Trans identity and the gender binary
Hi! I would like to take a moment to expand my understanding of an aspect of queer culture that I have some trouble with. I'd like to preface this by saying that, while I consider myself to be queer in the broader sense, I also pass as a cishet male. That being said, I'm going to express myself honestly in the hopes that someone will be able to give me an honest to what might read as bigoted. Putting everything else in a detail box:
Questions on the 'validity' of trans identity
Basically - I understand gender to be social construct based on expected roles for biological males and females undertake in a traditional society. While there is some validity to the stereotypes on a biological level, I figure that most people should be able to understand that they exist in many places on the spectrum of masculine to feminine traits. People who are queer generally do not fit into these stereotypes and experience ostracization from those who cannot escape the mental paradigm of the gender binary.Is trans identity more than a product of societal gender roles? I don't understand where the root of the dysphoria could be other than not fitting into the stereotypes of your assigned gender. How could someone come to understand that their body feels "wrong" to them without learning that from something outside of their internal experience (i.e. perceiving gender roles and feeling like oneself is more aligned to the opposite pole than the one they're assigned to?) What is the benefit in choosing to identify as transgender (which reinforces gender roles through buying into them) versus choosing to eschew the gender binary entirely and identifying with / presenting as genderfluid or non-binary?
I am a trans woman. I've known this since I was a teen, and I am turning 50 next year. My trans identity came to light in the late 1980s, and in the late 1980s, there was not a great deal of trans representation. It's not gender roles I had an issue squaring away, it was looking at a mirror and seeing a stranger looking back at me, yet everyone agrees that myself and the stranger are one and the same. I could no more choose to not be trans than I could choose to grow brightly colored plumage. The person was not the person I was inside. Likewise, presenting as non-binary is as much a lie as ignoring the dysphoria altogether... there has never been a moment where I felt male or masculine. It would be like passing myself off as mixed race.
There is no benefit in being trans (and there is no "choosing" it) save one immediate and important benefit: I ceased lying to myself and began discovering who the person inside is, despite society wanting no part of that journey (especially at that time.) The only benefit to staying closeted is camouflage, but that is painfully shallow comfort.
Thank you for your honest response, and I'm sorry that you've had to deal with an external representation that doesn't line up to your internal experience - I don't think it could really compare that to any experience in my personal life. I suppose my follow-up question is: how did the the recognition of not identifying with maleness/masculinity lead you to recognizing your identity as a woman as opposed to something like a third gender?
Part of it was realizing I was not who I was supposed to be... and part of it was seeing others walking around, born with it, and yearning to have lived that experience. It's akin to growing up in poverty, knowing people don't have to live this way, and suddenly you get to visit the rich side of town.
Little late on replying but just saw this, the way I found was mostly trial and error of what makes me feel the most like myself. In that similar to looking in the mirror and not recognising that body as myself it was a matter of experiementing until I found out what I could see as me.
On a basic level, I am not trans because of society's views on gender and I did not transition because of society's view on gender. It took me a long time to realize who I am, but when I started to realize I might be a woman, transitioning seemed like a very natural next step for me and wasn't in any way influenced by how society does/doesn't see certain genders or gender roles. I didn't decide I was a woman or that I wanted people to see me as one, I was discovering that I am a woman and that transitioning was a method of making my outsides and what other people view me as match what I feel like inside. I know that probably doesn't make much sense, but it's impossible to actually describe, because there wasn't a single moment where I was like "I want to be a woman". It was moreso a process of me finding that I'm more comfortable thinking about myself and being in my own skin when I think of myself as a woman than anything else. Once I started to have these thoughts, the thought of being perceived as male became repulsive to me. The need to be perceived as a woman was almost instinctual once I started down my path of transition, much like how cis people just instinctually want to be perceived as a man or a woman. It really is no different from that now that I'm well into transitioning, it's just that it takes us trans people a long time to actually figure that out about ourselves.
To answer your question on "what is the benefit to choosing to identify as transgender" and "why not eschew gender": for me, I don't "feel" non-binary or agender. I feel like a woman. I didn't "choose" to be or feel transgender, this is just who I am and I had no say in it, I only had a say in discovering who I am and if I wanted to make my outsides match my insides, which I did. I had as little say in my gender as cis people do. Most cis people never once question their gender. After transitioning, I also never once questioned my gender again. I finally get to be me and it just feels correct. For me, eschewing gender doesn't feel right. Gender also may not be purely a social construct. There may be an actual biological element to it that is separate from sex: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359295113_The_Biological_Basis_of_Gender_Incongruence
"Is trans identity more than a product of societal gender roles?"
Yes. I am who I am and I feel how I feel because that's just how I am. I just am a woman. I didn't choose to be perceived by society as a woman while not feeling like one, I chose to finally be myself and society ended up seeing that person as a woman.
I like this, thank you for sharing.
It seems most people have already responded to emphasize the biological background behind being trans. To me, this is the only viewpoint that makes sense with both my own lived experiences and current scientific knowledge. I'm a research scientist, though, so I have no particular knowledge of queer theory and the "social construct" arguments apart from what I've read online.
There seem to be two main "types" of trans people currently - some that are transitioning or calling themselves trans as they disagree with gender roles and those that experience dysphoria. From my (very) recent experience in the hospital here, the people getting gender affirming surgeries were all firmly in the latter camp and none of us could understand the former group at all and most don't consider them trans in the same way that we are. In my view, there are two phenomena currently being called the same name, which can make the discussion a bit confusing.
So, for those trans people with a similar biological basis, I think the brain sex theory makes the most sense. That is, a mental map of the body is created at birth that maps to a particular sex - this can be called your neurological sex or gender identity. Sex consists of multiple different components: chromosomes, primary sex characteristics, hormonal profile, neurological sex, etc. For intersex people, the chromosomes might not match the primary sex characteristics, while for trans people the neurological sex doesn't match the remaining sex markers. By transitioning, it's possible to change the primary and secondary sex characteristics as well as the general phenotype and hormone profile to match the neurological sex, so that trans people are ultimately much closer to the sex they transition to than they are to the one they were at birth.
