Why isn’t anyone talking about subconscious sex?

Subconscious sex was the missing piece in my own gender puzzle. It might be the missing piece in today’s trans discourse.

“Subconscious sex” was coined by trans feminist writer and activist Julia Serano in her 2007 book Whipping Girl to refer to “an unconscious and inexplicable self-understanding regarding what sex one belongs to or should be”.

One might assume that “subconscious sex” is merely a synonym for “gender identity”, but that would be incorrect. Indeed, my goal here is to argue that the concept of subconscious sex put words onto an experience which had been as-of-yet unnamed. I also argue that the term “gender identity” comes with its own set of problems, namely a) that the word “identity” in this context raises issues which can only be resolved if we acknowledge the existence of subconscious sex, and b) that it contains the word “gender”, which — given the way gender is most commonly defined today — undermines the very identities of the people the term “gender identity” is purported to serve. However, instead of doing away with the term, I suggest instead that we add new terms to our lexicon, which I then helpfully provide.

I further argue that the aforementioned situation constitutes an instance of hermeneutical injustice, which is to say that it unfairly impedes trans people’s ability to understand ourselves and each other, as well as the ways in which we relate to broader society, and that its ultimate cause is trans people’s past and ongoing marginalization. I also discuss the persistent erasure gender nonconforming trans people face, and the ways in which this exacerbates the issues I have outlined. I also list a set of misconceptions which I believe might be further discouraging trans people from acknowledging the existence of subconscious sex — the proximate cause of its current lack of use. I then address these misconceptions one by one. Finally, I propose that we generate new meanings in order to better respect the full diversity of trans experiences.

Subconscious sex: an introduction

In Chapter 5 of Whipping Girl, after describing some of her childhood experiences which hinted at, and then revealed her subconscious sex to her, Julia Serano writes:

Trying to translate these subconscious experiences into conscious thought is a messy business. All of the words available in the English language completely fail to accurately capture or convey my personal understanding of these events. For example, if I were to say that I “saw” myself as female, or “knew” myself to be a girl, I would be denying the fact that I was consciously aware of my physical maleness at all times. And saying that I “wished” or “wanted” to be a girl erases how much being female made sense to me, how it felt right on the deepest, most profound level of my being. I could say that I “felt” like a girl, but that would give the false impression that I knew how other girls (and other boys) felt. And if I were to say that I was “supposed to be” a girl, or that I “should have been born” female, it would imply that I had some sort of cosmic insight into the grand scheme of the universe, which I most certainly did not. (emphasis mine)

A few paragraphs later, she adds:

I am sure that some people will object to me referring to this aspect of my person as a subconscious “sex” rather than “gender.” I prefer “sex” because I have experienced it as being rather exclusively about my physical sex, and because for me this subconscious desire to be female has existed independently of the social phenomena commonly associated with the word “gender.” As mentioned previously, my initial experience with my female subconscious sex was not accompanied by any corresponding desire to explore female gender roles or to express femininity. Nor was it the result of me trying to “fit in” to societal gender norms because, by all accounts, I was considered to be a fairly normal-acting young boy at the time. And my female subconscious sex was most certainly not the result of socialization or social gender constructs, as it defied everything I had been taught was true about gender, as well as the constant encouragement I received to think of myself as a boy and to act masculine. (emphasis mine)

She then argues that cis people also have a subconscious sex, yet they tend not to be aware of it:

Many cissexual people seem to have a hard time accepting the idea that they too have a subconscious sex — a deep-rooted understanding of what sex their bodies should be. I suppose that when a person feels right in the sex they were born into, they are never forced to locate or question their subconscious sex, to differentiate it from their physical sex. In other words, their subconscious sex exists, but it is hidden from their view. They have a blind spot.

Reading that chapter was a huge turning point for me. I now had a term to describe something which I previously hadn’t had the words for: subconscious sex. I had experienced it my entire life, I had experienced the mismatch between it and my birth sex, and yet it had gone unnamed and unrecognized up until that moment. I cannot overemphasize how important and life-changing this discovery was for me.

Prior to this, I had already been familiar with concepts such as “gender identity”, gender as a social construct, the trans intracommunity feud between transmedicalists and the rest of us, the debates with TERFs, all the common arguments that transphobes mount against us and their attendant rebuttals, etc. By the time I read Whipping Girl, I’d been identifying as trans for some time, knew many trans people online and offline, was intimately familiar with “trans Youtube”, and had read a few books and many articles and essays written by trans people. In other words, I was already well-versed in what one might call “the trans discourse”. Which made me all the more puzzled when I read that passage, had a huge “Aha!” moment, and then remembered that Whipping Girl had been written 15 years earlier. Why in the fuck was no one talking about this?

Why no one is talking about this

I believe that one of the reasons why people aren’t talking about subconscious sex is a set of misconceptions, which are as follows:

1. “Being trans is either about sex, or about gender, and the only way to be inclusive is to claim that it’s about gender.”
2. “If someone’s transness is primarily about sex, that means they must necessarily experience physical dysphoria.”
3. “A mismatch between one’s subconscious sex and one’s birth sex cannot account for the experience of social dysphoria.”
4. “To say that it’s possible for one’s subconscious sex to not match one’s birth sex validates gender essentialism.”
5. “People who emphasize biological sex are transmedicalists.”
6. “Subconscious sex cannot apply to non-binary people.”

As stated in my introduction, I’m going to be addressing these one by one.

But first, I must introduce the concept of hermeneutical injustice in order to expose the other reason why no one is talking about this, and I must explain why “gender identity” proves to be problematic when applied indiscriminately.

Hermeneutical injustice

In her book Epistemic Injustice (this video provides a good overview), Miranda Fricker first illustrates her concept of hermeneutical injustice (hermeneutical means ‘relating to interpretation’ — in this context, how we make sense of our lived experiences and of the world around us) through the story of Wendy Sanford, a woman suffering from postpartum depression who does no know that others also experience the same thing and that it has a name. She then finds out about it through other women while attending an MIT workshop. Wendy Sanford, as quoted by Fricker, recalls:

“I realized that what I’d been blaming myself for, and what my husband had blamed me for, wasn’t my personal deficiency. It was a combination of physiological things and a real societal thing, isolation. That realization was one of those moments that makes you a feminist forever.” (149)

According to Fricker,

Wendy Sanford’s moment of truth seems to be not simply a hermeneutical breakthrough for her and for the other women present, but also a moment in which some kind of epistemic injustice is overcome. The guiding intuition here is that as these women groped for a proper understanding of what we may now so easily name as post‐natal depression, the hermeneutical darkness that suddenly lifted from Wendy Sandford’s mind had been wrongfully preventing her from understanding a significant area of her social experience, thus depriving her of an important patch of self‐understanding. If we can substantiate this intuition, then we shall see that the area of hermeneutical gloom with which she had lived up until that life‐changing forty‐five minutes constituted a wrong done to her in her capacity as a knower, and was thus a specific sort of epistemic injustice — a hermeneutical injustice.(149, emphases mine)

Indeed, after reading Whipping Girl, I was straight-up angry when I realized that a key aspect of my experience had gone unacknowledged for so long. I did feel that I had suffered an injustice, because not only had I been at a disadvantage in my ability to understand myself, and this had had a negative impact on my life, but also because the means of shedding light on the “hermeneutical darkness” had been there all along in that passage I had just read — I just hadn’t been aware of it. The concept of subconscious sex did not seem to have had a significant impact on trans discourse — much unlike some of Serano’s other concepts, such as trans-misogyny, for example.

