institutions to take responsibility, he addressed the audience by asking if 
any homosexual, trans or nonbinary psychoanalysts were present, receiving 
in response a heavy silence and some nervous laughter. Preciado recounts 
that after expounding his talk with the difficulties due to an unwelcoming 
audience, he was forced to conclude hastily amid aggressive comments 
from some bystanders; days followed in which excerpts of the talk, filmed 
and put online, were circulated, commented on, transcribed in partial and 
more or less accurate ways. Hence Preciado’s choice to finally publish the 
original text of his own talk in volume, in order to offer a more immediate 
and clearer contribution to the debate in its entirety. The same audience 
that Preciado found himself in front of at the Palace of Congresses in Paris 
must have partially and superficially grasped the arguments that were being 
proposed to him: because they were expounded with all the limitations 
of orality under adverse expository conditions, and because they were 
profoundly dissonant with the training that those present in the room had 
received as psychoanalysts.

At the Paris event, Preciado says he placed himself before the audi-
ence by recalling the character of Peter the Red, the protagonist of the 
Kafkaesque short story Ein Bericht für Akademie [A report for an Academy]. 
Peter the Red, the narrator, is a monkey who, in order to speak before 
an audience of scientists, had to assume anthropomorphic attitudes, learn 
human language, until he turned into a man. This was not an evolu-
tionary triumph of some sort, Preciado notes in the wake of Kafka, but a 
forced disguise to which the subject “deviant” from the norm was forced 
to undergo in order to be taken into consideration by the institutions by 
which that norm is enshrined. Preciado emphasizes how the humanization 
process experienced by Peter the Red does not constitute a path of emanci-
pation, an ascending and improving evolution from animality to humanity 
but, on the contrary, a path of progressive imprisonment. The monkey is 
forced to take on guise acceptable to the scientific community in order for 
it to be granted the right to speak, but for it this means caging itself in a 
form that does not belong to it, that does not reflect its own subjectivity. 
Peter the Red manages to escape the cage of Hagenbeck’s circus only to 
end up in the cage of “European colonial humanism and its anthropo-
logical taxonomies” (Preciado, 2021, p. 15) Peter the Red undergoes his 
own enmeshment in the rigid patterns predisposed by the human scientific 
community, and the continuation of the narrative sees him become an 
alcoholic in order to cope with his own new conditions of life in the society 
of human beings and his own new human identity. Peter the Red had to 

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Paul B. Preciado, Psychoanalysis and the Regime of Sexual Difference

learn to speak the language of human beings for him to be granted speech, 
and so too Preciado tells of his studies to appropriate the: “language of 
Freud and Lacan” (Preciado, 2020c, p. 19), the language of colonial patri-
archy, in order to be heard.

Preciado claims Peter the Red as the alter ego of trans bodies that domi-
nant thought, through its discursive but also clinical practices, seeks to force 
into the ontological cage of binarism, into the epistemological cage of sexual 
difference. The blatant irreducibility of trans and non-binary bodies to those 
cages, Preciado denounces, has not so far led psychoanalysis to question 
the validity and universality of those rigid epistemologies and the political 
devices that constitute them, in order to adapt them to the multiformity 
of living bodies, but on the contrary: living and multiform bodies have 
been pathologized, subjected to even violent processes of normalization and 
medicalization, relegated to the realm of dysphoria, neurosis, and psychi-
atric disorder. One has not dared to question the validity of the theory even 
in the face of the variety and multiplicity of life that proves, by its very exist-
ence, to exceed that theory: the academy and official medical practices have 
rather preferred to “resolve” that excess, denying its legitimacy, relegating it 
to the realm of a pathological to be reabsorbed and corrected. Thus Preciado 
presents himself before psychoanalysts knowing that they will deem him to 
be mentally ill: he presents himself as a deviant, a mutant, a “monster”, who 
nevertheless is produced as such by their own clinical practices.