As far as I've experienced, neurological sex is immutable and present from birth. As a small child, I attempted to pee standing up, viewed myself as male and held myself to those societal standards such as not crying when hurt or being embarrassed to ride a 'girly' bike. I assumed I would naturally go through male puberty and was bewildered to not be put into the right health class. All this with a marked cognitive dissonance as I rationally knew that others saw me as a girl.
As puberty started, I wished for breast cancer and later to accidentally be dosed with steroids and still somehow believed that I would be male when grown up although I had no idea how that could be as I had never heard of transitioning. None of this had anything to do with gender roles, rather it was a natural distress with how my body was changing that was far greater than what is typical for teens. In fact, gender roles weren't really enforced when I was growing up and I steadfastly ignored any attempts to make me more feminine. Once I learned that medically transitioning was possible at 16, it was abundantly clear to me that that would be the correct path for me. Struggling through the therapists and bureaucracy was a nightmare at that age.
Many trans men, including myself, experience phantom penises and can't reconcile breasts into their own self-Image. Despite having lived with them for nearly 10 years, the second I had a mastectomy it felt normal again. In contrast, women often feel the loss or phantom pains after such an operation.
If you want any studies or review papers, I can find them for you as I have a very large master list and too much time as I'm currently recovering from surgery.
I would caution you not to put too much weight on the brain sex theory, at least not as your only understanding of what makes people trans. I know the brain sex theory gets brought up a lot as an explanation for why trans people exist, especially in groups of mostly binary trans people, but I've seen very different amounts of confidence in the theory among researchers in the field. From what I've read, evidence of brain differences between cis men and cis women is limited at best, and a lot of the scientific work on trans brains is even sparser. The idea that there's some sort of clear inherent "male brain" vs "female brain" physically isn't super well-founded scientifically and has the potential to lead into dangerous bioessentialism, which is often weaponized against women and trans folks. There may well be some anatomical differences in the brain according to current research, but there's a lot of disagreement and pushback to the claims about how extensive these differences are. They may be associated with being trans, but the evidence isn't strong enough to really make strong claims there yet as far as I know. The truth is that we don't really know what makes someone trans or gives them dysphoria on a scientific level, and it's likely far more complicated than "male brain in a female body" (or vice-versa) and it's highly unlikely to be based solely on physiological factors like brain anatomy.
I absolutely don't want to invalidate your experiences in any way, but I think those experiences are indicators of your trans identity regardless of what their cause is. Even if science revealed that actually trans people have brains that are associated with the sex they were assigned at birth, that wouldn't invalidate your experienced or mean you weren't trans. It would just indicate that brain anatomy wasn't the reason behind it. I personally don't really invest a lot of my energy into theories about what actually makes trans people exist, because to me it's orthogonal to the practical issues when it comes to being trans and how trans people should be treated in society. Much like we don't know for sure what makes someone born gay, but we don't need to in order to have a picture of how a gay person should be treated from a human rights perspective.
I appreciate your emphasis on your own experiences as someone who experiences a lot of dysphoria and feels strongly about transition. But I do want to push back on the idea that there are two easily separable categories of trans people like that which can easily be separated. Dysphoria isn't a binary thing, and it's very possible for trans people to have different levels of physical dysphoria or to only feel physical dysphoria about certain body parts. For instance, I'm afab non-binary and I definitely feel dysphoria about my breasts (wishing for breast cancer to get a double mastectomy is absolutely something I've done, and I'm still amazed I did it without realizing I was trans at the time) but I don't have any "bottom" dysphoria at all. And even my breast dysphoria seems a lot milder than many of your experiences -- I want them off badly enough to be currently in the process of navigating the bureaucracy of getting top surgery arranged, but they don't cause me any sort of extreme distress in any particular moment. For me, I'd describe it as a permanent irritation, like walking around with a stone stuck in your shoe all the time (except getting it out requires major surgery). By contrast, I can definitely recall specific instances of acute despair over being too fat, for instance. I think even among those of us that do definitely feel physical dysphoria, the exact ways we experience it vary a lot, and that makes it difficult to cleanly divide those who do feel physical dysphoria from those who don't.
I think a lot of trans people who "don't experience dysphoria" are actually just expecting dysphoria to be a more acute sensation than it actually is. I didn't notice that I felt anything like dysphoria about my breasts until I'd already had them for almost 10 years. I don't think that's because I didn't have dysphoria prior to that, but because I didn't recognize my feelings as strange, much less as dysphoria. After all, every women hates having their period and tons of women with large breasts are annoyed by them. I think it's very easy for those whose dysphoria is primarily around things that weren't present before puberty to rationalize away their feelings as just a normal part of growing up or as things everyone experiences. We learn to live with the dysphoria without identifying that's what it is. I think this is one of the reasons that "trans euphoria" can be helpful -- even if you experience physical dysphoria, it's often such a constant that you're blind to it, and that sudden moment of joy when someone refers to you as the "wrong" gender can be an eye-opening experience to many trans people.
I also think a lot of people assuming that social dysphoria is the same thing as just "disliking gender roles", when it really isn't. What exactly it is isn't super easy to rigorously define (even if you do get into a bunch of the gender studies theories and such, which I don't think most people want to invest their energy in doing), but I think we should make a clear distinction between them. In your experiences, you describe viewing yourself as male and having cognitive dissonance when others see you as a girl -- these things, I think, are independent of gender roles and while they often co-occur with physical dysphoria to some extent, I don't think they necessarily have to. There are certainly plenty of women who hate gender roles and are gender non-conforming, but these women wouldn't necessarily be comfortable with being called men and referred to with "he/him" pronouns, even if they want to fill traditionally male societal gender roles. By contrast, one experience that in retrospect was a huge sign I was trans was when I felt giddy with joy when a redditor referred to me as "he" in a comment. We were having an argument and the redditor wasn't exactly mincing words either -- but that was overshadowed by my joy at being referred to as "he". At the time, I rationalized this as being about gender roles and sexism -- obviously I was just happy that he assumed I was a man because it meant he assumed I was his equal. But over time I came to realize that this feeling, at least to the degree I felt it, wasn't relatable to cis women, even those who fiercely opposed gender roles. Gender non-conforming cis women don't necessarily feel like the label "woman" is an anvil hanging over their head.