However, it is clear that this term did shed light on an area of “hermeneutical darkness”. I am reminded of Julia Serano writing that “all of the words available in the English language completely [failed] to accurately capture or convey [her] personal understanding of [the experiences she recounts in her book]”. And this is in the context of a broader situation of systematic hermeneutical injustice suffered by our community. Indeed, since trans people make up a tiny portion of the population, and because of our systemic oppression and the wilful efforts to suppress knowledge pertaining to us (e.g. the burning of Magnus Hirschfeld’s research by the Nazis in 1933), we had not been active participants in meaning-making practices along with the dominant group — in this case, cis people. And since cis people have “a blind spot” which keeps them from being aware of their own subconscious sex, they never developed a term for it. Trans people had been additionally barred from “generating meanings” due to the stigma against us which led the dominant group to see us as less worthy of being listened to and believed. Indeed, our transness is often seen as a defect, and we as trans people as objects to be studied, and we are deemed to be less capable of rational thought. Thus, our subjective experiences were and continue to be discounted as unreliable. In addition to this, the ongoing gate-keeping of our access to medical transition (which hinders our mental health), as well as our marginalization, and the fact that our families of origin are less likely to support us — financially or otherwise — has meant that we are also likely to be de facto barred from “professions that make for signicant hermeneutical participation (journalism, politics, law, and so on)” (Fricker 156).

However, even within the trans community, there seems to be a “blind spot”. It seems to me that trans people whose gender inclination (see Serano’s Intrinsic Inclinations Model, and the note below this paragraph) aligns with their subconscious sex (for example, feminine trans women, masculine trans men, and androgynous non-binary people) often have a blind spot in regards to their subconscious sex being a phenomenon that’s distinct from their gender inclination.

Note: The thing I’m calling “gender inclination” is what Serano calls “gender expression”. Serano instead refers to subconscious sex, gender expression and sexual orientation as all being “gender inclinations”; I will not do that here, since that might lead people to again conflate subconscious sex with the tendency to be either feminine, masculine, or something in between. Besides, I think it’s important to differentiate the inclination from the expression of that inclination. Indeed, society often actively tries to discourage us from expressing our inclination when the latter falls outside of the norm — just like it tries to get in our way when we try to express our subconscious sex by medically transitioning. I think it’s important to be able to talk about that.

Furthermore, gender conforming trans people are often granted more legitimacy in the eyes of cis people, which means that they are usually the ones who get listened to (on the rare occasions when cis people actually listen to us), and we gender nonconforming trans people are not. Even worse, we might be seen as a source of “bad optics”. Not to mention that we also don’t get listened to much within the trans community itself — perhaps because we are a minority within a minority. This situation reinforces the existing state of hermeneutical injustice suffered by trans people whose gender inclination does not neatly align with their subconscious sex.

Communication breakdown

Before reading Whipping Girl, but after I’d already become aware of my own transness, I’d been feeling frustrated and confused, as though no one was talking about the trans experience in a way I could fully resonate with. Not only that, but people were talking about transness in a way which invalidated my own experiences as a trans person while simultaneously pretending they were trying to include me. For example, people would say things like “feminine trans men are valid” — which I fully agreed with, since I am a trans man, and also happen to be more inclined toward feminine modes of gender expression than the average man. However, those same people would then say that “words like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ refer to one’s gender identity” and that gender, in that context, was “the socially constructed set of social roles, expectations, behaviours, etc. commonly associated with a given sex”. Which, in my view, contradicted the point that “feminine trans men are valid”. Indeed, doesn’t the view of gender that’s operational here undermine the truth of that statement? Wouldn’t a trans man who, for example, wears masculine clothes, be more of a man than a trans man who wears feminine clothes, if “man” was a term referring to one’s gender — “the socially constructed set of social roles, expectations, behaviours, etc. commonly associated with a given sex”? I would argue that the masculine trans man would indeed be more of a man under such a conceptual framework. Yet this problem is seldom acknowledged in popular trans discourse.

On a personal level, all those well-meaning explanations of gender as a social construct sounded like “feminine trans men are women/lesser men”, and it seemed like the word “valid” in that context meant “you can call yourself whatever you like because it doesn’t mean anything”. In other words, I didn’t feel validated; I felt invalidated, and like my existence and lived experience was of so little concern to people in my own community that they thought that throwing an empty platitude my way should be sufficient to appease me, and that if it wasn’t, that meant I was probably just confused.

Indeed, whenever I would attempt to discuss my concerns with other trans people, they would usually dodge the issue by saying something like “your gender identity is different from your gender presentation”. When I would ask what “gender” meant in the context of “gender identity”, they would again parrot the same definition of it being the “socially constructed set of [blah-blah]”. When I would then express the fact that, in this context, the definition invalidates my identity, they would say something like “just because something is a social construct doesn’t mean it isn’t real; something being socially constructed just means that […]”. I guess they were trying to be helpful, since “social construct” is academic jargon and hence confusing to a lot of people (not to mention that academics are not in uniform agreement regarding the meaning of the term, or what it means for gender in particular to be socially constructed). It was clear that my trans peers were not understanding what I was trying to say. In retrospect, this was the result of a deficiency in the language, in our ability to interpret our own and each other’s experiences relating to gender and sex. In other words, a “hermeneutical lacuna” (Fricker).

The turning point

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)

By the time I was having these frustrating exchanges with other trans people, I was almost 30 years old and I’d spent most of my life not realizing that I was trans. And a big part of why I’d remained ignorant of such a basic fact of my being for so long was that the ways in which people would typically discuss transness didn’t tend to resonate with me. Indeed, if gender really was “the socially constructed set of social roles, expectations, behaviours, etc. commonly associated with a given sex”, I remained unsure about which gender(s) I should identify as, and about how this related to my general sense of gender confusion. I couldn’t have known at the time that this confusion was due to a “hermeneutical lacuna”. Instead, I thought that’s just how gender was — confusing. Indeed, that’s what trans people who were in a similar position of hermeneutical disadvantage within the trans community would often say — “gender is such a weird thing; I’ve kinda just given up on understanding it”, “I don’t think anyone really understands gender, but that’s ok; we don’t need to understand it, we just need to respect it” (true, but ideally it would be both). We did not have “faith in [our] own ability to make sense of the world, or at least the relevant region of the world”.

The first illumination came from a Reddit meme. The meme in question is, to this day, the 8th most upvoted post of all time on a popular non-binary trans subreddit. Here it is:

As a side-note, the title of the post — “The grass is always greener” — seems problematic in this context.

Seeing this heavily-upvoted meme was a watershed moment for me. My first thought was “wait…that’s allowed? We can talk about wanting to be of a different sex?”. Now, some people will call bullshit on this, and say I should have known that already, but I swear that it was far from obvious, and that this was the first clear indication I’d seen that anyone but myself experienced sex and gender as distinct internal experiences. In fact, up until that point, even I hadn’t realized that I experienced them as distinct.

My second thought was more like a flood of memories and realizations. All the memories of experiencing wistful envy while scrolling through pictures of non-binary AMAB-looking people with facial scruff who wore floral patterns and nail polish came back to me. And so did all the memories of feeling no such envy while scrolling through pictures of non-binary AFAB-looking people. However, how could that be if I was agender (as I thought I might be at the time)? What was this?

This was something else. This seemed to be about biological sex, not gender. I wanted to be “AMAB” — assigned male at birth — not because I wanted to hop into a time machine and force whoever wrote down the letter “F” on my birth certificate to write “M” instead, but rather because I wanted to be physically male.

Indeed, it became clear to me after seeing the aforementioned meme and doing some self-reflection that, while I had an interest in exploring divergent modes of gender expression, I only wanted to do so while being male.

And that’s the story of how I decided to transition.

The meme had found me at a time when my beliefs were different than they are now, and before I’d read Julia Serano. This caused my beliefs and understanding at the time to shatter into a million pieces, and yet I felt that I was now holding an important piece of the puzzle. It was only upon finally reading Whipping Girl months later that I was able to start putting the pieces back together into something coherent and meaningful.

The problem with gender identity

The first roadblock is the ambiguity of the word “identity”, and of the notion of “identifying as [something]”. Does it denote the deliberate act of assigning a specific label to oneself and purporting to become the thing the label refers to through that act (which is a common interpretation of the word, hence the tired “attack helicopter” jokes), or is it the conscious acknowledgement of an existing fact about oneself? If we say it is the former, it seems that we are conceding ground to our attack helicopter detractors. If we say it is the latter, this seems to call into question the validity of pre-transition trans people’s maleness and/or femaleness.