2. Naturalization and historicity of the regime 
of sexual difference

By his mere presence at the Paris Palace of Congresses, even before his own 
content, Preciado frontally attacks the traditional discipline, even belit-
tling the meaning of the study days that gathered psychoanalysts there: the 
theme of the days was in fact Women in psychoanalysis. The mere presence 
of a trans and non-binary body, which is granted the floor, undermines the 
assumption, underlying the choice of the theme and the overall setting of 
the discipline, that there is such a thing as “women”. The radical nature of 
Preciado’s questioning is due precisely to his directly corporeal constitu-
tion: “His truth emerges embodied in the visible metamorphosis of his 
body-language. His desire is not only printed in the signifiers he uses 
employs, but also in the mutant character that his body-language takes on” 
(Martins Parente & Silveira, 2020, p. 2).

Preciado asserts – and at the same time performatively demonstrates 
this by his own mere existence – that the thesis of the existence of “women” 

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as a particular type of animate being, endowed with certain distinctive 
specificities within the sphere of “psychoanalysis”, should nowadays be 
radically problematized. Although maximally general, this first critical note 
offered to psychoanalysts by Preciado’s intervention is also radical in the 
etymological sense of undermining the now-naturalized assumptions of the 
psychoanalytic discipline under the discursive aspect and under the aspect 
of medical practice. From the observation of how a trans body knows how 
to radically challenge the whole edifice of traditional, that is, rigidly binary 
and heteropatriarchal, psychoanalysis, ultimately derives a political invi-
tation: precisely that of assuming its responsibilities under the epistemo-
logical, medical-scientific, and precisely ethical-political aspects. Preciado 
invites the academy and traditional psychoanalysis to accept being called 
upon to problematize the thesis, widespread in common sense and mostly 
uncritically upheld in the academic and medico-scientific world itself, that 
naturalizes “men” and “women”, as the same heteropatriarchal and binary 
regime that rests on such naturalization.

The naturalization of “woman” and “man” clearly rests on the 
anatomical and physiological evidence of biological sexes. The persistence 
of such a theoretical operation of naturalization is intuited as fallacious for 
at least two reasons: because gender is not immediately reducible to biolog-
ical sex – as the social sciences have now largely taught – and because, 
even if it were, not all living bodies are reducible to the two biological 
sexes recognized by the heterobinary system – think of the crisis of medical 
practice and even of scientific epistemology in the face of intersex bodies.

The disarticulation of gender identity from biology and the 
anatomical endowment of human subjects has a long history in the femi-
nist movement and contemporary philosophies. The entire first chapter 
of The  second sex is devoted by Simone de Beauvoir to highlighting the 
relativity of the value to be attributed to the data offered by biology in 
designating the socially normative aspects of sexual and gender identity 
(de Beauvoir, 1953, pp. 33-64). Beauvoir herself can now be considered a 
cult thinker in the bosom of the academy in Western countries, a more or 
less integrated element in the pantheon of the great philosophers studied 
in our universities: she has been partially monumentalized by scholars 
while simultaneously being overtaken by more radical and inclusive femi-
nisms, especially from the global South, with their histories of claims and 
progressive revivals. Yet, one of the major theoretical axes of The second 
sex, Preciado shows us with his experience at the Palace of Congresses in 
Paris, has been monumentalized as much as not assimilated: no matter 
how much Beauvoir is present in the teaching programs of universities, the 
academy as a whole still today, more than seventy years later, shows very 

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serious difficulties in admitting that now trivial disconnect between the 
biological-anatomical dimension of human beings and their gender iden-
tity, and the baggage of social norms that directly derive from the latter. It 
is still destabilizing to the dominant discourse that social expectations of 
gender cannot be naturally assigned to sexed bodies through the assign-
ment at birth of male and female roles. And it is all the more intolerable 
for the entire psychoanalytic edifice, which on heterobinarism immediately 
bases most of its theoretical and clinical tools.

Naturalistic positions manifestly reveal their obsolescence and the 
weakness of the still-proposed attempt to eternalize – that is, destoricize 
– social and political categories by disguising them behind the data of 
biology. What traditional psychoanalysis, as well as common sense and 
dominant discourse, considers “natural men or women” are actually the 
product of a political device long since unmasked by critical thinking. Paul 
B. Preciado resolutely disputes: “the natural existence of masculinity and 
femininity” (Preciado, 2021, p. 14) and decides to use his own experience 
as a non-binary trans person to demonstrate the far from natural or obvious 
status of gender connotation. Of the latter, on the contrary, it is necessary 
to highlight the historicity, and with it immediately also the susceptibility 
of transformations, oscillations, changes of status over time and according 
to the broader cultural and anthropological developments of societies.