While obviously gender roles have a huge influence on both cis and trans people, I don't think they're the deciding factor in the distress one feels when society views you as the "wrong" gender, at least not in isolation. The relationship between these things makes it difficult to tease out a sharp line between them, which I think it part of why so many people view being trans as being solely discomfort with gender roles. I think people overestimate how many trans people there are who feel absolutely no physical dysphoria, but I also think it's common to underestimate the effects of social dysphoria on trans people (even among those who also have physical dysphoria). Even gender non-conforming trans people generally feel at least some pain on being misgendered, after all.
I'll admit I'm also a bit sensitive to the wording here because TERFs in particular love to use the "afab trans people are just trying to escape sexism/gender roles!" argument to delegitimize all afab trans people, even those who do experience physical dysphoria. I don't think you're coming from remotely that place, but I think that discourse has unfortunately colored the use of that language for a lot of trans people. The idea that there are swaths of people who think they're trans but are actually just cis and gender-noncomforming is a hugely common TERF talking point, as they're more than willing to paint ALL trans people with that brush.
Stories like yours are the prototypical trans experience, imo. People who know they're trans from a super young age and chafe at all attempts to align them with their gender assigned at birth from youth are a much clearer picture. But there's a huge spectrum of trans experiences, and drawing a line between what counts as trans enough inevitably cuts off people from resources they do need.
Your description of these categories definitely hits home because I'm currently in the process of writing my "trans CV" to submit to the public health authorities along with other paperwork in order to apply to have my top surgery funded. I'm going to have it read by probably cis people who are going to then determine if I count as trans enough to have this surgery. Even though I have physical dysphoria when it comes to my breasts, that's not necessarily enough when you subject someone's trans identity to scrutiny before allowing them access to gender-affirming care like this. When you look at my "trans CV", it couldn't be more different from yours. I didn't have any issues with girlhood and traditionally feminine stuff pre-puberty, and during my teen and preteen years I didn't want to be a boy -- in fact, I was adament about how girls were actually better than boys in a weird embrace of "girl power". Even now I still don't really mind using she/her pronouns for convenience and I'm not currently looking to start HRT. I don't ever plan to have bottom surgery. Do these things mean I'm not trans enough? Which things are vital to me "counting" as trans instead of a GNC butch woman? Why should which label fits me better according to someone else matter when I want to get top surgery? In my opinion, anyone who is willing to go through the bureaucracy required to access gender-affirming care has already proved that it's not just a fleeting whim to the extent necessary that they deserve access, and I think respecting someone's social identity and desired pronouns is just common courtesy regardless of whether they "count" as trans or not in the end.
This is a really long comment and it was written over the course of several spurts, so sorry if it doesn't make a ton of sense or jumps around too much. A lot of it is more my general feelings inspired by the topic rather than a direct response to you, but I hope it's interesting to you regardless.
I have a degree in neurobiology and I spent a perhaps unreasonable amount of time reading research on brain morphology and differences due to sex. Like everything else in biology, the truth is that everything is way messier than we'd like it to be. Nature is fantastic and wild and chaotic. It's really hard to draw firm boundaries in biology because it likes to change under our very noses - not just through it's own baked in chaos (evolution is both an intentional and unintentional process), but through our refined understanding of it. As soon as we think we understand how something works, we discover there's an even bigger picture. In a pure biological sense, differences between sexes quickly became differences between genetics, and now it's become more and more clear that epigenetics plays a strong role too. Along that route to additional knowledge we started to understand how society and environment and many other factors outside our direct control play a role too.
I greatly appreciate your comment delineating the thoughts behind why things can be different and not necessarily described or fully entailed by biology. I also appreciate the comment you are replying to, because it highlights that there are differences we see between cis men and women, and that some of these differences translate into interesting structural findings in trans brains as well. The reality is that it's messy and while we can point towards correlations in structure and function in brains and some differences which seem to be related to sex, we always have to keep in mind the limits of the science that we have.
Correlation or causation? Genetic variability? A matter of exposure? There's so many known unknowns that we can't really control for. Even when we do have very specific answers, such as whether certain 5HT receptors are more strongly activated in bodies which also have levels of estrogen typically seen in cis women, how much that correlates with structural changes, how much those receptors vary from person to person, and what other factors might shape that receptors response are all unknown. To draw any firm conclusions about whether something is 'biological' in nature is drawing strong lines when we hardly have evidence for structure at all.
Investigating these differences help us to understand possible mechanisms, to understand contributing factors to what might make someone trans, but ultimately we will never be able to come up with a 'formula' any more than we can create a formula for the universe or even one to accurately predict who our next president or prime minister will be. We need to think of these as pieces to a puzzle so massive and outside our understanding that we might as well be trying to build the Saharan desert one grain of sand at a time. Just as much as we should be pursuing physical science to understand better why we are who we are, we should be pursuing non-physical sciences as well. Narratives from individuals who 'do not experience dysphoria' and who do not pursue medical intervention, those who do not pursue transitioning at all and those who don't understand what gender even is are just as important to understanding the trans experience. I personally think there's a lot to be learned about how we all make decisions for ourselves and where we choose to assert those decisions from people who don't follow the standard narratives.
Perhaps I am a bit biased, however, as I happen to be a uniquely weird individual. I'm trans but I've hardly ran into a narrative quite like mine. I have found some kinship in others who identify as non-binary, those who identify as agender, and those who do struggle to understand what the big deal is. I struggle with loosely defined social concepts because their amorphousness makes it difficult to be specific. Society seems to agree that for a transgender person who is dissatisfied with their chest, that they are experiencing gender dysphoria, but society typically disagrees that if a cis man is upset that his chest isn't muscular enough or a cis woman is upset that her chest is too flat that these somehow are fundamentally different. While I recognize that these experiences are all vastly different, it confuses me why people draw such strong boundaries when they share such similar narratives - wanting to present to society in ways which result in the kind of treatment they desire.