However, I argue that this quandary only arises due to our failure to consider the phenomenon of subconscious sex. Indeed, in the case of trans people who are pre-transition, their identity as “male” or “female” constitutes a conscious acknowledgement of an existing, underlying fact about themselves — their subconscious sex. The fact that “male” and “female” tend to refer to one’s birth sex exclusively is rooted in the systematic hermeneutical injustices trans people face. Indeed, it seems to me that we should be distinguishing between “birth sex”, “lived sex” and “subconscious sex”. The fact that we only use one word — sex — to refer to all three is due to the fact that all three align for the vast majority of people (for example, most people who are born female wish to remain so because their subconscious sex aligns with their birth sex), and that because of trans people’s marginalized status, our experiences are discounted and we are thus barred from meaning-making practices.

What am I supposed to select in this instance? I will select “F”, since my birth sex is relevant in this particular context (speech therapy), yet a miscommunication is happening which I am not given the obvious means to rectify, and this is based on an assumption which is rooted in my hermeneutical marginalization. Instead of “Sex”, this should say “Birth sex”, or “Lived sex” (depending on which is most relevant in this context). And within that category, there should be a third option for people whose sex — birth, subconscious, or lived — is not distinctly male or female (for example, “X”).

The second issue with “gender identity” is that it contains the word “gender”. This wouldn’t be a problem if not for the fact that “gender identity” is used indiscriminately to refer to subconscious sex and to gender inclination. However, since it is used indiscriminately to refer to both, and because of the way gender is commonly defined today, the use of the word invalidates gender nonconforming trans people. Indeed, gender in this context is most often defined as something akin to “the socially constructed set of social roles, expectations, behaviours, etc. commonly associated with a given sex”. For instance, the World Health Organization defines it as follows:

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. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.

And the American Psychological Association defines it as follows:

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. These influence the ways that people act, interact, and feel about themselves.

However, if “man” and “woman” are “gender identities” (as we trans people have been saying for a while now), it sounds like we’re saying that someone being a man or woman depends on the degree to which they align with “the socially constructed set of social roles, expectations, behaviours, etc. commonly associated with [the male or female sex respectively]”. Which, again, necessarily invalidates trans people who are gender nonconforming relative to their subconscious sex (e.g. butch trans women). If you’re still not convinced that this is a problem, read on, because this also affects gender conforming trans people.

Why this also affects gender conforming trans people

There is a sentiment I’ve seen pop up all over the place — generally from trans-positive and well-meaning people — which I find to be very problematic. It’s the idea that experiencing a desire to change one’s body is the result of internalized transphobia and/or primarily the result of social forces. Indeed, if a trans person changes their body in order to affirm their gender, that must mean that they are clinging to the notion that certain genders must be associated with certain bodies — for example, “men must have penises and flat chests”, or “women must have breasts and vaginas”. However, the same people usually acknowledge that there is “a robust international consensus in the peer-reviewed literature that gender transition, including medical treatments such as hormone therapy and surgeries, improves the overall well-being of transgender individuals,” so they thankfully do not try to discourage trans people from transitioning. No, they merely think to themselves, “how sad that society’s gender norms are preventing this person from seeing that their body is already a man’s/woman’s body”.

If you think I’m exaggerating, I would like to share a quote from Spanish trans sociologist Miquel Missé’s recent article — The doctors profiting from trans surgery — published in Unherd. The contents of the article are extracted from his recent book The Myth of the Wrong Body. He writes:

Our bodies are fine — the problem is how certain parts of us are interpreted in our society, the meanings and connotations assigned to them. And due to this, unfortunately, many people might feel the need to alter themselves.

Is my body “already a man’s body”? According to one interpretation of “man”, sure. However, this is a rhetorical sleight of hand — equivocation. Say that a trans man vents to you that he wishes he had a man’s body. What he means is that he wants to have “a body which is physically male”. But what you mean by the word “man” is something else. Either “someone who aligns with the set of social roles, behaviours, etc. associated with the male sex”, or “anyone who wants to be a man or says they are a man”. So in your view he already has a man’s body — he is a man, and this is his body. That’s what you tell him. You get to feel good and like you’ve helped, when all you’ve done is that you’ve reinforced his sense of dissonance. He gets to feel worse — even more confused, unseen, and misunderstood.

At this point, someone might object that “‘male’ is still a term which refers to gender — it’s just a synonym for ‘man’”. What I would then reply is “ok, so let’s try to be as explicit as possible. The trans man wishes that the dominant sex hormone in his body was testosterone, and that he had a flat chest, a penis and testicles. He wishes that he could grow a beard. He wishes that he had a deeper voice. What arbitrary combination of mouth sounds would you like him to use in order to express this to you in a way that’s more efficient than saying all that?”

This person might then ask, “but why though? Why would he want those things?”. We don’t know. No one knows. We have various hypotheses as to why, but at the end of the day, we just don’t know. I’m sorry I don’t have a satisfying answer for you, something simple and straight-forward like “because society teaches trans men that if they are masculine, that means they should have a penis”. Gender nonconforming trans people — in particular those whose gender inclination is better aligned with their birth sex than with their subconscious sex in the eyes of society — who want to medically transition are living proof that’s not a good answer.

Let’s apply this to a different situation to drive the point home. A hungry person tells you, “I wish I had a full stomach”. Then, in an attempt to be helpful, you say “your stomach is already full — it’s full of the desire for food. You see, you’re only hungry because of the way society defines food.” My stomach might be full of something in a figurative sense, but not full of the thing I need in the literal sense. What my body needs is food. If you try to address hunger by redefining food as “the desire for food”, you’re gonna wind up starving a bunch of people.

I would argue (as Serano also does in Chapter 6 of Whipping Girl) that trans people who medically transition do not do so to affirm our gender by changing our sex, but rather to align our physical/lived sex with our subconscious sex, and the latter remains unchanged whether or not we transition. We are transitioning to alleviate a state of dissonance which is felt by us but not by others — in fact, by doing so, it seems we are throwing others in a (hopefully temporary) state of dissonance, for the dissonance between how they see us and how we see ourselves is now apparent to them as well (it is generally at that point that we encounter the most direct and virulent transphobia).

Indeed, it is often because we do not want to “inconvenience others”— by causing them to temporarily experience a dissonance we have ourselves experienced on an internal level, in silence, our entire lives — that we put off transitioning. And the reason why we do not want to inconvenience others is because — on a conscious or unconscious level — we most likely feel that 1) being who we are is shameful (actual internalized transphobia), and 2) that this makes our happiness less important than other people’s. In other words, we believe that other people’s temporary inconvenience (and perhaps temporary shock and grief in the case of close family) is a worse “evil” than one’s lifelong self-denial. So it seems to me that internalized transphobia would be more likely to lead someone to avoid transitioning. Therefore, medical transition is not an act of self-hatred, but the exact opposite — which is to say, the most vital and loving act of self-affirmation one might have hitherto undertaken.

The aforementioned attitudes play right into the hands of a particular brand of transphobe, since they are likely to take it as further license to restrict our access to medical transition under the guise of it being for our own good, and for the good of society — since changing our bodies is seen as a sort of capitulation to oppressive gender norms. The latter “concern” is most often weaponized against trans men, who are seen as “vulnerable girls” suffering from internalized misogyny and body image issues.

Presumably as a rebuttal to the claim which is commonly made by transmedicalists that “we’d still want to change our bodies if we’d been born on a desert island”, Missé writes:

In my opinion, trans people born on a desert island wouldn’t be trans: our gender expression would not be associated with any fixed gender identity and less still to a concrete social corporality. If we’d been born on desert islands we’d never dream of operating on ourselves.