Beauvoir’s long-standing thesis that women are not born echoes in 
Preciado’s living experience as told to her psychoanalytic audience. Recalling 
her own memories as a child in Francoist Spain, in a body recognized by 
society as unequivocally female at birth, she asks, “What was there in my 
childhood body that allowed her to predict my whole life?”. The experi-
ence of the trans and nonbinary subject, with her own factual existence, 
shows the non-exhaustiveness of gender assignment at birth according to 
the genital apparatus with which one comes into the world, and the no 
longer sustainable arbitrariness of assigning social roles according to that 
same anatomical endowment. It was impossible for young Beatriz Preciado 
to mechanically trace her destiny of becoming a heterosexual bride and 
mother to her own mere infant physicality. The arbitrariness of the assign-
ment becomes even more blatant when one sees how the attribution of 
gender roles does not even have to wait for the act of birth: an ultrasound 
scan of the fetus, which identifies its female biological sex, is enough to 
predict a future as a heterosexual wife and mother, even before its constitu-
tion as a subject. A human being, born with a given chromosome set and 
genital apparatus, “having been assigned to the female gender at birth” 
(Preciado, 2020c, p. 23), for that reason alone should submit to the natu-
ralness of a whole series of social expectations that to those “data of biology” 

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serve as a seemingly necessary corollary. The first, truly basic step of a 
countersexual proposal is to first point out how the normativity of gender 
conduct is not naturally determined but socially constructed, and thus to 
reject it as a device of political control and over-termination:

It is about stop doing what one’s gender prescribes, for example about aban-
doning, the spaces of victimization, caring, gentleness, seduction, availability, 
and listening for which we cis-female have been pharmacopornographically 
programmed since childhood. (Preciado, 2020c, p. 278) 1

The mere experience of a trans person, with its own uncomfortableness, 
demonstrates the rigidity and at once the violence of gender attribution: 
femininity, young Beatriz felt, was a cage. However, the rejection of the 
naturalization of femininity is only the first in a series of escapes. Here 
the need for transition is grafted as much as the denial of a certain still 
rigidly binary way of understanding transition itself. In choosing to break 
out of the cage of femininity, Preciado explains, it is not a matter of ceasing 
to be a woman in order to “become a man like the others” (Preciado, 
2020c, p. 28). That is, to enter immediately into the other cage, that of 
masculinity. A transition understood as mere migration from one gender 
assignment to another, from one bank to another of obligatory hetero-
binarism, is not a sufficient tool to challenge that binarism but on the 
contrary becomes an experience capable of reinforcing it as an institution 
and as an epistemology. This is a real epistemological insufficiency, which 
reaffirms the impositional violence of gender binarism, if the only escape 
from compulsory femininity is identified in the entry into compulsory 
masculinity.

The overcoming of naturalistic positions in the epistemology of 
sexual difference, and thus the reconfiguration of genders as not naturally 
implicated by biological sex, is still but a step in the even more radical path 
of the abolition of gender as such. Preciado goes beyond Butler, beyond 
the performativity of gender, and much more radically rediscusses the very 
need for “gender” to be posited. The latter after all, Preciado denounces, 
since its conceptual birth with the work of John Money has been config-
ured as “el instrumento de una racionalización de la vida en la que el cuerpo 
no es más que un parámetro” (Preciado, n.d. - link). This means first and 
foremost that “gender” is a (bio)political device: “es ante todo un concepto 
necesario para la aparición y el desarrollo de un conjunto de técnicas de 
normalización/transformación de la vida” (Preciado, n.d. - link). And it 

 1 The section in chapter 12, entitled Ejercicios de programación de género posporno. 
Coaching viril in the Anagrama edition (pp. 277-279) is absent in the Feminist Press edition.

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Paul B. Preciado, Psychoanalysis and the Regime of Sexual Difference

is also a politically and socially configured device that does not hesitate to 
shred real nonconforming living bodies.