With that being said I think it's important to paint a complex narrative picture. There are distinct, unique, and important differences between all the individuals experiencing chest dysphoria I mentioned above precisely because we are a sum of our biological and environmental factors. Others will find solace in a narrative which matches theirs, finding kinship, love, and support through commonality. Some will be inspired, or simply recognize things about themselves from hearing these stories. Understanding why someone might feel the way they do can help to fix society, to provide medical intervention, or to otherwise shape the future for others so that they might alleviate their stress quicker or never be in distress in the first place.
At the end of the day I think we need to place less stress on any mechanism of action as being the mechanism of action and rather think of all of these as simply levers which control a vast machine. While one lever may speed things up, another might slow things down, and we need to take into consideration where the machine is, who's operating it, what resources it has at its disposal, and so much more to understand its output. There are unlimited ways to be trans, and I greatly appreciate you pushing back against any strong narratives and are instead painting a picture of the vastness that is humanity. Just as understanding some of the underpinnings of sexual dimorphism might help some individuals who are trans to live healthy and happy lives, so will highlighting the experiences of stories like yours and people who struggle in different ways because they've got a very different set of levers to contend with.
Hey, I'm sort of new to identifying as non-binary but I've been feeling somewhere around demi-gender for quite a while and that sense of internal "the fuck does it matter" resonates with me even as I recognize it matters a lot for others. Just wanted to share a moment of kinship. And thanks for your post.
I feel like culturally we're on an early cusp of this narrative becoming more common and more represented and I could not be more stoked to hear from people sharing these stories.
Hey, I don't have a ton to add to this comment but I just want to say how much I appreciate the response. I agree with pretty much the whole thing and it expresses my own feelings much more eloquently than I did in some respects. Thanks so much for writing this out.
Aw, you're very sweet, thank you! I feel similarly about a lot of what you wrote 💜
I think it's plausible that some trans people who do/did not experience dysphoria may nonetheless be trans for purely medical (non-social) reasons.
There is overlap, but male and female brains have some physical differences. For me, this makes total sense: male and female sex hormones are wildly different (with basically no overlap outside of medical cases), yet male and female behavior is extremely similar. If a cis man's hormones fall outside typical male levels or a cis woman's fall outside typical female levels, they undergo meaningful changes to behavior (depression, irritability, severe sex drive changes, etc). For males and females to be as similar to each other as they are, despite wildly different hormone levels, surely male and female brains must be different to correct for these hormones.
Thus I wonder if gender dysphoria might actually be an intersex condition where the brain develops a physical structure that is at odds with the body and gonads. If this is the case (I'm not sure if it is, but it seems plausible), then I expect that we might also see individuals with brains that are neither fully male nor fully female. Someone with such a brain might feel a greater affinity for one gender over the other, without necessarily experiencing full dysphoria/euphoria, and therefore identify as trans. Others may identify as nonbinary, and others may even identify cis (such as cis-by-default people, who maybe don't meaningfully associate with their assigned gender, but opt to comply with social expectation anyway).
Unfortunately, this does mean that the male-female binary we have in society could be doing a great deal of harm to people with brains that are not fully male or female. Their brains may not be able to correctly handle male levels of testosterone or female levels of estrogen; they might function better with something in between those extremes. I do wonder if a lot of those "I thought I was trans, but it turns out I'm not" cases are actually people with intersex brains who would do better with just a partial transition.
That's how I feel, I was always very effeminate, didn't. Ex wife even praised it until we started trying to have a baby. She changed when she was 4 months pregnant and wanted a manly man, I tried and got super depressed, she withheld affection and i suggested marriage counseling but she wouldn't go.
I went and ended up talking about trans identity, how I was told by girlfriends I used my penis as a strap-on, how it reminded them of having sex with a lesbian. My ex took me questioning myself as a free pass for divorce without her getting in trouble with her parents for leaving so a few months after she left with our 4 month old I went to my Dr to talk about hrt.
My levels were already mixed up before starting. 275 for testosterone, and 250 for estrogen. Once I got the t lowered I was seeing changes rapidly. I worked thru therapy all the coping skills I was using to temporarily get rid of my gender and sex issues. The disassociation during sex just to have it.
No I'm sitting in a skilled nursing facility 8 days post op right now and while there is some pain right now, I feel like myself. My testies were always testy, causing physical pain at the slightest inconvenience, while getting an erection was at best an annoyance or worse I would hide away in my headspace to get away from it. Even before I knew I was trans it was easier masterbating with a magic wand than whatever jerk off motion I saw.
This feels very much like me. I feel mostly like a guy but estrogen just agrees with me better. I just feel more normal for lack of a better explanation.
I'm the same in the sense that from my POV the dysphoria is core to my experience of being trans. The physical element was the first part of being trans that I was aware of, before I had a name for the phenomena. From my perspective it is basically impossible to see the distinction between transness without physicality and someone 'just' being GNC.
That said grouping dysphoric and non-dysphoric trans people does have one major benefit: it reduces risk of mistakes. By separating 'being trans' from 'needing medical transition' you can better avoid cases where someone thinks they're trans, assumes they need medical intervention, and then later realising it was a mistake. To be clear those cases are rare but having a countermeasure built into the community is helpful to keep those numbers low.
As much as I can't personally understand non-dysphoric trans people I don't see any value in trying to gatekeep transness. Casting a wide net isn't doing any harm, and I can see the benefits in it.
This is a well thought out, nuanced, and compelling response. For me, it's affirming to hear that this was something that happened for you for most of your memorable life and particularly at ages before I expect kids to have a very strong understanding of self-image. I'm glad that you've found a way to exist in alignment with your identity.
Do you have any further reading regarding "brain sex theory"? That sounds like a pretty reasonable explanation for the lived experiences of trans people.
