What if being trans isn’t about gender?
Preface
I’m one trans person trying to make sense of the world and of my own experiences with the limited tools at my disposal. I’m not enrolled in academia at the moment. I’m doing research on my own, because I have a deep inner drive to understand and to learn.
I also feel like my experience as a trans person is being misrepresented in the mainstream discourse. I know there are trans people out there who don’t take issue with that discourse, and who are even proponents of it. I don’t know if they’re correct and their experience is simply different from mine, or if they’ve instead decided to trust other people’s explanations over their own perceptions. I know I used to do the latter, because I didn’t have faith in my own abilities and perceptions.
My goal here isn’t to foster even more division among the trans community. And I don’t mean to re-ignite the old transgender vs transsexual debate. Part of what I mean to do is to point out that the controversy has never truly been addressed. It’s simply been swept under the rug. The transsexual side has been deemed conservative and assimilationist, while the transgender side has been deemed progressive and subversive (Lane 2009). People now say that “‘transsexual’ is outdated terminology”, as though the debate had been settled and we’d all decided to subsume the diversity of trans experiences under the big transgender umbrella. Attempts at bringing attention to the specific needs and perspectives of the “transsexual” subgroup are seen as inherently divisive.
While it’s true that many on the “transsexual” side have had rather problematic takes (transmedicalism, for example), I think we’ve been too quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater. And I think we’ve been missing a very important piece of this entire puzzle: the distinction between sex identity and gender identity.
Furthermore, I think we should pay more attention to the experiences of those on the “transsexual” side, and strive to do so without pathologizing transness, encouraging medical gate-keeping, or placing blame on certain subsets of our community.
For the purposes of this article, when I talk about “trans people”, I’m talking about trans people whose trans experience is similar to mine — often called “transsexual people”. If there are trans people who do not resonate with what I’ve written here, this article is not about them. However, they would still probably benefit from reading it.
What even is gender?
When someone questions trans people’s right to exist, you tend to hear something along the lines of “gender is just a social construct, so why does it matter what trans people call themselves?”.
In my opinion, such an answer is counterproductive and completely misses the mark. Indeed, instead of validating trans people’s identities, all it does is attempt to invalidate the very thing that matters to trans people so as to make our existence seem more palatable.
However, it fails on both counts. First of all, what matters to trans people — at least to a significant portion of us — is our bodies, and how our bodies are perceived by others and ourselves as being either male, female, neither, or something in between. And second of all, telling people that what matters to trans people is something “arbitrary” and “constructed” does absolutely nothing to make us more palatable — to the contrary. I think it tends to make our concerns appear frivolous (“why can’t you just be a masculine woman?”).
You might say that something being socially constructed doesn’t mean it’s “arbitrary”, and I would agree. But the people who make those arguments actually do seem to think that gender is entirely artificial and often use the word “arbitrary”. This is a tendency which Julia Serano refers to as “gender artifactualism” (Serano 2013). But even if they were representing the concept of gender as a social construct in a nuanced way, they would be talking about something completely different from the thing that makes trans people trans, and therefore missing the mark regardless.
No one really seems to agree on what gender is, so I have decided to base this article on the most common definition of gender that I have found online, to assume that it is accurate, and to go from there.
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them.
Gender refers to a person’s experience of their identity relative to the categories of masculinity and femininity.
Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other.
Canadian Institutes of Health Research:
Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, expressions and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender diverse people.
American Psychological Association:
Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women.
A good summary would be that gender is “the socially constructed set of social roles, behaviours, expectations, etc. associated with a given sex”. It seems to be roughly equivalent to masculinity and femininity, at least according to the above definitions.
But if that’s the case, I don’t know how to make sense of my experience as a trans man. Indeed, growing up, I was not a tomboy in the traditional sense. I was not aligned with the gender associated with any particular sex. I was always a bit in-between — as many people are — and that is still the case today. And there are plenty of feminine trans men and masculine trans women out there. Some trans men are more feminine than some cis women, and some trans women are more masculine than some cis men.