The issue here is two-fold. First, Missé seems to be conflating two concepts which we have shown to be distinct — gender identity and subconscious sex. Missé might have a blind spot preventing him from recognizing that distinction. His gender inclination might lean masculine, and his subconscious sex might be male. I obviously don’t want be making wild speculations about what’s going on in someone else’s mind, but he does write that he and his sister were “two very masculine girls” growing up, which seems to support my hypothesis. Interestingly, his sister did not transition, and they both chalk it up to the fact that “in the face of a similar discomfort, each of [them] developed different survival skills.” (50)

Second, the desert island thought experiment that transmedicalists and Missé engage in seems to be a way of illustrating opposing beliefs regarding the “nature versus nurture debate” — the former group being strictly on the side of nature, and the latter individual strictly on the side of nurture.

In her 2013 book Excluded, Serano coins the term “gender artifactualization” to refer to “the tendency to conceptualize and depict gender as being primarily or entirely a cultural artifact” (117). She distinguishes this from social constructionism by saying that “to have a social constructionist view of gender (by most standard definitions) simply means that one believes that gender does not arise in a direct and unadulterated manner from biology, but rather is shaped to some extent by culture — by socialization, gender norms, and the gender-related ideology, language, and
labels that constrain and influence our understanding of the matter” and that “gender artifactualists, on the other hand, are typically not content to merely discuss the ways in which gender may be socially constructed, but rather they discount or purposefully ignore the possibility that biology and biological variation also play a role in constraining and shaping our genders.” (118) By that definition, Missé seems to be a “subconscious sex artifactualist”, which is to say that he believes that trans people’s desire to change our bodies is entirely the product of socialization, and more specifically of the association of certain bodies with certain forms of gender expression.

In The Myth of the Wrong Body, he writes,

The relationship between identity and body, or, more accurately, gender identity and body, is a twentieth-century Western concept, which assumes that if a person identifies as the “opposite” gender to the one they were assigned at birth they have to change their body to match. (24)

It should be obvious given what we’ve already elucidated that Missé has it all backwards. Indeed, it is wrong to assume that “if a person identifies as the ‘opposite’ gender to the one they were assigned at birth they have to change their body to match”, but not for the reasons he thinks.

One obvious reason is that trans people change their bodies because they want to do so. Missé has anticipated this objection, and believes that trans people can in fact be influenced by society to the degree that they might experience a subjective need to transition, which they would not experience if society was different (24). It seems to me that the regret rate for medical transition is much lower than one would expect if the concept had really been invented and promoted by Western doctors as a scheme to profit off of gender variance. But then again, Missé would likely respond that societal influences are indeed that powerful.

Another reason is that trans people should indeed not feel like they “have to” transition just because they are trans. I’m not sure where the “have to” comes from. I guess Missé might argue that if people see transness as a medical condition, this might lead some of them to think of medical transition as being a necessary treatment, rather than a personal decision. However, that’s a bit dubious considering that treatments for medical issues are almost always personal decisions — a doctor could diagnose you with a treatable yet potentially lethal medical condition, and instead of complying with their recommendations, you could say “no thanks, those side-effects sound pretty bad. I think I’ll try acupuncture instead”.

Another reason why the belief Missé condemns is indeed wrong, but not for the reasons he thinks, is that subconscious sex and gender identity are distinct phenomena that should not be conflated. Someone who was born female could have a subconscious sex which is male, yet their gender inclination could be feminine. This person would likely still want to transition. The “twentieth-century Western concept” he is talking about is rooted in the fact that it used to be that in order to be allowed to medically transition, you’d have to first “live in the target gender” for a period of time. And what was usually meant by “live in the target gender” was “perform gender in the ways that conform with the gender norms associated with the sex you want to transition to (the person’s subconscious sex or sex identity)”. However, trans people themselves did not necessarily have an interest in performing gender in that way. They often merely did so to appease cis doctors who had archaic views of gender and sex. (see Bennett)

Also, I am reminded of the thing nearly everyone’s parents suggest when they come out as trans: “why not just be a feminine man?” to trans women, and “why not just be a masculine woman?” to trans men. If it really was the case that trans people only “alter themselves” to escape the pain of being gender nonconforming, how do you explain that gender nonconforming trans people (i.e. masculine trans women and feminine trans men) exist?

Transgenderism and the trans experience in general has to do with rigidity. The categories of man and woman are so terribly rigid that they end up excluding people. It’s so difficult to be a masculine man or a feminine woman that in fact many people feel they fail to meet gender norms.(48)

I’m the living proof that Missé is wrong (and right, but not in the way he thinks). I was not a “very masculine girl” at all. I was an autistic “girl” who’d sit in a corner away from people, reading books or drawing high fashion clothes in my sketchbooks. I have a picture from when I was five or six, in which I’m hanging out with my best friend at the time, who was what people often call “a tomboy”. She is sitting on a bicycle “in the driver’s seat”, and I’m right behind her straddling the rear cargo rack. She is wearing masculine clothes and she has short hair. I’m wearing a dress, my hair is long, and I’m smiling.

Later, I became a somewhat femme “woman” who enjoyed wearing makeup. The only reason I ever stopped doing so, is because when I started telling people that I was a man, I feared that their “rigidity” (as Missé so eloquently puts it) would prevent them from taking me seriously if I kept doing things they associated with femininity. Gender norms didn’t start feeling like a prison until I started telling people that I was a man. That’s when society’s expectations of what male people should or shouldn’t do started to weigh down on me in earnest. And I also felt this within the trans community, because of the notion that gender inclination and subconscious sex are one and the same. Yet I still want to change my body.

Again, I am struck by the persistent erasure that gender nonconforming trans people face. And what’s contributing to this erasure is that we still do not make a distinction between gender and sex when discussing our identities.

In order to remedy this situation, I propose the following: 1) that we add a new term to our lexicon: “sex identity” (which could be used interchangeably with subconscious sex — although of course, “sex identity” suggests that our subconscious sex has risen to the level of our conscious awareness), 2) that we use the term “gender identity” to refer to someone’s intrinsic gender inclination which has risen to the level of their conscious awareness (i.e. someone being genderqueer, or being butch or femme, for example), 3) while we’re at it, we could also add the term “lived identity”, which would be based on one’s lived sex and/or gender expression (gender expression being the external manifestation of one’s intrinsic gender inclination), such as one being a “genderqueer man” or a “butch woman”, and 4) that we stop artifactualizing subconscious sex.

Misconception 1: “Being trans is either about sex, or about gender, and the only way to be inclusive is to claim that it’s about gender”

I think I’ve successfully demonstrated in the previous sections that that is not the case. I don’t mean to suggest that being trans can’t be about gender also, or that a given person’s transness couldn’t be exclusively about gender rather than about sex (more on that once we get to misconception 6). I only mean that we should stop suggesting that being trans is exclusively about gender inclination, while disregarding subconscious sex. In fact, claiming that it’s only about gender excludes and invalidates gender nonconforming trans people, not to mention that it misrepresents what I would argue to be the vast majority of trans people.

Misconception 2: “If someone’s transness is primarily about sex, that means they must necessarily experience physical dysphoria”

For the purpose of this essay, I will define “physical dysphoria” as “psychological pain or discomfort related to sexed aspects of one’s body”. As far as I can tell, there is no particular reason why one couldn’t experience a mismatch between one’s subconscious sex and one’s birth sex without experiencing physical dysphoria as a result. Of course, some amount of discomfort does often ensue — especially starting around the onset of puberty — but that is not always the case. And in fact, many trans people report that they did not experience physical dysphoria until they acknowledged and accepted that they were trans, and many of them do seem like the sort of trans people for whom being trans is more about their subconscious sex than it is about their gender inclination. To further illustrate my point, I will use myself as a case study.