Yeah, when I was thinking about if I really was trans or not and whether I truly needed to medically transition, I based a large part of my decision on my childhood memories as I was a bit hesitant to fully trust my current feelings at the time as being a teenager is a volatile time for most people. I had a staggeringly long list of weird memories. Looking back at it now, 14 years later, it's amazing how much of a difference transitioning made. Any tendencies towards depression and depersonalization vanished - I used to read about 2-3 books a day just to escape reality and had massive problems both with self-care as I couldn't face the mirrors in the bathroom, as well as with falling asleep.
One of the long lists I have is at https://pdfhost.io/v/xlKhxp5Ld_Statistics_and_Studies_of_Transsexuals.pdf The interesting studies start on page 37. For example, in posthumous studies the authors found that the BSTc sizes of trans men and women matched those of their identified genders even though the subjects had never undergone any hormone therapy. This paper also gives an easy-to-read summary of the research into the origins of transsexuality: https://doi.org/10.4158/EP14351.RA
I'm probably in the other group, and yeah, I have to agree. I've tried explaining it to other trans people before and they mostly don't seem to fully get it.
Lots of trans people had a time when they were sure Real Trans People felt way more strongly about being trans. I also had that... and I still do. I think of myself as having been male, then changing to female; I wasn't "always a woman" in any meaningful way. I certainly like this more than being male, and I don't want to go back, but honestly, I'd probably have been fine never transitioning. Whatever dysphoria I have now, I picked up as I transitioned, as a "yeah, this is an upgrade, let's not do the other thing anymore" sort of thing.
So why did I even consider this in the first place? I was struggling a lot at the time with dissociation and depersonalization, and nothing else seemed to do much about it. I had a whole list of things it might be at one point, and slapped "I'm trans???" on the end as an afterthought after remembering that those are things some trans people struggle with. Over time, I thought really hard about it, and managed to convince myself everything else on the list was inapplicable, and then stayed up really late one night reading about gender and it became a thing.
And I'll tell other trans people this story, and they'll nod and say they felt the same way, and then go on to describe a dysphoria story much like yours and entirely unlike mine. It's really weird how often that happens.
Maybe it's different manifestations of the same thing (I have dysphoria, but primarily mental instead of physical?), or maybe it's different things. I stopped caring after a while. I'm doing a thing that makes me happy, as are you, and that's all that matters.
I don't really agree with dividing trans people into "feels dysphoria" and "doesn't feel dysphoria" groups, because every trans person feels a different amount of dysphoria and it presents in different ways. Hell, a lot of trans people were hurt by older standards for defining dysphoria that basically said "you don't have bottom dysphoria? you're not trans".
Being trans is a wide range of experiences that are all related, but not all the same, and gender is basically impossible to sort into neat little boxes. I think it's a lot more important to try and reassure trans people that their experience is valid than try and sort trans people into different "kinds of trans", especially since the latter can make it a lot harder for trans people like you to actually understand they're trans.
"I don't think I'm trans enough to be trans" is an... unfortunately common thought among people who are just realizing they're trans. And while I don't think we'll ever get away from that, I do think we'd be a lot better off if we did more to validate "non-standard" trans experiences.
Every single trans experience is certainly valid, no doubt about that. And I also agree that the dysphoria/no dysphoria grouping is kind of detrimental to the overall goals of the queer community.
A grouping that I do feel makes sense though is "I need medical intervention" and "I'm fine without it" because that's where our experiences will really begin to differ a lot. Like, I would be lost without surgeries that I have been through/hope to get access to, not to mention laser, voice training - and probably most importantly hormones, without which I think I would die. That experience means that I have a hard time relating to someone who is okay without any kind of medical transition - and even less relatable would be someone who didn't socially transition either.
That's not to say I want to gatekeep anybody from living their life as their truest self. Nobody is lesser than anybody else of course - and no trans person is any more "real" than any other trans person, and I hope nobody lets those parts of the internet tell them otherwise. There are just differences, and I think it's fine to point them out and say "hey I'm more like X", because even inside our very small group of humans, we are still just as different as all other humans in all other groups, more or less arbitrary as they can sometimes get.
I agree with this to an extent but it's worth noting that this also isn't two discrete groups -- for almost any medical intervention, there are trans people who need it and others who don't really want it, and it's not necessarily always the case that every trans person either wants all the interventions or none of them.
English is my second language so I apologize for not understand because it seems like what I said is more or less exactly what you are saying too? But you also seem to disagree somewhat?
This reads as if there are two groups, one with people who want all the medical interventions, and one with people who want none. @sparksbet is saying that each medical intervention needs to be considered separately (e.g. there are people who want HRT but not surgeries, or only want specific surgeries).
I'd add that "need" is itself a spectrum; everything is tradeoffs and several trans surgeries fall into the "I would like that but I don't want it badly enough to deal with how much of a pain in the ass it is" category for me.
(this comment is intended as explanation and clarification, in the kindest tone possible)
Thank you for explaining and clarifying! I definitely do understand the nuance and what you're both saying is still more or less what I originally tried to say 😅 Although I didn't mean to say that one group wants everything - just that there is a difference between those that need medical help (be it one thing or many things, like I mention for myself hrt, laser, voice, surgeries) and those that do not need it at all. They are just very different lived experiences.
I know many who only need hrt, others who need hrt + top surgery, yet others who need as much as they can possibly get. I am also stopping short of some procedures myself because yeah, it's not worth it and/or a pain in the ass and/or I don't have the strength to do them - full gcs for example. Maybe in the future though
I'm 8 days post op for gcs, I hear yeah. I was so dissociated from my genitals that pain just didn't register as a worry. That was until I started associating my genitals with me after surgery. Then it became a big deal, I got shy about them, I was worried about taking care and had to stonewall my mind before anyone touched it during checkups.
If only there was a button I could press. I got an orchi a few months ago though which has been really great, and a very easy recovery too. It's mostly watching my ex go through full gcs that scared me from doing it because of how immensely hard it was for her (and she is more resilient than me, so)
That button phrase is always on my mind. I said it almost a decade before I figured out I was trans lol
I agree that it's difficult to divide people into two neat little boxes of "has dysphoria" and "doesn't have dysphoria". In fact, I think it's a much better idea for everyone to think about each step in the medical process individually.