Because of this, along with things I’ve discussed in previous writings, and things I’m about to discuss, I’ve come to the conclusion that the assumption that being trans is rooted in gender is in fact wrong. Instead, I believe it is rooted in what I call sex identity.
Subconscious sex (originally coined by Julia Serano): this is the sex that you feel you should be, the sex that feels right to you. Most people do not realize that they have a subconscious sex, because it is the same as the sex they are born as.
Sex identity: a person’s subconscious sex which has risen to the level of their conscious awareness, as expressed through a word — or a set of words — which they feel best communicates said subconscious sex.
Gender inclination: a person’s tendency to align with a certain gender (defining gender as “the set of social roles, expectations, behaviours, etc. commonly associated with a given sex”), or their tendency to move away from gender-as-it-exists-today (through a rejection of gender, and/or through a creative reinvention of gender).
John Money versus Milton Diamond
When the matter of the sex/gender distinction is brought up, people often mention John Money. John Money was a psychologist who was well known for the David Reimer case. David Reimer was born male, but due to a botched circumcision during his infancy, lost his penis. Reimer’s desperate parents saw Money on TV and went to consult with him. Since David had an identical twin, Money immediately saw this as a chance to prove his theories about gender, and convinced David’s parents to agree to David’s surgical sex reassignment. Reimer was then raised as a girl, and for a long time the experiment was deemed a success. However, it was later discovered that Reimer had never been comfortable living as a girl, and that Money had lied. Eventually, upon finding out what had been done to him, David transitioned back to his birth sex.
People often bring up this story in an attempt to discredit trans people, which is interesting since I think it does the exact opposite. I think it supports the idea that people have an innate sense of what sex they should be (a subconscious sex).
But even more interesting is that, in these discussions, people rarely talk about the man who uncovered the failure of John Money’s experiment. That man is Milton Diamond, Professor Emeritus of anatomy and reproductive biology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
Whereas Money is well-known for his highly unethical experiments, Diamond campaigned for decades to convince the medical community that performing non-consensual sex reassignment surgeries on intersex infants is wrong, and to stop labelling intersex conditions as disorders. Diamond has also argued in 2016 that transsexuality is an intersex condition.
Some people — including trans people — would take issue with such an notion. Indeed, they say that it shouldn’t matter whether transness is innate, that we should accept it regardless. And yes, that’s true; people should be able to change their body and their presentation as they see fit.
However, as a trans person, it matters to me that I am not being misrepresented and that my lived experience is not being dismissed. And it makes a lot more sense to me personally to think of myself as having a type of intersex condition, than to think of myself as innately aligning with an artificial construct, and to care about it to such a degree that I would upend my entire life over it. Especially since I never cared much about social norms or gender norms — I’m autistic, and not very social.
This is why I have started writing about the difference between sex identity and gender identity. It seemed like the difference was eluding pretty much everyone, and I thought that it was important to bring attention to it. However, I recently discovered that Milton Diamond had been making a similar distinction, as he wrote a paper titled Sex and Gender are Different: Sexual Identity and Gender Identity are Different (2002). He writes:
Sexual identity [what I call sex identity, and what Julia Serano calls subconscious sex] speaks to the way one views him- or herself as a male or female. This inner conviction of identification usually mirrors one’s outward physical appearance and the typically sex-linked role one develops and prefers or society attempts to impose. Gender identity is recognition of the perceived social gender attributed to a person. Typically, a male is perceived as a boy or a man, where boy and man are social terms with associated cultural expectations attached. Similarly, a female is perceived as a girl or woman. […]
Gender and gender role refer to society’s idea of how boys or girls or men and women are expected to behave and should be treated. A display of gender, as with a gender role, represents a public manifestation of gender identity. It can be said that one is a sex and one does gender; that sex typically, but not always, represents what is between one’s legs, whereas gender represents what is between one’s ears. A sex role usually involves the acting out of one’s biological predisposition. In young males this is associated typically with their greater aggressive, combative and competitive nature than is usual with young females. In young females their sex roles are usually manifest by nurturing and compromising behavior, less frequently seen in boys. These might actually better be called sex typical (male-typical; female-typical) behaviors. Gender roles are those behaviors imposed overtly or covertly by society. As described by Gagnon and Simon (1973) gender roles are behaviors that can be considered ‘scripted’ by society. Examples of this is how girls learn to keep their knees together or adjust their dresses and apply cosmetics, whereas boys actively memorize the rules of sports and games. Gender has everything to do with the society in which one lives and may or may not have much to do with biology (Gagnon & Simon, 1973).