After rejecting the “naturalistic” foundation of the heterobinary sex-
gender system, Preciado seeks to dismantle this system itself, and to demys-
tify the apparent obligatory nature of gender choice. Preciado’s rejection 
is about binary gender identity and the legitimacy of its derivation from 
biology, not about the actual “natural” existence of gendered bodies; in 
this sense, if this rejection has been traced back to Solanas’ “extinctionist 
approach” as it emerges from his SCUM Manifest (Evans, 2018, p. 287), 
it seems to me that it can be rather traced back to the work of Shulamith 
Firestone and should be framed within the general perspective of gender 
abolitionism as it is configured in xenfeminist perspectives (Hester, 2018, 
pp. 22-32). As an inhabitant of Uranus, Preciado wrote:

I am not a man and I am not a woman and I am not heterosexual I am not 
homosexual I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the sex-gender system. I 
am the multiplicity of the cos-mos trapped in a binary political and episte-
mological system, shouting in front of you. (Preciado, 2020b, p. 37)

3. Another “transition”
Preciado then proposes the category of trans as something radically 
different from the transition from male to female status or vice versa: tran-
sition is not mere permeability of the barrier between male and female, to 
allow the unidirectional transition from one side to the other, but is radical 
questioning of the dichotomy itself. The transition affirmed by Preciado 
has value as a powerful epistemological tool insofar as it offers itself as a 
way out not with respect to one gender or the other, but with respect to the 
very fanaticism of sexual difference, to the overall cage of the false alterna-
tive between “natural” masculinity and femininity.

It is a matter here, Preciado says, of negating another mistaken view, 
because it is too rigid and because it again reaffirms patriarchal heterobina-
rism, of transition, linked to the bogeyman of irreversibility. Every trans or 
near trans person is strongly discouraged, especially at a young age, from 
embarking on their own path of transition, with the argument that they 
might later regret it: there is no turning back from transition. Transitioning 
from one gender to another involves status, physical, hormonal, possibly 
surgical, aesthetic, and performative changes that do not tolerate back-
tracking. The assertion of such rigid affiliation between the trans person 
and his or her target gender is, from an epistemological perspective, no 
less conservative than the principled denial of the legitimacy of the transi-

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tion itself. The thesis that the target gender is irrevocably assumed is not 
qualitatively more progressive than the thesis of the naturalness of gender 
assignment at birth: it concedes a “correction” of the natural error and, on 
the basis of the intervention to amend it, reaffirms the incommunicable 
alternative between the two traditional genders.

It is possible to bring the trans body back to normative heterobina-
rism by forcing it to jump from one gender assigned at birth on the basis 
of genital endowment to the opposite gender through the “pharmacological 
and psychiatric ritual” (Preciado, 2020c, p. 35). To be swallowed up in 
the opposite gender to the one assigned at birth is to fall back into normal 
and naturalized heterobinarism; it is to have not escaped the rigidity of the 
regime of sexual difference but to have remained under its yoke, thereby reaf-
firming its epistemological and practical validity. It means having to learn 
the codes of dominant masculinity in order to conform to one heterobinary 
norm rather than the other. This would be mere “mimicry”, a concept that 
Preciado sharply rejects to speak of gender transition, which risks being 
seen as reduced to simulation or imitation of the chosen gender. Here 
Preciado highlights the radical nature of his own conception of transition: 
it is properly so if it is permanent, that is, if one assumes it as a process that 
is possible to travel in both directions. Denying that transition is a one-way 
journey constitutes the radical rejection of the epistemological approach 
to sexual difference: it invalidates its underlying dichotomy, defusing the 
obligation of choosing the cage in which to allow oneself to be imprisoned. 
The epistemologically revolutionary act is no longer to grant that there can 
be transitions from one status to another – from female to male or vice 
versa – but to deny that the definition on natural and biological grounds of 
each is exhaustive of the variety and multiformity of existing bodies.