I've seen a lot of both: obviously dysphoric people who keep telling themselves that everything is normal and there is no way they could actually be trans, but also (primarily young) people whose sole reason to transition seem to be GNC tendencies but who feel entirely comfortable with their bodies. I think the former group tends to get there eventually, but the latter worries me. Especially those that extrapolate from a label to 'must do all the steps even if it feels wrong'. You see quite a few questions about microdosing T or how to avoid basically all of the consequences of T.
I think my main concern with lumping both groups together is that a lot of the studies on transsexual people, which show huge benefits with hormone therapy and little post-op regret, probably aren't applicable to the non-dysphoric group. With the current ratio of self-identifying transgender/non-binary people to diagnosed transgender people being about 100:1 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4823815/), it worries me a lot that health insurance might not deem transition care as medically necessary in the future if the definitions aren't better delineated in the future.
For some affirmation, I genuinely do resonate with what you're saying. I also had that sudden "oh shit, am I trans?" After denying it to myself for years - not really denying, more like telling myself that I'm not actually trans because of reasons that I kind of made up. After running out of those reasons, I didnt have many options left.
Keep in mind that dysphoria and dysmorphia aren't the only driver to a transgender identity; there's euphoria, being happier as a particular gender. You don't need a particular opinion about the relevance of gender roles to enjoy a particular identification of it more.
Transgender biologist and writer Julia Serano has written a good bit about topics related to this. Sex and Gender are, in general, complicated and multifaceted. This collection of some of her writings on the topics of Biology, Sex, and Transgender People may be helpful to you, as it has been to me.
I have read some of the comments already posted, although not all of them - so apologies if I am writing things that repeat other commenters. But I'll try to answer your questions!
Let's take an example of a cisgender heterosexual woman who wants to have babies and be a stay at home mom while her husband provides. She probably isn't a feminist - but she could be. She could want to fulfill traditional societal gender roles while simultaneously wanting to smash the patriarchy. Two things can be true at the same time.
Transgender people can derive euphoria and happiness from transitioning and fulfilling traditional societal gender roles while simultaneously wanting to dismantle gender as a social construct.
But to be honest, some your questions are things that most trans people have asked themselves, tried to answer, but came up short.
Yes, but I don't entirely know why. I do know though that my trans identity has also brought with it a sense of belonging with the queer community, especially with other trans people. None of whom fit into stereotypes of their gender - some are getting all the surgeries to go the whole way, others are getting a few of them, and yet others aren't getting any at all. All of those I know that are trans are on hormones though, and definitely do in one way or another try to mitigate an upbringing of their assigned gender.
Perhaps it would be beneficial to read about identity as a concept, and not limit it to trans identity? Because identity in and of itself is complicated enough as it is before bringing transness into it.
It is not a satisfying answer but all I can say is that it just does. The wrong things just feel wrong and the right things just feel right. It's not more complicated than that but I wouldn't even know where to begin to explain it anymore than you could explain what kind of food you feel like cooking for dinner today, or which shirt you feel like wearing tomorrow, or why you want to cut your hair and beard a certain way. It just feels right, you know? It's just you - and that other haircut just isn't.
With this I am assuming you mean choosing to transition, because it is not a choice to be transgender. Choosing to transition is, anyway, simply the best solution to the psychological distress of dysphoria and everything else that the trans experience brings with it. But that is the singular benefit - to lessen mental anguish. Other than that, there are no real benefits - at best there are either attempts at correcting our lives to what a default human experience (being cisgender) should be like, or trying to make up for lost time, for example having had a wrongly gendered upbringing. Everything else about choosing to transition is disadvantageous and detrimental to most trans people - you risk being shunned, risk losing friends, family, risk losing your job, you risk being uprooted and maybe even need to start a new life somewhere else. Not to mention all the other ways in which you get discriminated against, marginalized, and potentially even become the victim of hate crime.
But all of that is worth it because as I said, the benefit is lessening the psychological pain of dysphoria.
This is what I did for years before finally coming out, but it was not feasible in the long run.
I hid in the closet for 6-7 years while questioning my gender, at one point even coming to the conclusion that I was genderfluid and could simply continue to live in the closet. I could be a man outwardly but have my own feminine side and be fine with exploring that at home. But it was not meant to be, because my situation worsened as time went on. I just couldn't endure it any longer. So I came to realise that the pain of not living my truth was worse than the potential pain of losing everything and having to start over.
And like I said to begin with, two things can be true at the same time. I can paint my nails, take care of my hair, get into fashion... all while simultaneously wishing for the dismantling and smashing of social constructs. But those social constructs are nonetheless what has shaped my identity throughout my upbringing and culture - and are what therefore ultimately decide some (not all) of the reasons I feel dysphoria and euphoria, whether I want it to be that way or not.
While a lot of gender is a social construct, that isn't entirely the case. Some food for thought: while research thus far is limited, studies suggest that transgender people's brains tend to have some areas more similar to their experienced gender than their biological sex. They're not a exact match, but they still differ from cisgender brains. This article talks about one small study and how transgender brains differ from cisgender.
Recently I've also read about phantom genatalia, which is similar to phantom limb syndrome. With phantom limb syndrome, your brain's map of your body includes limbs that aren't there. It's most known in the case of amputees, but some people have reported it for limbs they weren't born with. In the case of transgender individuals, transgender men would be more likely to report feeling a "phantom penis" before transition and even hormones. Meanwhile, post-surgery transgender women would be less likely to report a phantom penis compared to cisgender men who lost their penises in accidents.
This article explains it in more detail. It's from 2008 when the idea was fresh, so a lot more research has been done on the topic since then. It's the only article I can find that's not a published paper in a scientific journal.
Brain structure and phantom genatalia definitely aren't social constructs. So there's definitely some basis in how people can come to understand their body feels "wrong" on an innate level. I think beyond that, the main roadblock is knowing that being transgender is a thing. People can feel something is "wrong" or "different", but need to know it exists for it to click why. I'm not transgender, but I am asexual, and a lot of people don't realize they're ace until they learn there's a term for it. That doesn't mean they suddenly became ace, it just means they didn't know it was a possibility.
