The Sameness We Cannot Accept

Abstract

This paper examines the paradoxical rise in violence against transgender people amid their heightened social visibility by situating the phenomenon within Jacques Lacan’s theory of the imaginary and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. Lacan highlights how images structure ego formation through misrecognition, producing identities grounded in narcissistic illusion and envious aggressivity. Girard complements this by showing how mimetic rivalry and scapegoating stabilize fragile social orders through exclusionary violence. Reading Lacan and Girard together reveals how identifications with images of self and others bind desire to aggression, such that transgender people become targets not for their difference, but for their perceived sameness, which threatens the distinctions that sustain individual and communal identity. Clinical insights and real-world cases illustrate how gender identifications, cis and trans alike, function as psychic strategies for survival amid fragmentation, while scapegoating mechanisms expose the violent foundations of identity and social order.