This usage and terminology are somewhat different to that used by Money and Ehrhardt (1972). These investigators do not use the term sexual identity and have generally conflated the meanings given earlier under the terms gender identity/role and offer, in addition, their own definitions: ‘Gender identity is the private experience of gender role; and gender role is the public manifestation of gender identity . . . “gender identity” can be read to mean gender identity/role’ (p. 146). But here again the terminology has not been consistent with that used by others. Stoller (1968), for example, called this inner realization of self-identity as a male or female ‘core gender identity’. (Diamond 323, emphasis mine)
Although Diamond’s definition of gender identity is different from one I’ve given in the past, the way I interpret this passage is that Diamond is concerned with the importance of differentiating sex identity (what he calls sexual identity) from gender identity and its associated social constructs, and notices that his colleagues — including his academic rival Money — are instead conflating the two. He recognizes that there is a sense of identity that we have in regards to our sex characteristics which might have nothing to do with gender as we commonly understand it.
it is illuminating to consider what one highly educated male-to-female transsexual said to me when she heard how I was trying to understand the motive or drive for sex change. […] ‘If there is anything I want to shout from the rooftops, it is that some of us want to change our bodies for reasons that have little or nothing to do with facilitating our acceptance as social women. We want to change our bodies because we want to change them. Sometimes we decide to change them even though we know we won’t be accepted as women, and wouldn’t want to be accepted anyway. (Diamond 329, emphasis mine)
This is such a breath of fresh air for me. Even before finding that paper, I was trying to shout the same thing from the rooftops: “trans people want to change our bodies because we want to change our bodies”. It is other people — and often even ourselves — who project gendered interpretations onto our decisions to do so, the same way we project gendered interpretations onto anything anyone ever does. I thought I was all alone screaming this into the void. And here I find out that a trans woman was saying the same thing a couple decades ago. I feel so much more validated and seen reading those few lines, than I ever have from reading any explanations of transness that were based on the concept of gender.
Why are so few people making that crucial distinction?
I actually wrote a whole essay in which I attempt to elucidate that very question, using Miranda Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical injustice. But back when I wrote it, I hadn’t known about Milton Diamond. And the fact that the notion of sex identity isn’t a new concept, and that Julia Serano was not the only one to have pointed to its existence (through her concept of subconscious sex) means that we’ve been turning a blind eye — perhaps wilfully — to something that is key to trans people’s lives.
Not only that, but we’ve been actively papering over it. For example, what we used to call “sex reassignment surgery” is now called “gender affirmation surgery”. What could be called “birth sex” is now called “assigned gender at birth” — as if “female” and “male” were genders, rather than labels used to classify bodies according to the sex characteristics we can perceive. This, in turn, robs trans people of our ability to even discuss our lived experiences. Indeed, if I say that I want to have a male body, someone will chime in and tell me “but you already have a male body — you are male, and this is your body”. So I cannot effectively discuss the conditions of my birth, or the things I want to achieve in regards to my body without some well-intentioned person chiming in to “correct me”.
Actually, the mere attempt to openly discuss the way I experience my transness in honest terms is seen as some sort of political stance, one which is in favour of assimilation and biological determinism. Which would be missing the point. If I do have a political stance, it is in favour of being able to express myself and of not putting up with being constantly spoken over by people who think they know better than me.
