For Lacan, every “I” is the symptom—or in Old French, the sinthome, which Lacan turns into a pun to suggest that our symptomatic subjectivities are a “synthesis” that becomes our “home”—of a successful attempt to weave those three rings of reality together into a stable pattern and thereby to become a non-psychotic subject. This, for Lacan, is what it means to be a person. The transgender subject is a kind of person who, for Lacan (and, I would argue, for Lou Sullivan) similarly succeeds at the task of becoming a viable, non-psychotic subject by entwining the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real—but
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