When I was a female child, I expected that I would grow up to become an adult male. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious expectation. It was simply that whenever I would imagine myself in the future, I would see an adult male in my mind’s eye. It did not consciously occur to me that this is not what happens to “girls”. And I wasn’t particularly tomboyish, so it’s not like I thought I was a boy at the time. It was pretty obvious to me that people thought I was a girl. I just didn’t think this would last. It’s hard to remember whether I was consciously upset by the situation — since many upsetting things happened during my childhood which might have taken precedence — but I really don’t think I was. Or if I was, it certainly wasn’t intense enough for me to pray that God would turn me into a boy, or anything of the sort. And it wasn’t for lack of believing in God at the time, since I used to pray to God for other things (for example, that Pokémon would be real).

I also remember that I strongly identified with male characters in stories, much more so than with female characters. One of my earliest memories is of walking into the kitchen pretending to be a deer, saying “look, I’m Bambi!”, only for my grandma to suggest that I should be a doe instead. I also seemed to relate a lot more to the male people in my life. I felt that I resonated with them on a level that just wasn’t the case with female people.

One could argue that this might have been a simple matter of my personality and interests being more aligned with males, but that was not the case — my personality and interests have always been idiosyncratic and not obviously gendered one way or the other. And when examining the cases in which they were gendered, my subconscious sex was nonetheless evident. For example, I was interested in high fashion (generally seen as a feminine interest) and dreamed of becoming the next Jean Paul Gaultier. Indeed, I pictured myself becoming a male fashion designer. I do remember feeling slightly hurt whenever someone would gift me something “girly” for a birthday or for Christmas — rather than something relatively “non-gendered”, like a microscope (I was into science and wanted a microscope for years; I did wind up getting two over the course of my childhood) — but that might have been true if I’d been a cis girl who was not into girly things, in which case those gifts would have been indications that whoever gifted them did not pay much attention to what I was actually like as a person, which a cis girl would have every right to be upset about.

I also internalized a lot of social expectations which are directed at males, as though I unconsciously thought they should apply to me (one reason why I find the whole “socialized female/socialized male” idea a bit dubious when applied to trans people — I think trans people are likely to be influenced to varying degrees by the social expectations placed on both their physical birth sex and their subconscious sex).

My subconscious sex manifested itself further when I became intensely interested in LGBT issues in high school. Indeed, I felt that I resonated deeply with homosexuality, in spite of the fact that I was very attracted to guys, and not very attracted to girls. I wondered whether I might be a lesbian — and even identified as such for a year or two — but I couldn’t help but notice that my continued interest in guys contradicted that hypothesis. So I figured I must be bisexual, yet I still had little to no romantic interest in women. However, being in a straight relationship seemed wrong on a basic level, and throughout the years, whenever I was in relationships with men, I always hoped that they were secretly bisexual — not because I wanted a threesome or to indulge in voyeurism — but, in retrospect, because that might mean we were in fact in a homosexual relationship.

Once I became consciously aware of the fact that I kept picturing my future self as male, I chalked it up to “internalized misogyny”, and to the fact that most of the people who worked in the fields that interested me were men. In order to remedy this — I was, and still am a feminist after all — I attempted to picture my future self as female instead. I had to catch myself repeatedly throughout the day, and throughout the weeks, months and years, and this took considerable effort. Nonetheless, this gradually began to work. However, I did not care about that blurry woman in my mind’s eye. She felt like a stranger. And the consequence of this was that over time, I struggled to retain my ambitions and my interest in my own future. Whereas I’d previously been motivated to work toward a career in academic philosophy, I was now only trying to avoid pain on a day-to-day basis. I was merely surviving, and planning to write a will and “put my affairs in order”, so that when I went to sleep at night hoping to never wake up, I could at least do so with peace of mind.

It’s hard to say whether this passive suicidality was the direct result of my attempts at denying who I was to myself, or whether that was only part of it — since I do have other issues which correlate with suicidality. And I can’t deny that I felt disillusioned with traditional academia, and lacked confidence that this was a viable career path for me — philosophy departments are being downsized or altogether eliminated all over the place, and competition for academic positions is fierce. Either way, now that I have come out of denial, I have once again found my passion for philosophy, and it feels like there is a purpose and meaning to my life beyond the mere avoidance of discomfort. I now have a “willingness” — as people say in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — to experience discomfort, and an active commitment toward my values.

I conclude from these experiences that my subconscious sex has likely always been male. Yet, for most of my life, I did not experience physical dysphoria. I only started experiencing it in earnest once I had already decided to transition. That is when the considerable gap between what my body looks like and what a male body typically looks like became an object of concern. I also started to notice all the ways in which this or that body part looked female. This did not use to be something I cared about, but now it made me worry that I might never be able to successfully embody my subconscious sex. Whereas in the past I’d seen myself through the lens of worrying whether I looked attractive to other people, I now also saw myself through the lens of my project of becoming physically male. Therefore, in my case, physical dysphoria is only a consequence of my desire to transition, rather than its cause, and it is quite distinct from the experience of subconscious-to-birth sex mismatch (one might call it a “dissonance”, as Serano does in Whipping Girl) — though they are now intertwined.

A meme found on a trans subreddit (source)

A word on transmedicalist purity testing

Some transmedicalists express skepticism when a trans person who was born female claims to love their body, their curves, their breasts, etc. The thing is, it is perfectly conceivable that one might appreciate one’s body aesthetically (or for other reasons) while still feeling that one’s subconscious sex does not match one’s lived sex. If one’s body is aesthetically pleasing, one is not exempt from noticing that. Not to mention that being seen as beautiful, or at least attractive, can be a source of privilege in society. And if we are to acknowledge that privilege, we must also acknowledge that one might fear losing such a privilege. And indeed, that is often a concern for people who are trying to decide whether or not to transition.

As for medical transition, there could be any number of reasons why a person whose subconscious sex does not match their birth sex might not want to medically transition. All those reasons are that person’s own business, and we should not speculate about other people’s lives and their reasons for doing things. However, to provide a few examples: medical transition is often expensive; change can be scary (especially for autistic people, and trans people are more likely to be autistic); one might have health issues which might be exacerbated by HRT, etc. Again, no one should be under any obligation to disclose the reasons for their choices in order to be accepted as a trans person, and the attitude of “cis until proven otherwise” in transmedicalist circles is harmful.

It’s also a bit akin to not believing someone about their sexual orientation until they give you a list of all the people they’ve dated and/or had sex with — “you say you’re bisexual, and yet you haven’t had sex with an equal number of men and women. You’re clearly just straight/gay”. Indeed, the existence of bisexual people is rather inconvenient for people who are trying to “prove” that they are not attracted to members of a particular sex, and doing so by sleeping with the “other sex” (for example, George Costanza saying “do you wanna have sex with me right now? Let’s go!” in a desperate bid to prove to a female reporter that he isn’t involved in a romantic partnership with Jerry in Season 4, Episode 17 of Seinfeld). Similarly, the existence of trans people who don’t transition and don’t experience physical dysphoria is inconvenient for those who rely on a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and/or their own medical transition to prove who they are to themselves and others.

By contrast, ever since discovering Julia Serano’s concept of subconscious sex, I have felt a remarkable sense of peace and confidence in who I am. The question of whether or not I am trans is now separate from the question of whether or not I want to transition. That is incredibly liberating. I am trans. My subconscious sex is male. And that has always been true and will most likely continue to be true whether or not I transition. So I know that I’m transitioning because I want to do so — not because I’m trying to prove anything to anyone. And I also know that my femininity doesn’t in any way invalidate my subconscious sex (a statement which would be nonsensical if you were to replace “subconscious sex” with “gender” as it is commonly defined; it’d be like saying “the fact that I love pasta doesn’t in any way invalidate my hatred for pasta” — it’s no wonder that gender nonconforming trans people are often so unsure about which words to use to convey our internal experiences).