Furthermore, I find the notion that I was “assigned” female rather problematic. I was not assigned a sex by any person or any agent — I was merely assigned a label. So I’m not gonna pretend that what I’m upset about is the label, when the thing I’m upset about is the thing it refers to — I was born with certain sex characteristics which my brain seems not to be in alignment with. Using the term “assigned sex” to refer to that reality feels dismissive of my lived experience and I really wish people would stop doing it. Especially since “AFAB” has started to be used as just another word for “female”. When people call me “AFAB” it just feels like they’re calling me female, and reminding me of the thing I don’t want to be reminded of. Of course, gendered expectations are “assigned” to us from birth, and that’s worth discussing, but it is quite a different thing from the matter of having a transsexual lived experience.
A few important notes before we continue
In the event that transsexuality is indeed an intersex condition, that still doesn’t make it a disorder — being intersex is not a disorder. I am not in favour of pathologizing transness. I think that, on this topic, we can probably learn a lot from studying disability rights and intersex activism.
I’m also not saying that trans people should start identifying as intersex, since that currently refers to people who were determined to be intersex based on the direct observation of their sex characteristics. Even if it is the case that transsexuality is an intersex condition, we should find some way of distinguishing those two types of intersex experiences through language, since they are different experiences and I would not want us to drown out the voices of those who currently use the label intersex to refer to themselves.
And this also doesn’t mean that we should gate-keep people’s access to medical transition. We trans people know better than anyone else what our sex identity is and we know that medical gate-keeping has been terrible for us in the past.
The importance of shedding light on these issues
When you find yourself in a situation in which you seem to be the only one to feel the dissonance between received understanding and your own intimated sense of a given experience, it tends to knock your faith in your own ability to make sense of the world, or at least the relevant region of the world. (Fricker 163)
When you have an inner conviction about yourself and no one, not even other trans people, seem to reflect that back to you, you start to feel like maybe you must be wrong or crazy. So when I read a paper in which a respected scientist quotes a trans woman as saying “we want to change our bodies because we want to change them”, I finally feel like I’m not just a crazy person with crazy ideas screaming into the void. I begin, once again, to “have faith in [my] own ability to make sense of the world”.
I’m hoping that, through my writing, I can give other trans people that same faith in their own abilities. I am pained to constantly hear trans people talking about how confusing gender is. Many of them are convinced that they’re the ones who are confused, when it seems to me that it is society which has robbed them of the hermeneutical resources required to make sense of their own experiences.
John Money’s damaging legacy
John Money “knew [David Reimer] was never happy as a girl, and he knew that as soon as David found out what happened to him, David reassumed the social identity of a boy”. Money straight-up lied to the public about this for decades. When people use the term “assigned female”, I remember Money, who actually did assign the female sex to young David Reimer by recommending surgical reassignment and hormones. He traumatized the child by spending years trying to force him to accept that assignment (Colapinto). And today, we still turn a blind eye to the existence of sex identity, the same way that Money turned a blind eye to the evidence which showed that his experiment on David hadn’t worked. I find that troubling since, based on Money’s lies, thousands upon thousands of intersex infants have been surgically assigned to a binary sex, much to their own detriment (for more on this, read The True Story of John/Joan, by John Colapinto).
If our concepts of sex and gender really are socially constructed, I wonder why we’ve decided to construct them based on John Money’s ideas. Especially when those ideas impede our ability to understand ourselves as trans people, and when that man’s lies have led to so much suffering.
I think that a plausible explanation is simply that some people find the truth rather inconvenient. Indeed, many feminists had been very happy to believe that Money’s experiment on David Reimer had worked. And when it came out that it hadn’t, Money was only too eager to reassure said feminists. He “claimed that the media’s reporting of the case [had] reflected a conservative bias. ‘It’s part of the anti-feminist movement,’ he said. ‘They say masculinity and femininity are built into the genes, so women should get back to the mattress and the kitchen.”(Colapinto) And this is not to give reason to the views of conservatives, of course, or to paint feminism in a negative light. It’s simply to suggest that we should not sacrifice people or honesty on the altar of our ideological biases.