The concept of transition outlined by Preciado then seeks to reaffirm 
life in its multiplicity that does not allow itself to be reduced to the norms 
of obligatory heterobinarism, and is surplus to the latter’s ontological and 
epistemological categories. Preciado writes that “gender transition is an 
antigenealogy” (Preciado, 2020c, p. 49). It is no longer just a matter of 
“inventing a mechanical adjustment”, whether hormonal, surgical or vari-
ously expressive, to hide the phenotype of the gender assigned at birth in 
order to acquire a different one, but it is a matter of accepting to make 
room in one’s body for a parallel evolution of life that would otherwise 
never be expressed. The medical-surgical, technical and capitalistic dimen-
sion of the process under the physiological aspect does not exhaust it as 
a creative act; “naturalistic” readings, which would reduce transition to 
an extraordinary correction of natural and biological life, cannot recog-
nize transition as the means of realizing, in the same body, another of the 

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possibilities of the multiformity of life. The latter no longer accepts being 
reduced to biology. Preciado’s discourse, which has invested the historical-
anthropological dimension, now opens up to the vastness of the futuribles 
to which transition finally allows access, in a theoretical-practical sense and 
as an epistemological paradigm break: “To be trans”, Preciado writes: “one 
must accept the triumphant irruption of another future within oneself ” 
(Preciado, 2020c, p. 49).

4. Toward a new epistemological paradigm

The historical-anthropological dimension of Preciado’s discourse first 
emerges in his assertion of the historicity and ethnocentrism of the regime 
of sexual difference, as of the disciplines it informs, first and foremost 
traditional and heteropatriarchal psychoanalysis. Preciado recalls the case 
of intersex births, to show in one respect the non-absoluteness of the 
binary model of the sex-gender system, which fails to subsume all the cases 
actually offered by nature – thereby debunking the claim that it would 
be nature with its eternal and superhuman categories that would ground 
heterobinarism itself. Second, the historicity of the regime of sexual differ-
ence emerges, for example, from a consideration of the single-sex episte-
mology in force in Europe in the Middle Ages and the early centuries of 
the modern age, according to which there was strictly speaking only one 
sex, the male, while women constituted imperfect, deficient males. The 
fanaticism of sexual difference, which can be considered as belonging to 
a now traditional epistemology, is not eternal, however, but historically 
determined – and also relatively young. The idea that a new epistemo-
logical upheaval will still take place to overcome the epistemology of sexual 
difference is not utopian, but a historically and anthropologically realistic 
scenario; especially since, as Preciado reconstructs in his Paris report, the 
model that is still dominant today nevertheless already entered an irrepa-
rable crisis after World War II.

Overcoming the regime of sexual difference is not only predictable 
from the epistemological aspect, but is desirable from the political aspect. 
The regime of sexual difference, in fact, is a semio-technical and cognitive 
lattice, which constitutes a limitation for our perception, for our expres-
sion, for the possibility of establishing relationships. In pretending to be 
universal, it edifies a whole complex of discursive and clinical practices 
with immediate effects on the political subjectification of “deviant” or 
“monstrous” bodies, as well as on the delegitimization of “deviant” forms 
of sexual and sentimental relations – that is, all those different from hetero-

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sexual monogamy. The arrogance of claimed universality is justificatory of 
the disposition of political and precisely necropolitical practices. Recalling 
Mbembe, for whom “exercising sovereignty means exerting control over 
mortality and defining life as the unfolding and manifestation of power” 
(Mbembe, 2016, p. 8), one can observe the connection between the abso-
lutist claims of the regime of sexual difference and the consequences on the 
lives of subjects reduced by it to the margins. Preciado, moreover, criticizes 
in this respect the theoretical – or psychological – identity trap, according 
to which only subalterns would have one: this is the illusion that induces 
the hetero cis bourgeois white male to consider himself the universality of 
the human, and not one identity among others. Just as in the single-sex 
regime woman was identified with not “succeeding” in being as physi-
ologically perfect as man, subaltern identities today would be characterized 
and connoted by defect, according to shortcomings with respect to the 
universal human model. Identity would thus be configured as the profile of 
any minority that cannot aspire to place itself as universal.

