Abstract
In 2012, a Colorado elementary school district barred Coy Mathis, a six-year-old trans girl, from using the girls' restrooms under the justification that her foreshadowed future adult male sex organ would make the other girls currently using the restroom uncomfortable. Responding to this moment as indicative of antitrans discrimination more broadly, this article undertakes a psychoanalytic interrogation of how this exclusion was structured by the coming together of the trans child and the phantasmatic body. Centering the ambivalent political and psychic work of the body as phantom, and the trans child's phantasmatic body in particular, the analysis puts Freudian and Lacanian understandings of the penis/phallus into conversation with biographical narratives of trans childhood. Thus, it argues that both trans-affirmative and transphobic narratives that temporally position the phantasmatic body of the trans child do so in nuanced and complex ways that structurally complement, rather than challenge, each other's terms.