Misconception 3: “A mismatch between one’s subconscious sex and one’s birth sex cannot account for the experience of social dysphoria”

We are, of course, social beings — we do not materialize out of thin air on desert islands. And it can be argued that it’s through perceiving others and being perceived by others, and through our interactions with them — including through language — that we gain an understanding of ourselves and of the world around us (see Stitt 18 on relational frame theory, and Sartre on The Look, for example). So it stands to reason that if our subconscious sex is in conflict with other people’s perception of us, this is likely to cause problems in the construction of our sense of self, cognitive dissonance, as well as ongoing confusion and frustration in our day-to-day interactions. Socially transitioning (or even just putting on an item of clothing culturally associated with our subconscious sex — even in private), though it does not change our body, is still very likely to bring us joy and relief because it helps us see our subconscious sex being reflected externally (by cultural association/relational frames), and helps us be seen as ourselves by ourselves and/or others, thus bringing us relief from our sense of social dissonance. Not to mention that for trans people whose gender inclination matches their subconscious sex, this would also have the added benefit of allowing them to express their gender inclination.

Furthermore, if a person sees me as a woman, it is a reminder that my subconscious sex does not match my lived sex, and of the fact that I am effectively powerless to make my subconscious sex obvious to others except through either 1) medically transitioning, or 2) simply telling them what my subconscious sex/sex identity is and asking them to refer to me accordingly. But in the latter case, most people are so used to assuming that someone’s birth sex must align with their subconscious sex — indeed, they do not even have a concept of subconscious sex due to the systematic exclusion of trans people from the dominant group’s meaning-making practices — that they are likely to either a) explicitly refuse to acknowledge our subconscious sex and continue to refer to us according to our birth sex instead, or b) refer to us according to our subconscious sex, but only as a sort of gesture of appeasement which isn’t backed by any real belief that we are who we say we are. In this case, we might experience our body as the barrier preventing us from being perceived as we are, without being aware of the barrier constituted by the unrecognized hermeneutical injustice, and by the mental rigidity of our interlocutor. However, while our body is not the only barrier preventing us from being perceived as we are, it is definitely a significant barrier.

The other thing I want to point out in regards to social dysphoria, is that adopting the gender presentation associated with our subconscious sex/sex identity does help other people see us as we are, and therefore does tend to alleviate our social dysphoria. But I think it is a mistake to then assume that “playing the wrong gender role” was the thing bothering us and causing our discomfort. Gender, in this case, can be a tool which helps others associate us with a given sex (or can serve to keep them from associating us with a given sex if we feel that our subconscious sex is neither female nor male), but it does not necessarily follow that this is what our transness is about. As Youtuber Natalie Wynn puts it, “no trans woman thinks that femininity and womanhood are the same. We’re using a language of cultural signifiers to prompt others to see us for what we are”. Although, I should specify that I wouldn’t say that “no trans woman thinks that” — I do think that some trans women whose gender inclination aligns with their subconscious sex might in fact think that, due to the “blind spot” I mentioned earlier. From what I’ve observed, it seems to be a somewhat common misconception, which makes sense in light of the definition of gender which is commonly used in the context of “gender identity”.

To stress the point further, I direct the reader’s attention to the fact that, while we might agree that gender norms can often be oppressive — and can be used to justify various forms of unfair discrimination — many of us have realized that if gender norms were more rigid, trans people would have an easier time “passing”. Indeed, if women almost never had short hair and almost never wore pants, someone who saw me wearing pants and sporting a short haircut might be more likely to assume that I’m a young, effeminate-looking guy with an unusually high-pitched voice than to assume that I’m a woman. Which isn’t to say that rigid gender norms are good, of course. I would never make such a claim, especially as someone whose subconscious sex is male but nonetheless finds joy in feminine modes of gender expression. I’m pointing out that if our society’s association of certain bodies with certain genders was really the thing causing trans people so much distress, you wouldn’t see us feeling so ambivalent about the fact that the relaxation of these norms makes it harder for us to be perceived as our subconscious sex, especially pre-transition.

Post-transition, or during transition, many trans people talk about how euphoric it makes them feel to wear clothing associated with their birth sex and to still be perceived as their subconscious sex. For instance, I’ve read Reddit comments from trans men who said things like “the ultimate euphoria is to wear a dress and for people to still see me as a man”. I’ve also seen comments from trans women saying things like “my breasts have grown so much from HRT that I now need to wear a binder to keep people I’m not out to from noticing, and just the fact that I have to do that now makes me euphoric”. I think those are quintessential examples of sex identity being at the heart of why people choose to medically transition.

Misconception 4: “To say that it’s possible for one’s subconscious sex to not match one’s birth sex validates gender essentialism”

People who intuit the existence of subconscious sex often think of it in simplistic terms, such as “having a male brain in a female body” or “having a female brain in a male body”. Which then of course begs the question: is there such a thing as a “female brain” or a “male brain”. I would say no, just like there isn’t a “female height” or a “male height” even though the females of our species are on average shorter than the males (I probably got this from Serano but I can’t find the quote).

Which then begs the further question: how does subconscious sex arise? Where does it come from? And what leads to the “mismatch”?

As I’ve said earlier, we don’t know. It’s probably another one of those things that we don’t quite understand, like what makes a particular person autistic and another one neurotypical, for example. And before people come at me with pitchforks, I want to stress that I’m not pathologizing transness by comparing it to autism, because I also don’t pathologize autism. And it’s an interesting comparison to make, since both autistic people and gender variant people have been subjected to attempts at conversion therapy over the course of history, much to our detriment.

The other parallel I want to draw is that Magnus Hirschfeld was studying gender variance around roughly the same time and geographical area that Hanz Asperger was studying autistic kids (Weimar-era Germany and Nazi-era Vienna respectively). Though they are both problematic figures (Asperger in particular), their scientific discoveries were still significant. The issue is that the Nazis then specifically targeted these scientists’ patients for sterilization and/or extermination. Which is why, when people nowadays attempt to zero in on what “causes” transness or autism, we start getting worried; we know that these findings can be weaponized against us. But we shouldn’t conclude from this that transness or autism can’t be innate and/or genetically influenced. Instead, we should probably learn to deal with the fact that we don’t know exactly what causes them — there probably isn’t a singular identifiable cause anyway.

To draw yet a further parallel, it seems that some people today want to eradicate transness through “kindness”, and claim that this is “for our own good”. For example, by suggesting that if we could just see that our body is already fine the way that it is (e.g. “realize that you only want to change your body because of internalized transphobia/misogyny”) — and similarly, if autistic people could just learn to get used to being hugged without their consent — everything would be just fine and dandy and no one would have to think about “violent” surgical interventions, and no one would have to feel embarrassed when an autistic person recoils from one’s attempt at hugging them.

a society in which trans people exist is not exactly my utopic ideal; when there is transgenderism it’s because there is suffering; it is a symptom of the rigidness of our gender categories. Or said the other way around, my utopic ideal would be a constant state of transition, where we feel free to explore our gender expressions without limits, expectations, or punishment. (Missé 49)

Yikes. Fortunately, not many autistic people think that we wouldn’t be autistic if society was different. We just think that we wouldn’t be disabled, based on the social model of disability. I know I would still have executive function issues for example, it’s just that there would be tools and accommodations available to help me deal with them. And just the same, if society was different, we trans people would still want to change our bodies; it’s just that others wouldn’t get all up in arms about it, and we’d have a much easier time accessing medical transition (there are many more things that could change for the better, but I won’t list them all here).

No matter how much you change society, you can’t change it so much that autistic people are no longer autistic and trans people are no longer trans. You can exterminate us like the Nazis did, you can try to train us to suit your ideals, or you can pretend that our existence is just an unfortunate by-product of social conditioning. What you can’t do, is turn us into something we’re not.

Misconception 5: “People who emphasize biological sex are transmedicalists”

I hope I have made it clear by this point that I am not a transmedicalist. So far, I have explained why physical dysphoria is not a requirement for being trans or for wanting to transition. I’ve also said that one can be trans without having plans to transition. I’ve also called out transmedicalist purity testing. And one of the overarching themes of this essay is that we should acknowledge the existence of gender nonconforming trans people and stop invalidating them (us). I will also add that I believe that access to medical transition should be based on informed consent, and that I condemn the bullying and lateral violence transmedicalists often engage in. As for my take on non-binary identities, I think that the things I am proposing in this essay will help non-binary people feel more validated and seen (more on this when we get to misconception 6).