The characteristics of the hetero cis and bourgeois white male 
configure one type of identity among a great many others possible and 
existing de facto, but at the same time they delimit that specific identity 
that enjoys the power, historically and socially constituted, to legitimize 
or not all others, and to sanction which among all others do or do not 
deserve to continue to exist, and under what conditions: it is in this sense 
that Preciado speaks of a “necropolitical animal”. Heteropatriarchal and 
colonial psychiatry and psychoanalysis – themselves victims of the illusion 
of universality, which blinds them to their own historicity and ethnocen-
trism, for that matter long denounced by ethnopsychiatry and decolonial 
studies – can legitimize or not legitimize processes of political subjectifi-
cation. In our societies, they may in fact necropolitically deny the right 
to exist and to speak of subalterns who are not ascribable to the codes 
of the purported white Western heteropatriarchal universality. The cost of 
granting life, speech and political subjectivation is the sacrifice of “devi-
ance” through more or less forced medicalization, psychiatric, hormonal or 
even surgical normalization.

All the limitations of the approach that neglects the ethnocen-
tric element of this epistemology, which grounds clinical practices and 
political denials of subjectivity, are revealed in the case of intersex births. 
The medical-clinical practice of the instantaneous “normalization” of new 
intersex births in recent times is increasingly debated and no longer univer-
sally practiced, but it remains revealing of the practical violence that the 
regime of sexual difference is capable of exerting. Recognized as “deviant” 
and “deformed”, the bodies of the many infants whose biological sex could 

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not be uniquely identified because of particular conformations of the 
external genital apparatus, have in large numbers been surgically operated 
on, with the utmost ease, to be reduced to one sex or the other – with often 
dramatic psychological consequences, as intersex rights activism now ener-
getically documents and publicizes. Trans bodies, while having historically 
and biographically specific experiences compared to intersex births, regu-
larly experience similar attempts at pathologization and subsequent medical 
normalization, primarily through psychiatric categories and practices.

Significantly, the crisis of the current epistemology of sexual difference 
has deepened and extended through the work of struggle movements that 
explicitly set out to deconstruct dominant thought in its various meanings: 
the labor, feminist, homosexual, colonial critique, anti-racist, anti-capitalist 
and LGBTQI+ movements. The multiplicity of forms of deviance and 
resistance with respect to normative heterosexuality reflects the processes of 
political organization and subjectification of those minorities marginalized 
by the universal and colonial human – even Butler recalled the closeness 
between minority identities and the postcolonial subject, highlighting the 
concurrence between certain aspects of his own work and that of Saidiya 
Hartman, Homi K. Bhabha and other authors, with reference to, among 
other things, the process of “appropriation of the colonial ‘voice’ by the 
colonized” (Butler, 2006, p. 206).

More or less figuratively, Preciado speaks of the very construction 
of a transitional epistemology as a process of decolonizing epistemology: 
the breaking out of the cage of sexual difference, in his autobiographical 
account, had for him the meaning of debinarizing, disidentifying, decolo-
nizing. The process of transition itself is a process of reasserting one’s 
subjectivity, of decolonizing one’s body, the trans body that has historically 
become a colony of medical and psychoanalytic discourse in the regime of 
sexual difference and its disciplinary, media and market institutions. Trans 
bodies, Preciado explains, are natural resources to feed the heteropatriar-
chal system, at the cost of extraction, exploitation and annihilation.

It is then an eminently political challenge to construct a new episte-
mology, an epistemology of transition, that can offer itself as a historical 
alternative to the equally historical epistemology of sexual difference, whose 
historicity precisely is denied by common sense, dominant discourse as well 
as hegemonic and academic psychoanalysis and medicine. Recognizing the 
historicity of the regime of sexual difference and the epistemology related to 
it, and demystifying the leap from the descriptive claims of the two natural 
sexes to the normative claims of heterobinarism, is necessary to found a 
new epistemology. In the meantime, it is a matter of tracing back to histo-
ricity and the cultural dimension all the lexical, cognitive, practical and 