Do you ascew the gender binary entirely yourself? If not, what is the benefit for you to choose to identify as a guy (which reinforces gender roles through buying into them)?
I've always really loved this quote.
Personally, I've had to do a lot of work to redefine what it means for me to be 'a man' in the world we live in. My dad did not do a very good job of modelling it for me when I was younger, so I've had to build a model largely on my own.
'Manliness', to me, is about setting my personal desires aside and doing what I feel needs to be done for the benefit of my community and the world at large. I live out this behavior because I want to see more of it in the world, and all of the kids who are growing up without any positive male role models need to see it. I present as 'a man' because there are many young boys out there who are given that as a label without much context for what it actually means. To me, being 'a man' and being 'the best version of myself (regardless of how people perceive me)' are the same - so that's how I live.
To bring it back to the Shakespeare quote: If I was trying to 'be a man' and live up to someone else's expectations of what that means (i.e. acting in accordance to predefined gender roles), that would be distinctly unmanly to me.
Disclaimer: I present myself as a cis male though internally what I've considered to be closer to the truth is more complicated than that. I am not trans so I want to clarify that so as not to accidentally speak on behalf of others.
I'm all for completely redefining what it means to be 'a man' and 'manliness' in a way that leaves behind the toxic pre-defined gender roles that have been socially constructed- if those constructs are to remain.
I suppose (and I don't mean this in an attacking way, it's just naturally what pops into my head to ask) my question would be- why do you feel like what 'manliness' is to you- is specifically a male trait? I have a feeling maybe you don't and it's a matter of how your wording is read- maybe it's just that, being a man, you're trying to ensure the 'man' you project to the world is a positive one?
I suppose my only qualm with that cycles back around- why do we need to see these things as particularly gendered at all? Is there a reason we can't simply do away with the concept of 'manliness' entirely and just be the best 'humans' or the best 'people'. I want those things you described to be seen as attributes of good humans, and that any kind of gendering layer on top of that is unnecessary?
Maybe what I'm reaching for here is too idealistic- so instead of completely deleting the concept of 'manliness' or 'womanliness', people are inclined to try to redefine them positively since they've been defined so rigidly and negatively in the past. It just bothers me (not you in particular) that at large that we can't just move past these concepts completely. Or, particularly, if there are pro-trans/LGBTQ+/left-leaning/etc arguments FOR keeping some semblance of these concepts around, I'm all ears there too. Maybe I myself am missing something
I think that you're reading/interpreting my response correctly, but possibly with the wrong intonation. I'll try to explain, maybe it'll make sense and maybe it won't.
This is probably not how most people view it, but I don't actually see 'manliness' as a gendered thing. It's a personal thing that I have chosen to redefine on my own terms. You can use Arete if you want, but to me it's a reclamation of my assigned gender as a non-dichotomous thing. To get mathematical about it, I'd say that 'arete' and 'grace' (I haven't really decided a word for my own internal conception of the pursuit of embodying feminine principles, but 'grace' works a lot better for me than 'womanliness' does) exist as orthogonal axes on a plane. Being more of one doesn't make you less of another, but pursuing either/both will make you a better human across the board.
I have been imprinted at a basic level with an understand that it is my job to pursue "being a man" as a social goal. For parts of my upbringing, "being a man" has been equated with "not being a woman", which has been totally unhelpful for me towards understanding how to see myself on my own terms rather than in comparison to other things. Negating this understanding (don't 'be a man', because 'being a man' is bad) requires a lot more cognitive load and reprocessing (what is "not a man"? Is it not-not a woman? How can I be that?) than it does for me to define "man" in my own way and pursue that.
Within this framework, I can pursue "manliness" in and of itself as a set of what I perceive to be virtuous behaviours while at the same time fostering the growth of my more traditionally femme characteristics. I don't project these labels outwards, this is just an example of how I have leveraged my cultural programming to become the best human I can be! I don't think we can fully move past the gendered basis of our existence for the same reasons that we can't fully escape death. We have bodies, they are temporal and imbued with the things that created them. They were born from people boinking their genderbits together and they are sustained by the destruction and consumption of other forms of life - plants, animals etc.
To deny masculinity and femininity is to deny the ground we stand on. There doesn't need to be an argument for "keeping these concepts around", because the idea of abolishing gender is like trying to take the color orange out of the rainbow. The best we can do is move beyond the dichotomy of it and recognize that "more orange" doesn't have to mean "less blue", it just means "more light".
Okay, I think I was generally reading it right then. Though to clarify, I was not advocating abolishment of the concept of gender in general, but more the false binary we've constructed and the stereotypes, roles, and general terms surrounding it.
To attempt to put it more simply: I'm personally wary to call most anything 'manly' or 'womanly' simply because the terminology is loaded with exclusion- and gender-exclusionary thinking is something I've worked to battle and extricate from my brain. Example: If I say X is manly, I'm implying X is not womanly (or that X is not a trait of any other gender than male). Almost 100% of the things I've been conditioned/raised/taught to think are masculine/feminine are not actually gender-specific traits - and on top of that, those traditional ideas have been harmful to me directly in the past, so to me it feels more powerful to avoid traditionally-gendered language as much as possible, at least personally.
I understand that's different for you and that is fine, whatever helps you- and I understand there is some sense of maybe, though I'm not entirely convinced unavoidable necessity in society for us to try to redefine those terms in positive ways and as positive examples, simply because others will refuse to give gender-specific ideas up completely. I just think care needs to be taken and that the terms 'manly' and similar are very loaded, so I prefer to move past them (whether that involves other terms, like the ones you mentioned, or... something else, idk).
