Egg Theory’s Early Style

This essay contemplates an enduring form of reasoning it titles “egg theory”: the type of
reasoning that trans people use, prior to transition, to prove transition’s impossibility or fruit-
lessness. It follows this reasoning in a critical and ironic framing in the work of the novelist and critic
Sybil Lamb and then, in a less ironic mode, through some essays of Eve Sedgwick and, more broadly,
the tranche of queer theory that her work continues to inspire. Egg theory’s hostility to the logic of
transition inheres in queer theory’s own insistence on universality and virtuality as key aspects of
queer politics. The essay concludes by considering, through Freud’s “Schreber Case” and Dalı ´’s
“Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” alternatives to egg theory for approaching the condition of the egg
before it hatches, the trans person before transition.