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political paraphernalia that comes with the regime of sexual difference, in 
order to finally recognize its surmountability. Preciado, in the Paris report, 
predicts that it may take “ten or twenty years” for a new epistemological 
paradigm “of the living body” to be delineated thanks to the work and 
activism of the anti-racist, transfeminist and queer movements. This would 
be a great collective work of experimentation and innovation – of relational 
and love practices, of family and filiation bonds, of gender identification, 
of sexuality. In such a process of collective critical and creative produc-
tion, psychoanalysis, too, is called upon to play a role: that of initiating a 
process, even a difficult one, of depatriarchalization, de-heterosexualization 
and decolonization of itself, as discourse, narrative, institution and clinical 
practice. Initiating such a process would mean ceasing to legitimize the 
necropolitical violence of heteropatriarchal normalization and the fanatical 
regime of sexual difference: this is an urgent task with which Preciado 
explicitly invites the academy to confront.

References

Butler, J. (2006). Gender trouble. Routledge.
de Beauvoir, S. (1953). The second sex. Jonathan Cape.
Evans, E. (2018). “Wittig and Davis, Woolf and Solanas […] simmer within me”: 

Reading feminist archives in the queer writing of Paul B. Preciado. Para-
graph 41(3), 285-300. doi: 10.3366/para.2018.0272.

Hester, H. (2018). Xenofeminism. Polity Press.
Martins Parente, A., & Silveira, L. (2020). Paul B. Preciado e sua epistemologia 

mutante. Cult, 1-6.
 https://revistacult.uol.com.br/home/paul-b-preciado-psicanalise/
Mbembe, A. (2016). Necropolitica. Ombre Corte.
Preciado, P. B. (n.d. - link). La invención del género, o el tecnocordero que devora a los 

lobos – Biopolítica del Género. [28.03.2022].
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uploads/2019/05/365213634-Preciado-B-La-Invencion-Del-Genero-o-
El-Tecnocordero-Que-Devora-a-Los-Lobos-1.pdf

Preciado, P. B. (2020a). Testo yonqui. Sexo, drogas y biopolítica. Anagrama.
Preciado, P. B. (2020b). An apartment on Uranus. Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Preciado, P. B. (2020c). Yo soy el monstruo que os habla. Informe para una academia 

de psicoanalistas. Anagrama.

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Riassunto

Il presente articolo intende illustrare il pensiero di Paul B. Preciado in merito alla episte-
mologia della transizione, che dovrebbe subentrare all’attuale regime epistemologico del-
la differenza sessuale basata sull’eterobinarismo. A partire in particolare dalla relazione 
tenuta da Preciado a Parigi nel 2019, si intende mettere a fuoco gli assi portanti del pen-
siero di Preciado sul tema: innanzitutto la necessità della denaturalizzazione del genere 
rispetto al sesso biologico; la denuncia della normalizzazione e medicalizzazione subite 
dai corpi trans o intersessuali, “devianti” rispetto all’eterobinarismo; l’etnocentrismo e il 
potere necropolitico delle istituzioni mediche e disciplinari nei confronti dei “devianti” 
e “mostruosi”; il concetto di “transizione” elaborato da Preciado, quale decolonizzazione 
rispetto all’epistemologia e alle istituzioni disciplinari dell’attuale regime della differen-
za sessuale.

Copyright (©) 2022 Alessia Franco 
Editorial format and graphical layout: copyright (©) LED Edizioni Universitarie

 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 
 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to cite this paper:
Franco, A. (2022). For an epistemology of transition: Paul B. Preciado, psychoanalysis and 
the regime of sexual difference. Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and 
Empirical Perspectives, 2(1-2), 51-63. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/elem-2022-0102-fran

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	Sommario.pdf
	First Section
	Editorial I
	Transitions:
New and Different Perspectives

	The Human “Historicity”
as a Permanent Transition
in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría
	François Jullien: The Double Transit
of Human Life
	The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis
	For an Epistemology of Transition:
Paul B. Preciado, Psychoanalysis
and the Regime of Sexual Difference

	Second Section
	Editorial II
	Governing Transitions

	Becoming Support Teachers
at the University of Foggia
During the Pandemic *
	Music: For a Sustainable Community and the Promotion of Well-being
	Educating for Transition in Work Contexts
	The Future We Want:
The Transition to Adulthood
of Unaccompanied Minors
	An Exploratory Survey