However, it’s also true that there is some overlap between the things I say in this essay, and some of the things transmedicalists say. One such thing is the emphasis on biological sex. For example, transmedicalists often prefer the term “transsexual” over the term “transgender”. However, it does not seem like transmedicalists are very concerned with the hermeneutical marginalization of gender nonconforming trans people. Much to the contrary, it seems that they tend to view us as “trenders” (aka, not “real” trans people). I’m also under the impression that their emphasis on biological sex might be due to their interest in associating themselves with something they view as concrete and tangible — again, the concern with “real-ness” (see Stitt 37). However, this cannot apply to me and others who relate to the concept of subconscious sex, since we have no way of definitively proving someone else’s (or our own) subconscious sex — we rely on others to take our word for it that our subconscious sex is what we say it is.

Of course, it’s also conceivable that some transmedicalists are people who have been feeling angry and frustrated for the same reasons I’ve been feeling these things — they might feel that they are being invalidated by the mainstream trans discourse, due to its overemphasis on gender. They might also have been feeling threatened and invalidated when subconscious sex artifactualists have been suggesting that their desire to transition is rooted in internalized transphobia and other social factors. Indeed, artifactualist views of transness which dismiss subconscious sex are, in my opinion, putting trans people’s access to medical transition in further jeopardy.

However, since the only well-known alternative to the mainstream trans discourse is transmedicalism, these people might have then taken refuge in transmedicalist circles. This in turn probably led them to buy into the rest of the transmedicalist ideology, since doing so is generally required for continued acceptance in these groups. For this reason, I believe that by offering an alternate view which validates and acknowledges the experiences of people whose subconscious sex does not match their birth sex, we will see a decrease in the amount of people who get sucked into transmedicalism.

Misconception 6: “Subconscious sex cannot apply to non-binary people”

When people refer to themselves as non-binary, it isn’t clear whether they’re referring to their gender inclination, to their subconscious sex, or both. One could conceive of a person whose subconscious sex falls outside of the male/female binary, either through a combination of the two, or through the sense that one ought not to have sex characteristics. In fact, some non-binary transmedicalists have come up with the words “duosex” and “nullsex” to refer to such experiences. However, due to their origin in transmedicalism, these terms are likely to be unpopular. There is the term “neutrois”, which was created before the term “nullsex” and seems to be its non-transmed equivalent. However, I’m not sure what the non-transmed equivalent of “duosex” would be. Perhaps “salmacian”, although from what I understand, that seems to refer specifically to one’s genital configuration (wanting both sets of genitals), and it does not necessarily imply that one’s subconscious sex is one way or another — one could want such a genital configuration for other reasons. “Altersex” could be another option, though it does not seem to specify whether one wants no sex characteristics, or a combination of female and male sex characteristics.

“Non-binary” seems like it can also refer to one’s gender inclination. Indeed, it seems that some people who identity as non-binary have a subconscious sex which is either male or female. For example, I know that many trans people refer to themselves as “non-binary men” or “non-binary women”. I wonder if that has something to with it. I would also refer you back to the Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man meme I mentioned earlier. I could of course be interpreting it wrong, but I would like to think that many of the people who up-voted it probably felt like I did.

Personally, I do not feel comfortable labelling myself as either “non-binary” or “binary” in the current climate — due the way those terms are commonly interpreted. Indeed, if I say that I am non-binary, it seems that I am erasing the fact that my sex identity is male. And if I say that I am binary, it seems that I’m erasing the fact that I lean feminine in my gender inclination. Both of these — my sex identity and my gender inclination — are important to my identity and I do not want either of them to be erased. Not to speak of the problematic “transmasculine” label — again, my femininity gets erased, and there is an implication that I’m transitioning toward masculinity, rather than toward maleness. This is why I think that we need more words. We need words that refer to a non-binary subconscious sex, and we need to distinguish them from words that refer to a non-binary gender inclination. That way, the broadest possible range of people will be respected and included.

I am aware that some people reading this will bring up the fact that “we already have 476 genders” (random number), and that adding more words will only “upset the cis” further. However, 1) that’s not why the cis are upset. They’re upset because they don’t like that we exist. The fact that we often sound incoherent when talking about gender and sex (because we do not distinguish between subconscious sex and gender inclination) is merely convenient for the transphobes who are trying to undermine us (see Fricker 159–160). 2) It’s not clear whether those genders refer to sex identities, gender inclinations, or a combination of the two. I think it would be helpful if we made that clear, so that we could communicate more effectively with each other, and so that we didn’t leave some of us struggling to convey who we are to others.

Generating new meanings

Up until now, people have failed to clearly distinguish subconscious sex from gender inclination in the following ways:

1. Subsuming gender into sex. Those are often the people who suggest that one must have dysphoria, want to medically transition, and be gender conforming in order to be a “real” trans person.
2. Subsuming sex into gender. Those are often the people who suggest that one’s body should be irrelevant to one’s identity, and that to the degree that it is relevant, it is only due to our society’s assumptions regarding what kind of body a person of a given gender should have.
3. Recognizing that sex and gender are distinct, but failing to recognize the different aspects of sex (birth, subconscious, and lived), and stating that we trans people change our sex in order to affirm our gender — sex is still not considered to be a key aspect of one’s transness, and the distinction is not made between sex and gender at the level of an individual’s identity.

My proposal is that we recognize that sex and gender constitute separate inclinations, and that it’s not universally the case that “we trans people change our sex in order to affirm our gender”. I would argue that we change our sex in order to affirm our subconscious sex, and that we change our gender expression in order to affirm our gender inclination. Just because people often do both at the same time doesn’t mean they’re one and the same.

Here is how we can generate new meanings in order to help us achieve this:

Subconscious sex: “an unconscious and inexplicable self-understanding regarding what sex one belongs to or should be.”

Birth sex: a person’s physical sex at birth (“physical”, in this case, excludes whatever physical aspects of the brain might be involved in the experience of subconscious sex). For example: male, female, intersex.

Lived sex: a person’s current physical sex (“physical”, in this case, again excludes whatever physical aspects of the brain might be involved in the experience of subconscious sex). Note: taking “cross-sex” hormones effectively changes one’s lived sex over a period of time, and surgery can further align one’s lived sex with one’s subconscious sex, to the degree that any differences between a cis person and a trans person of the same lived sex (e.g. chromosomes, gametes, etc.) would be irrelevant in almost all contexts.

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. For example: male, female, man, woman, neutrois, etc.

Gender inclination: a person’s tendency — usually experienced as innate and persistent — 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).

Gender identity: someone’s gender inclination 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 gender inclination. For example: genderqueer, femme, butch, etc.

Gender expression: the external manifestation of one’s intrinsic gender inclination, and/or gender identity, and/or desire to conform with a particular gender for whatever reason (in the latter case, one might express gender in a way which does not resonate with one’s intrinsic gender inclination, for example due to traditional gender norms being violently enforced in one’s community).

Lived identity: encompasses the various aspects of one’s gender and sex with respect to how one relates to them, and relates to others through them, as expressed through a word — or a set of words — which one feels best communicates them. Can also be referred to as one’s “lived gender and sex identities” or “lived gender-sex identity”, in the interest of disambiguation in contexts where it is not clear that one is speaking about identity as it relates to gender and sex. For example: genderqueer man, femme neutrois, etc.

Note: the words defined below should preferably be used as adjectives (e.g. “a transsexual person” as opposed to “a transsexual”), unless used to refer to oneself — in which case, you do you)

Transsexual: a person whose subconscious sex does not match their birth sex. (note that this definition offers the added benefit of not excluding transsexual people who are in denial about being trans, or who have not transitioned yet or do not plan to do so)

Cissexual: a person whose subconscious sex matches their birth sex.