To give an example of potential feminist bias on this issue:
Considering David Reimer, a boy reassigned as a girl after a botched circumcision, [Judith] Butler argues that initially Money used this tragic story to support the theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth (Butler 2006), then that Diamond used David’s adoption of a male identity to support the theory that gender identity is largely innate (Butler 2006, 185–86). However, [they] badly misrepresents Diamond as proposing merely to assign XY children with a small or absent penis as male instead of female, but still supporting early surgical intervention. This wrongly depicts Diamond, who is a prominent advocate opposing interventions on intersex infants. Butler appears to have been a victim of disciplinary constraint; [they cite] only two biological articles: Diamond and Sigmundson 1997b and Fausto-Sterling 2000, 45–77. Yet Fausto-Sterling states: ‘‘Diamond [calls] for new treatment paradigms — above all postponing immediate and irreversible surgery’’ (70).
Does Butler’s misreading matter? It doesn’t affect [their] main argument, reading David Reimer’s story as other than evidence for gender as socially or biologically determined. Instead, [Butler] reads the story as hopeful and unexpected, offering the possibility of being loved through invoking an ‘‘I’’ that exceeds anatomy and the norms of gender (Butler 2006, 191–93). However, David Reimer’s tragic story now has mythic status in the discussion of nature/ nurture and gender. Since Butler is extremely influential in queer/trans studies, and this is the only TSR [Transgender Studies Reader?] article to discuss David Reimer, many readers may treat [Butler’s] reading as authoritative, seeing Diamond as a reactionary biological determinist. Diamond is, in fact, an important political ally for gender-variant people, explicitly opposing the pathologizing of intersex, transgender, and transsexual people, saying they represent healthy variation (Diamond 2005). The errors undermine an important part of Butler’s argument — that for Money, the presence of the phallus is the essential marker of the man, while for Diamond it is the Y chromosome. [Butler] points to other ways of understanding social construction and genetics than those offered by these ‘‘purveyors of natural and normative gender’’ (Butler 2006, 188). Indeed there are: Diamond himself argues against normative gender binaries; he sees the whole range of articulations of gender, sex, and sexuality as ‘‘natural’’ products that emerge in a social context and that people should be able to live in any gender position they prefer (Diamond 2006).
— Lane 2009, emphases mine.
Let’s now contrast that enlightening tidbit with John Money’s thoughts on the matter of intersex people:
When I asked Money about Diamond’s appeal to delay surgery on intersexual babies until they are old enough to speak for themselves, Money emphatically rejected the idea. “You cannot be an it,” he declared, adding that Diamond’s recommendations would lead intersexes back to the days when they locked themselves away in shame or worked as circus freaks. (Colapinto 96)
Why none of this is a threat to feminism
Simply put, if we have a sense of what sex our body should be, and that is the origin of transness (a mismatch between that sense, and the sex of one’s body), this need not imply anything about the extent to which femininity and masculinity are socially constructed, since subconscious sex and gender inclination (how feminine or masculine one tends to be) are two separate things — though they are correlated. However, I also want to quote Julia Serano on the topic of gender inclination, since she argues that gender inclination itself is not entirely artificial and that to argue as much is misogynistic:
The fact that feminine traits are not female-specific, and that they are separable from one another, is far too often brushed aside when people try to answer the question that unfortunately drives most discussions about femininity: namely, what produces feminine expressions in people? Those who wish to naturalize femininity will often describe feminine traits as though they were bundled in a single biological program that is initiated only in genetic females. Such claims gloss over the many people who have exceptional gender expressions (i.e., feminine traits in males and masculine traits in females) in order to fully subsume femininity within femaleness. On the other hand, those who wish to artificialize femininity often characterize it as though it were a unified social program designed to shape women’s personalities and sexualities via a combination of social norms, constructs, and conditioning. The assumption that femininity is one entity makes it easier for those who favor such social explanations to “prove” that femininity is artificial. After all, one needs only to make the case that certain specific aspects of femininity are clearly “man-made” and vary from culture to culture in order to extrapolate that all aspects of femininity are social in origin. Similarly, by showing that certain aspects of femininity are socially imposed on girls and women, one can claim that femininity as a whole is unnatural, or it would not have to be enforced at all. What should be clear by now is that the presumption that femininity is a singular program tends to foster an overly simplistic, all-or-none dichotomy between biological and social explanations for gender differences.
