This blog examines Cori Cohn’s reflections on life beyond gender, as discussed in the recent episode of the Beyond Gender podcast, through a Jungian lens. It explores the tension between rationalistic debates and feeling-driven experience, the difference between persona, identity and character, and the archetypal motif of dragon-slaying. Drawing on Jung’s Red Book and depth psychology, it shows how gendered experience unfolds across rational, emotional, and mythological registers. The post highlights individuation as a process of confronting adversity, integrating shadow, and distinguishing the multiple psychological dimensions of gender identity.
Cori Cohn speaks with the authority of lived time—over thirty years after transition. His reflections are not simply autobiographical but invite us to consider gender identity as a field where the personal, cultural, and archetypal converge. Jungian depth psychology offers tools for discerning these layers: by distinguishing between rationalism and feeling, by clarifying the difference between persona, identity, and character, and by recognising the mythological motif of dragon-slaying as a guiding image of transformation. Reading Cori’s testimony through this lens shows how the individuation process is woven through gendered experience, and why we must draw distinctions between different psychological registers of that experience.
Rationalism and Feeling
Contemporary discourse around gender identity is often dominated by rationalistic categories: medical protocols, legal definitions, policy frameworks. Jung, in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, warned against reducing psychic life to intellectual formulations. The “spirit of the times,” he wrote, seeks clarity and system, but the “spirit of the depths” presses upon us with irrational images, feelings, and necessities that cannot be codified. Cori’s reflections exemplify this spirit of the depths. Transition is not, for him, a mere logical conclusion; it is a felt imperative, experienced in the soul and body together. Jung observed that rationalism without feeling leaves the psyche barren, while feeling without form risks dissolution. Individuation requires holding both—the ordered framework and the felt necessity.
Identity, Persona, and Character
Jung’s model distinguishes carefully between persona, identity, and character. The persona is the social mask, the set of roles we present to the world. Identity is the lived narrative of who we take ourselves to be, as symbolically manifested in archetypal roles – the Hero, the Earth Mother, and so on. Character is the deeper structure of values, resilience, and integrity, tested and shaped by adversity.
In the Red Book, Jung describes how clinging too tightly to the persona suffocates the soul, while neglecting it leaves one vulnerable to chaos. Cori’s long view shows that transition involves not only the assumption of a new persona but the ongoing negotiation between persona and identity, and ultimately the forging of character through difficulty. It is character that emerges most fully in her testimony: the slow, enduring work of becoming more human, beyond categories of male and female.
The Dragon-Slaying Motif
In Western myth, the dragon symbolises chaos, threat, or the overwhelming force that must be confronted if new life is to emerge. Jung, in his analysis of archetypes, noted that the hero who slays the dragon is not simply destroying an external enemy but integrating a fragment of the shadow—those aspects of psyche feared and projected outward. Cori’s account echoes this archetype: each challenge, each moment of rejection or inner doubt, appears as another dragon to be faced. And, as in myth, the dragon is never slain once for all; it reappears at each stage of life in new guises.
This is the archetypal depth of transition: the confrontation with inner and outer dragons as the price of individuation.
The Interweaving of Themes
For Jung, these themes are not separable. Rationalism and feeling interlace in the tension between the spirit of the times and the spirit of the depths. Persona, identity, and character interact dynamically, shaping and reshaping the self in response to inner necessity and outer demand. The dragon myth provides the symbolic form through which these struggles are expressed, holding together the rational and the irrational, the personal and the archetypal.
Jung in the Red Book speaks of confronting the ridiculous, the humiliating, even the monstrous within oneself, as the necessary threshold to new life. In Cori’s reflections we see precisely this: the willingness to live through adversity, to endure mockery and suffering, and in so doing to emerge with a soul more deeply integrated.
Drawing Distinctions
A Jungian reading insists on drawing distinctions. Not all experiences of gender identity are of the same psychological order. Some belong to the level of persona—the negotiation of roles and appearances. Some belong to the deeper shaping of character through adversity and resilience. Others are archetypal, lived out in mythological patterns like dragon-slaying, symbolic death and rebirth.
Confusion arises when these layers are collapsed into one. Cori’s testimony demonstrates why we must resist such simplification: only by distinguishing between the registers of persona, identity, and archetypal process can we honour the full meaning of the experience.
From the perspective of depth psychology, living “beyond gender” is an individuation task. It requires the balancing of rational clarity and feeling depth; it demands the slow work of building character beyond the social mask; it unfolds through archetypal struggles that appear in the form of dragons, ordeals, and symbolic rebirths.
Jung wrote that “the way is within us, but not in gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws.” Cori’s long witness affirms this: the path of individuation is not reducible to external categories, but must be lived in the flesh and soul of each person. Cori’s reflections remind us that gender identity is not one experience but many—rational, emotional, social, archetypal—and that our task is to discern and respect their differences if we are to engage honestly with the question of what it means to live beyond gender.
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