Gender nonconforming: a person whose gender inclination does not conform with that typically associated with their subconscious sex. For example, a feminine transsexual man, or a feminine cissexual man.

Gender conforming: a person whose gender inclination conforms with that typically associated with their subconscious sex. For example, a masculine transsexual man, or a masculine cissexual man.

Transgender: If there are people who don’t identify with the experience of subconscious-to-birth-sex mismatch, but still relate to the trans experience in some way, they could fall under this umbrella. It’s hard for me to know what people mean when they identify as transgender, considering that our community has not been distinguishing subconscious sex from gender inclination, and given the misconceptions I’ve outlined regarding subconscious-to-birth-sex mismatch (such as the misconception that it necessarily implies physical dysphoria).

Notes

Important note: the above definitions/categories do not have clear-cut and/or fixed lines separating them. The lines are blurry and ever-shifting, because the world and its inhabitants are alive, and to live means to be in a perpetual state of transition. Language, in this way, is also alive.

Note: when I say that “‘physical’ excludes whatever aspects of the brain might be involved in the experience of subconscious sex”, it’s as a way of reminding the reader that the brain is involved in all our experiences, which means that they have a physical “source” — they are emergent properties of matter.

Note on mental rigidity and relational frames: The above definitions are meant to promote increased mental flexibility, rather than promote rigidity. This is because we are trying to recognize and challenge the relational frames which lead to the conflation of gender inclination with subconscious sex. What I’m saying here is that wanting to change one’s body is not the result of mental rigidity. What is the result of mental rigidity is thinking that, for example, if a trans man wants to physically transition, that must mean that this is a way for him to express masculinity. Or, alternatively, that if one wants to transition toward maleness, that means one should also change one’s gender expression to be more masculine, whether or not this actually reflects one’s intrinsic gender inclination.

More food for thought from Serano’s Whipping Girl

If you can, I would suggest that you buy (or borrow) Whipping Girl and read Chapter 20 in its entirety. Many of the issues I’ve outlined here are ones that Julia Serano had already noticed 15 years earlier. Here is a quote from that chapter:

The thing that always impresses me about human beings is our diversity. Even when we are brought up in similar environments, we still somehow gravitate toward very different careers, hobbies, politics, manners of speaking and acting, aesthetic preferences, and so forth. Maybe this diversity is due to genetic variation. Or maybe, being naturally curious and adaptive creatures, we invariably tend to scatter all over the place, exploiting every niche we can possibly find. Either way, it’s fairly obvious that we also end up all over the map when it comes to gender and sexuality. […] That is why I suggest that we turn our energies and attention away from the way that individuals “do” or “perform” their own genders and instead focus on the expectations and assumptions that those individuals project onto everybody else. By focusing on gender entitlement rather than gender performance, we may finally take the next step toward a world where all people can choose their genders and sexualities at will, rather than feeling coerced by others.

Conclusion

Phew, if you made it this far, congratulations. That was an essay and a half. Thank you for reading (or listening, for those who use text-to-speech).

To sum up, I’ve demonstrated that the lack of acknowledgement of the phenomenon of subconscious sex harms and invalidates trans people whose subconscious sex does not align with their birth sex, especially ones who are gender nonconforming relative to their subconscious sex (such as feminine trans men, for example). I’ve also shown that this impedes trans people’s self-understanding, as well as intracommunity understanding, and that this situation is rooted in our past and ongoing marginalization. This situation is perpetuated through the ongoing hermeneutical marginalization of gender nonconforming trans people within the trans community, as well as through a set of misconceptions, which I have now addressed. I’ve also shown that by distinguishing subconscious sex from gender inclination, we will be able to respect and include a greater diversity of trans experiences. Finally, I’ve provided suggestions for generating new meanings which I hope will help us achieve this.

If I have at least partially convinced you, I would invite you to share this essay on social media and to discuss it with your friends and colleagues, so that we may change things for the better for all trans people. If I have not convinced you, or if you have concerns or disagreements, I would welcome constructive feedback. I will do my best to respond to comments.

If you would like to support my work, you can make a one-time or monthly donation through Ko-fi.

Suggestions for further reading, watching, and listening:

Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano

Epistemic Injustice, by Miranda Fricker

The Forgotten Story of Magnus Hirschfeld: Trans History, by CopsHateMoe

Trans Theory: a Podcast about the Philosophy and Science of Gender, by Ash Paré and Yarrow Bouchard

Overcoming Systemic Transphobia in Mental Health, with Rachel Bennett and Dr. David Nylund, on the Very Bad Therapy podcast

Works Cited

Anderson, Ellie. Sartre’s Theory of the Look, 15 Apr. 2022, https://youtu.be/5r-qoABSF9E. Accessed 20 Aug. 2022.

“Answers to Your Questions about Transgender People, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression.” American Psychological Association, American Psychological Association, https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/transgender.

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.

Bustos, Valeria P., et al. “Regret after Gender-Affirmation Surgery: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Prevalence.” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery — Global Open, vol. 9, no. 3, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1097/gox.0000000000003477.

CopsHateMoe. Kalvin Garrah Is Far WORSE than You Thought. YouTube, 14 Jan. 2021, https://youtu.be/T-iaoIkD7rs. Accessed 22 Aug. 2022.

CopsHateMoe. “The Forgotten Story of Magnus Hirschfeld: Trans History.” YouTube, 11 Aug. 2022, https://youtu.be/2KZndQaqN7s.

Czech, H. Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and “race hygiene” in Nazi-era Vienna. Molecular Autism 9, 29 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6

Dattaro, Laura. “Largest Study to Date Confirms Overlap between Autism and Gender Diversity.” Spectrum, 16 Aug. 2022, https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/largest-study-to-date-confirms-overlap-between-autism-and-gender-diversity/.

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007.

“Gender and Health.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1.

Gibson, Margaret F., and Patty Douglas. “Disturbing Behaviours: Ole Ivar Lovaas and the Queer History of Autism Science.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 4, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1–28., https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i2.29579.

“The Grass Is Always Greener on the Other Side.” Wiktionary, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_grass_is_always_greener_on_the_other_side.

“Intrinsic Inclinations Model.” RationalWiki, https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intrinsic_Inclinations_Model.

Missé Miquel, and Frances Riddle. The Myth of the Wrong Body. Polity Press, 2022.

Missé, Miquel. “The Doctors Profiting from Trans Surgery.” UnHerd, 1 June 2022, https://unherd.com/2022/06/the-doctors-profiting-from-trans-surgery/.

Paré, Ash, and Yarrow Bouchard. Trans Theory, https://player.fm/series/3317748/330683960. Accessed 19 Aug. 2022.

Puddifoot, Kathy. “An Introduction to Epistemic Injustice.” Challenges to Wellbeing: the experience of loneliness and the threat of epistemic injustice on the clinical encounter, Aug. 2022, University of Birmingham, University of Birmingham, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4AybWp4O8Q. Accessed 19 Aug. 2022.

“The Grass Is Always Greener.” Reddit, https://old.reddit.com/r/ennnnnnnnnnnnbbbbbby/comments/qiukcu/the_grass_is_always_greener/.

Seinfeld, Jerry, and Larry David. The Outing. Seinfeld: Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That (Clip) | TBS, 5 July 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGAyQAkXajg. Accessed 19 Aug. 2022.

Serano, Julia. Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive. Seal Press, 2013.

Serano, Julia. “Julia Serano’s Trans, Gender, Sexuality, & Activism Glossary.” Julia Serano — Writer, Performer, Speaker, Activist, https://www.juliaserano.com/terminology.html.

Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Seal Press, 2016.

Stitt, Alex. ACT for Gender Identity : The Comprehensive Guide, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=6033689.

Stitt, Alex. “Relational Frame Theory.” ACT For Gender Identity, 31 May 2020, https://actforgenderidentity.com/relational-frame-theory/.

“What Does the Scholarly Research Say about the Effect of Gender Transition on Transgender Well-Being?” What We Know, 11 Aug. 2021, https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/.

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