Once we let go of the concept of monolithic femininity — and with it, the either/or ideology that plagues nature-versus-nurture debates about gender — it becomes rather apparent that individual feminine traits arise from different combinations of biology and socialization.
[…]
The idea that “femininity is artificial” is also blatantly misogynistic. While a handful of theorists in the field of gender studies have more recently begun to focus on how masculinity is constructed, the lion’s share of feminist attention, deconstruction, and denigration has been directed squarely at femininity. There is an obvious reason for this. Just as woman is man’s “other,” so too is femininity masculinity’s “other.” Under such circumstances, negative connotations like “artificial,” “contrived,” and “frivolous” become built into our understanding of femininity — indeed, this is precisely what allows masculinity to always come off as “natural,” “practical,” and “uncomplicated.” Those feminists who single out women’s dress shoes, clothing, and hairstyles to artificialize necessarily leave unchallenged the notion that their masculine counterparts are “natural” and “practical.” This is the same male-centered approach that allows the appearances and behaviors of men who wish to charm or impress others to seem “authentic” while the reciprocal traits expressed by women are dismissed as “feminine wiles.” Femininity is portrayed as a trick or ruse so that masculinity invariably seems sincere by comparison. For this reason, there are few intellectual tasks easier than artificializing feminine gender expression, because male-centricism purposefully sets up femininity as masculinity’s “straw man” or its scapegoat. (Serano, Whipping Girl, Chap.19)
A few more enlightening tidbits
We believe we have found evidence that, paradoxically, whilst one’s gender identity and internal body image are usually perfectly synchronised with one’s external physical gender, the two develop through different biological mechanisms, probably in utero. It is an uncoupling of this development which causes some individuals to become transsexuals. We hasten to add here, that transsexual people should not be viewed as abnormal, any more than one should regard someone who is exceptionally tall as abnormal, but merely seen as part of the spectrum of human gender identity. (Ramachandran & McGeoch 2008)
There seems to be an ongoing assumption in the trans community that to view transness as innate would somehow be to pathologize it. As I’ve already said, I disagree with such a view, and we only have to pay attention to, for example, disability rights advocacy, to realize that one does not need to entail the other.
It’s worth bearing in mind that many phantom limb patients had to endure years of self-doubt after they were told them their symptoms were ‘all in the mind’. An analogous modern equivalent to the old explanations for phantom limbs is the farfetched psychological theory that some MtF transsexuals become that way from masturbating in female clothing! (Blanchard, 1989; Bailey, 2003) This would be equivalent to claiming that most men end up heterosexual because they masturbate in front of female pinups in their adolescent years; a classic case of cart before horse. (Ramachandran & McGeoch 2008, p11)
This is very interesting when, today, some people are claiming that we trans people are only trans due to rigid gender norms, and that if we could only change society so as to remove such rigidity, trans people would no longer want to change our bodies — as though trans people had been taught to want to change our bodies, rather than the desire to change our bodies being inherent and/or existing largely independently from society’s existing gender norms. When someone claims “I’d want to change my body even if I was born in a completely different society”, they get replies along the lines of “how could you possibly know that?”. The implication is that we are lying to ourselves and too caught up in the cisheteronormative hegemony to realize it.
Scientists and their assumptions
One thing I’ve noticed when reading some of the scientific literature on trans people is that scientists often fail to consider that there could be such a thing as sex identity. Furthermore, they also don’t seem to consider that trans people might absorb society’s gender roles for the same reasons cis people do. Indeed, cis boys see themselves as boys, and so they believe (consciously or not) that society’s expectations in regards to boys are relevant to them. And similarly, trans boys see themselves as boys, and so they believe (consciously or not) that society’s expectations in regards to boys are relevant to them.