But again I think part of the point you were bringing up is this is purely a personal reclamation of a term, not something you necessarily publicly project elsewhere, the latter of which I think is where it can get more complicated. I guess for me, it's just that, as a generally cis man, raised as such (and certainly not given any leeway to question it, and also having rigid religious propaganda constantly going in my ears about what it means to be "a man"), I find no value personally in "being manly" or pursuing "manliness" as an attribute of my self, even if I attempt to redefine it as something good- calling such a thing (no matter the definition) "manly" has become meaningless to me. I find no need to represent a traditionally-gendered concept of personality
Does your definition of being a man differ from your definition of being a woman? That is, if a woman exhibits the qualities here that you perceive as manly, do you consider her less womanly for it?
Nope! See my response below.
I see. It almost sounds like your idea of "manly" is focused on the maturity aspect (contrasting "man" with "boy"), rather than the gender aspect (contrasting "man" with "woman").
Why do you feel that trans identity requires an explanation when the others do not?
Trans identity is just as puzzling and "made up" as my traditional cis-male identity. I was never required to explain why I feel strongly that I am a man. Why should they?
I'm coming into this thread rather late and I've seen a lot of fantastic replies, but I think at a higher level there are some questions you may want to ask yourself. I think you rightfully identify that society can put some strong stressors on us and provide us with incentives to align our behavior or presentation and that any discordance may be a byproduct of those factors. However, I think you're mislead to believe that only society can provide said factors. Have you ever felt like there was something you should be able to accomplish, even when you've never done whatever it is, perhaps even just a thought that occurs as soon as you recognize something, such as "I should be able to pick up that stick and break it in half"?
There are thoughts that we have that come as a sum of our knowledge, but there are also thoughts that we have that are outside of our control- that are emotional or instinctual. Do you feel more at peace in nature or at home? Why do you think that is? There's a chance that at least part of it is influenced by what knowledge you've acquired and the people who are important to you, but part of it just is. Human brains are wonderfully complex machines, capable of producing thoughts which don't match known or existing patterns. In order for that to be possible, we need to be able to think and act without a stimulus making us do it. Most people don't find this as much of a leap when thinking about concepts like feeling an urge to eat, drink, or reproduce. But the same can be true of any urge or instinct. You can feel the need for your body to be different without any external stimulus. Yes, we learn and refine these urges based on our knowledge and exposure in the same way that rather than just crying when anything is wrong like you do as a baby, you learn to identify hunger and later specific cravings or nutritional needs. Similarly one might just feel their body is wrong, without having the right words for it until they come across the right stimulus.
Ultimately I think this is what many trans individuals are trying to tell you, but can be a difficult or abstract concept to recognize, because we don't typically spend a lot of time examining our emotions and where they come from. We recognize them as valid, but just as society draws boundaries around men and women, messily bucketing individuals even when they don't clearly fit, society also draws boundaries around emotions, messily bucketing them even when they don't always fit. We often think of anger as directed or in response to, erasing its ability to be more amorphous. Similarly being upset or disgusted or uncomfortable is often seen in a similar vein. It's possible, however, to be uncomfortable with anything, for any reason at all. Pointing at societal roles around gender in the case of a transgender person's discomfort is a fantastic observation, but you shouldn't assume that just because it often is the source of problems that it must be in all cases or even that it caused the problem in the first place. Often times feelings have deeper roots. Even when they don't, to assume that a feeling in one person comes from the same place as a feeling in another person is as silly as believing that all upset stomachs are caused by the same problem.
What makes something a social construct, and does being a social construct cause something to not be 'valid'? A hard social constructionist perspective, for example, would almost certainly view trans identity as a social construct. It would also view essentially everything else as a social construct.
Reading many of the comments here, I get the sense that a social construct is often taken to be a particular meaning built by social interactions within a mainstream Society, but not other societies or social interactions. Many perspectives, I think, and certainly social constructionism, would disagree with this narrow definition, and instead argue that a social construct is any meaning built by social interactions; "society" ends up being potentially misleading in suggesting that it can refer only to a particular group of people and set of conventions.
In that wider definition, I think it is perfectly reasonable to view trans identity as a social construct, because in that perspective all identity is a social construct, as is the idea of having an identity at all. And despite the criticism of social constructionism, I think it is a valuable to view identity in this way. Whatever objective reality might be, we can only observe, communicate, and understand it through the lens of socially constructed meaning. "Eschewing the gender binary entirely", being queer, being non-binary, being straight, being cis, being trans, being neither, are all reasonably social constructs. Not fitting a mainstream social construct is as much socially constructed as fitting one. We can dismantle some sets of social constructs only by replacing them with other, hopefully better, social constructs.
At the same time, the construction of meaning must tend toward abstraction, and abstraction must involve inaccuracy and loss of information. Does an individual identifying as trans, or cis, involve a loss of details about them, mean that others will have some wrong assumptions about them, and even mean that their own sense of themselves will be pushed toward certain (not necessarily) social norms? I would argue that it does. But an alternative of seeing those aspects of every person as being specific to that person, and wanting to understand every detail, would frustrate the ability to feasibly understand or communicate meaning. I am reminded of Borges' 'Funes the Memorious', where the titular character has a 'perfect' memory, but in remembering every detail, loses the ability for abstract thought: he can remember every detail of a day's experience, but it necessarily takes an entire day. Would someone identifying as exactly themselves be more accurate? Yes, but how could that be communicated to anyone else, or even understood by the person themselves, without living their entire lived experience, and that of everyone around them? Such is the tendency toward abstraction that even not identifying with a particular abstraction often brings with it its own abstracted assumptions and loss of detail. We abstract because, in order to construct meaning and communicate, we must.
So from a practical perspective, I do think that when someone identifies as being trans, that can involve some pressures to fit within a cultural understanding of a trans identity, and might not quite fit their particular details. But that's also the case with someone identifying as straight, or non-binary, or anything else, or not identifying as anything. I think it is important to recognize that, and try to prevent the disadvantages of abstraction from being too problematic, while also understanding the advantages of abstraction and categorization. I think there is a difficulty in discussing this around questions of trans identity because there is such a vitriolic anti-trans segment of society that will leap on any opportunity to denigrate anything around being trans, but any communicable sense of identity is ultimately an abstraction.
At the risk of being too pithy, money is a social construct too, but that doesn't mean I don't have to pay my rent.