Trans Gods and the Archetypal Dimension of Gender Identity

How might Gender Identity be understood not only as a medical or political issue, but as a symbolic and archetypal phenomenon? What happens when we read it through Carl Jung’s depth psychology, where figures like Hermes, Inanna, or Tiresias represent the psyche’s attempt to integrate opposites?

“Although we are herd animals and are therefore only happy when we can function as social beings, there nevertheless persists along with this longing for one’s uniqueness and for a ‘meaning’ in one’s own life that goes deeper than mere social adjustment” (Franz, 1999, p. 222).

If Gender Identity can be seen as a social psychoid, do the anxieties and antagonisms surrounding it reflect deeper conflicts within the collective unconscious rather than disputes over empirical fact? To what extent does literalising symbols—treating mythic processes as material realities—risk producing neurosis or delusion?

Can the principle of individuation, the struggle to differentiate and integrate contrasexual qualities, help us reframe social conflict as a stage in psychological development rather than an ideological battle? And finally, how can a grounded, empirical, pragmatic perspective work alongside symbolic understanding, allowing myth to orient without dictating, and helping us to defuse conflict by restoring balance between conscious reason and unconscious archetypal meaning?

The contemporary phenomenon of Gender Identity is often framed in strictly medical, political, or sociological terms. Yet, Carl Jung’s depth psychology invites us to consider a different route of inquiry: to look at identity phenomena through a symbolic, mythological, and archetypal lens. What emerges when we shift our perspective from the literal to the imaginal? Can we make sense of the tensions, anxieties, and antagonisms surrounding this issue by returning to grounded, pragmatic, and non-ideological thinking rooted in the recognition of symbols rather than fantasies?

The suggestion that there are Trans Gods may provide a compelling starting point. Here, mythic figures who cross or transcend boundaries of sex and gender are presented not as proofs of an ideology, but as archetypes that illuminate the psychic experience of transformation. These include deities of metamorphosis and liminality, who carry the dual energies of creation and destruction, order and chaos, masculine and feminine.

Such figures appear across cultures:

• Hermes, the messenger and trickster who crosses boundaries;
• Inanna, who descends to the underworld and returns transformed;
• and Tiresias, who lives both as man and woman.

They embody not literal “models” for contemporary identities, but symbolic patterns in which human beings have long sought to situate difficult inner experiences.

Jung (2009) in The Red Book warns of the dangers of literalising symbols. The Pleroma, he writes, is neither empty nor full, but “both nothing and everything” – a paradox that only becomes meaningful when experienced symbolically, not concretely¹. To confuse the symbolic for the literal is to fall into delusion, and here lies one of the risks in current discourses about Gender Identity: mythological or psychic processes may be mistaken for material facts, leaving society ensnared in what Jung called neurosis – a conflict between conscious attitude and unconscious contents.

In this context, the phenomenon of Gender Identity might be read as a social psychoid: a manifestation that straddles both psychic and material reality, surfacing as collective “feelings” of anxiety, antagonism, and polarisation. Jung used the notion of the psychoid to describe how psychic events can extend into the social and material world without being reducible to either². If this is the case, then the conflicts around Gender Identity are not simply ideological battles, but symptomatic of deeper struggles for symbolic integration. The antagonisms expressed in public discourse reflect the unresolved opposites within the collective unconscious.

Can we then reframe the current crisis not as a clash of immutable positions, but as an expression of the archetypal process of differentiation? Jung argued that the essence of the human being is differentiation – to struggle against the undifferentiated sameness of the Pleroma by becoming distinct, by individuating³. Conflict, then, is not a pathology to be eradicated, but a necessary stage in psychic and cultural development. The problem arises when conflict is arrested and displaced into rigid ideology or fantasy, rather than being carried through to symbolic resolution.

What would such a resolution look like? Perhaps it lies in recognising that archetypal images of transformation do not call for literal enactment. Just as Tiresias did not “prove” the factual interchangeability of sex, but symbolised the capacity of the psyche to experience contrasexual qualities, so too might today’s conflicts signal a collective encounter with the anima and animus, the inner feminine and masculine principles.

Jung insisted that men must discover their femininity in themselves, and women their masculinity, lest they project them outward and remain enslaved by what they lack⁴. To mistake this symbolic task for a literal alteration of the body risks falling into precisely the “delusion” Jung cautioned against.

At stake, then, is a critical hermeneutic question: are we dealing with symbols or facts, archetypes or ideologies, myths or delusions?

The answers we give shape whether conflict escalates into antagonism or is transformed into dialogue. A return to grounded, empirical, pragmatic thinking need not mean abandoning myth – rather, it means situating myth within its proper domain, as symbolic orientation rather than dogmatic prescription. Such a move might defuse anxiety by restoring balance between the conscious and unconscious, the literal and the imaginal.

Questions for further reflection:

• If Gender Identity is understood as a symbolic manifestation, how should public discourse change to avoid literalisation and delusion?
• Can mythological figures like Hermes, Inanna, or Tiresias help us reframe contemporary conflicts as archetypal processes rather than ideological battles?
• To what extent do the antagonisms we see in society reflect our own inner neuroses, unintegrated opposites, and failures of symbolic understanding?
• How might pragmatic, empirical engagement with lived realities coexist with recognition of symbolic meaning, without collapsing one into the other?

In raising these questions, we begin not with fixed answers but with an orientation: that of the mythological imagination, as Jung advocated, set against the temptations of fantasy, delusion, and ideology. The challenge is to allow conflict to become meaningful, rather than destructive, by returning to the symbolic dimension where integration becomes possible.

References

1. Franz, M.-L. v. (1999). Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche. Shambhala.
2. Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton. (pp. 509–514 on the Pleroma).
3. Jung, C. G. (1954/1960). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. CW 9i. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Discussion of psychoid archetypes).
4. Jung, C. G. (1916/1957). The Structure of the Unconscious. CW 7. (Principium individuationis).
5. Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book, “Libra Novus” section, pp. 247–250. (Discussion of men wearing women’s clothes, laughter, and the need to integrate the contrasexual).
6. Trans Gods (2025). Project document. Primary source for mythological references and framing.