However, instead of wondering why trans boys would see themselves as boys in the first place (their subconscious sex is male), scientists often tend to assume that the reason why they see themselves as boys is because they have an innate tendency to be masculine and these boys have noticed that most people who are masculine are boys. The same assumption is made about trans men. So it is then assumed that trans men get sex reassignment surgery (SRS) because “people who are men usually have penises”. It does not occur to them that trans men might have an inherent desire to have a penis (which I think the phenomenon of the “phantom penis” illustrates quite well), as well as a view of themselves as male which might be the main motivating factor behind their desire to get SRS. And scientists do not consider the fact that trans men’s view of themselves as male leads them to being susceptible to societal conditioning which is directed at male people, or that trans men see themselves as “men” because society refers to “adult human males” as “men”. It also does not occur to them that the reason why trans men are often masculine is the same reason why cis men are often masculine — reasons which have not been fully elucidated. And indeed, their models usually fail to account for the existence of feminine trans men (and by “feminine” I’m not just talking about clothes — I’m talking about everything apart from sex characteristics and sex identity).
This conflation of subconscious sex with gender inclination then leads feminists to believe that any science which might suggest that trans identities are innate would somehow validate biological determinism in regards to gender. And this then leads the very same people to push people like me out of the conversation — even though I’m a feminist, and a trans man who is not particularly gender conforming.
However, I want to tell those people that they should consider that trans people are susceptible to gendered conditioning for generally the same reasons cis people are. Of course, trans people tend to absorb gender norms through osmosis, whereas cis people tend to absorb them both through osmosis and also through more direct forms of reinforcement on the part of caregivers. For example, a trans boy might not be berated for crying, since he is seen by his caregivers as a girl. But he might see a cis boy being berated for the same reason, and he might internalize it.
Conclusion
As I have pointed out in my preface, the type of trans experience which I have attempted to shed light on in this essay might not resonate with every trans person. However, I would very much like people whose trans experience is similar to mine to have a voice in this conversation. I think that, in order to allow this, people should not immediately assume that those of us who feel that our transness is innate and neurologically hardwired are uneducated in these matters, or that we’re trying to promote neurosexism. Instead, I think they should be a bit more open to listening to what we have to say.
I hope you have enjoyed this piece. I plan to dive deeper into this topic in the future, so be on the lookout for more. In the meantime, feel free to comment and share any constructive feedback you might have. If you are intersex, and something I wrote here strikes you as insensitive or inaccurate, please let me know.
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Works Cited
Bennett, Rachel, and David Nylund. “Overcoming Systemic Transphobia in Mental Health (with Rachel Bennett and Dr. David Nylund).” Very Bad Therapy, episode 62, Aug. 2020, https://www.verybadtherapy.com/episodes/overcoming-systemic-transphobia-in-mental-health-with-rachel-bennett-and-dr-david-nylund. Accessed 20 Aug. 2022.
Colapinto, John. “The True Story of JOHN JOAN.” Rolling Stone, no. 775, Dec 11, 1997, pp. 54–58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72–73, 92, 94–97.
Diamond, Milton. “Sex and Gender Are Different: Sexual Identity and Gender Identity Are Different.” Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, vol. 7, no. 3, 2002, pp. 320–334., https://doi.org/10.1177/1359104502007003002.
Diamond, Milton. “Transsexualism as an Intersex Condition.” Transsexualität in Theologie Und Neurowissenschaften, 2016, pp. 43–54., https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110434392-005.
Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Lane, Riki. “Trans as Bodily Becoming: Rethinking the Biological as Diversity, Not Dichotomy.” Hypatia, vol. 24, no. 3, 2008, pp. 136–157., https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01049.x.
Ramachandran, Vilayanur S, and Paul D Mcgeoch. “Phantom Penises in Transsexuals: Evidence of an Innate Gender-Specific Body Image in the Brain.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, Jan. 2008.
Serano, Julia. Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive. Seal Press, 2013.
Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Seal Press, 2016.
“Who Was David Reimer (Also, Sadly, Known as John/Joan)?” Intersex Society of North America, https://isna.org/faq/reimer/.
