Being Trans Isn't Just One Thing

Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash

One of the most frustrating things about the public discourse around trans issues is how low the floor is regarding what people know. The way some describe "transgender ideology" is so disconnected from reality that from this rhetoric, you could easily confuse a transgender person for some demonic harpy from the Pits of Tartus. According to these hate influencers, we are all groomers who take pleasure in not only "cutting up" our own bodies but "convincing" children to do the same.

All of this is, of course, nonsense, and while we could spend this time debunking these claims (which I have already done repeatedly), fundamentally, it just seems like these people don't understand what being transgender even is. Many Americans, especially older ones, believe that the pace "of change around issues of gender identity" is going too quickly, with a plurality believing that gender is determined by someone's sex assigned at birth. Many people don't seem to understand sex and gender at all, parroting gender essentialist tropes that often equate transness to some absurd parody.

And so, at the risk of sounding redundant, I want to stress that there is no single type of trans people and that many's definitions of gender and transitioning are painfully inaccurate.

Gender, sex, and all the many shades of trans

Part of the confusion is generational. According to texts such as the DSM–III, which was put out by American Psychiatric Association in 1980, "transgenderism" or "transsexualism" used to be considered a mental disorder. Transsexualism was defined as "…a persistent discomfort and sense of inappropriateness about one's assigned sex in a person who has reached puberty."

Definitionally, the stated "goal" of transexuals was to use a combination of "gender presentation" (i.e., clothing, speech, mannerisms, etc.), "gender identity" (how someone identifies via pronouns, naming conventions, and other gender markers), and "medical interventions" (i.e., hormones, surgeries, etc.) to "pass" as another binary gender. Or, as the DSM-III put it, "…getting rid of one's primary and secondary sex characteristics and acquiring the sex characteristics of the other sex."

This was and still is a perfectly fine goal in isolation, but as a totalizing definition, it excluded everyone who wanted a different path and was quite transphobic in its framing. The DSM-III insisted that people could always clock a transgender person, or in its own words, "the alert observer can recognize [a transexual]," which is just demeaning and untrue. There are plenty of trans people no one can identify until they self-id — it's sadly part of the reason some react violently to such revelations, claiming that a trans person has "trapped" them.

This archaic definition continues to have ripple effects to this day. The way even some transgender people talk is that if you aren't trying to fit into one end of the gender spectrum, you are not valid as a trans person. The prominent trans man Buck Angel is notorious for insisting that he continues to be a biological woman and often reshares prominent transphobic figures such as JK Rowling, Blaire White, and more, tweeting this year: "I said I am a female who made my appearance look male so I can walk the world without Dysphoria."

This framing was never great as there were always people in the margins who didn't fit inside of the gender binary or didn't want to. Many trans people don't have dysphoria and don't feel it's necessary, and nowadays, the medical community is largely transitioning (pun very much intended) away from this mindset. The DSM-V explicitly states now that the presence of gender variance is not itself a pathology but rather any accompanying dysphoria a trans person might have. The World Health Organization's ICD-11 no longer classifies gender identity as a mental health disorder, and what we might classify as dysphoria has been relabeled "gender incongruence" and has likewise been reframed as a non-mental health issue — the organization claiming that framing it as the latter had added to social stigma.

As things have progressed, people have started to use the word transgender to describe anyone who doesn't fit inside the classic gender binary of man and woman. As recapped by WebMd, of all places: "Not everyone's sex at birth lines up with their gender identity. That identity is how you see yourself and what you call yourself — he, she, they, or neither."

In essence, trans is an umbrella term meaning anything that is not "cisgender" (i.e., Latin for "on this side," it just means a person who has a gender identity that matches the sex registered for them at birth). Trans is not a definition that describes specific things within it, and more describes a person who, for whatever reason, does not want to align with the gender binary. Trans is a word defined in reaction to something: a word essentially describing what you are not, as much as what you are.

And so — and this is the part that throws a lot of people for a loop when we only focus on puberty blockers and surgeries — the people who decide to undergo medical intervention are only one slice of the trans community. Many trans people are only interested in experimenting with gender presentation and gender identity and will never engage in medical interventions. Not because of stigma— although that is a factor too for some people — but because they don't want to. They want to wear what they want to wear and identify how they want to identify, and that's the end of it. Again, transgender people are just those who have rejected the gender binary. There are no requirements one has to check off to do this — it simply is what someone identifies as.

In fact, there are some trans people who only engage in medical interventions such as hormones and do not vary their presentation at all. I sometimes meet this threshold. I am currently doing several medical interventions, and while I will occasionally experiment with my dress and appearance, I mostly do not. I am nonbinary, not seeking to fit either side of the gender binary, and so depending on how I present, I come across as an effeminate man with tits. Many nonbinary people can say the same. As one Redditor responded to a question on whether a Trans(MtF) person was allowed to wear typically masculine clothing: "Gender has nothing to do with clothing or makeup. Tomboys are for sure a thing. But honestly, clothes are clothes 💙."

Even when it comes to the subject of medical interventions, there are infinite combinations. There are puberty blockers (i.e., medication that lowers testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone) and hormones that increase things in the opposite direction. Electrolysis to remove hair on the body. Breast augmentation. Surgeries to change bone structure and to sculpt or remove genitals. Are all people who have opted for one or some of these surgeries the same kind of trans person? Where do you draw the line between puberty blockers, the effects of which are easily reversible, and things like genital reconstructive or "bottom" surgery, which can take months to recover from?

You can't, really, and that's my point — being trans isn't one thing.

Furthermore, many transgender people engage in neither nonnormative gender presentation nor medical interventions; they simply identify as transgender. There are buff, bearded people going by she/they pronouns, and they are still trans. There are femme, lipstick-wearing people who identify as men, and they are also still trans. Presentation is a component that can be added or discarded at will, and it doesn’t change someone’s gender.

To understand this complexity, one has to realize that there is a difference between sex (i.e., a label based on the genitals you're born with and the chromosomes you have) and gender (the presentation and identity we show to the world). Societally speaking, we do not use genitals in our day-to-day to determine if someone is a man or woman, but again, gender identity and gender presentation. We look at how they present, hear how they identify, and go from there. It's the reason why many trans people change their pronouns and names because identity is one of the primary ways we recognize someone's gender, and pronouns and other such gender markers are how that happens.

Now, if you are still following me here, this mutability with gender presentation does not mean that someone is automatically transgender for experimenting with it. You are not necessarily trans because you crossdress for a Halloween costume or even if you engage in a subversive activity such as drag. Identity is an essential component of being transgender — it is perhaps the only one — and there are plenty of cisgender people experimenting with nonnormative gender presentation and are still cisgender, including, perhaps most famously, half the cast of RuPaul's Drag Race.

Adding to this thought, there are plenty of effeminate men out there who are very much still cisgender. Gay men are classically stereotyped as effeminate, and that doesn't make them trans. There are even heterosexual effeminate men (gasps), including the fabulous TikToker James Carrington, who went viral not too long ago for being in a relationship with a masc-presenting straight woman.

To claim that gender is merely about biology not only ignores how gender has been redefined throughout human history (see Debating the Morality of Heterosexuality) but also ignores the reality of the modern trans experience. Transgender people are pretty aware of their biology — it's the reason some of us engage in medical interventions in the first place. If willpower alone could give you tits (or remove them), a trans person would have done it already.

We are aware that there is a difference between sex and gender. It's the reason why there are so many different flavors to the trans community in the first place, as deciding whether or not to engage in medical interventions (the many that exist) is one of the many choices a trans person can make.

Conclusively trans

All of this is to say that the totalizing framing of trans people as those trying to undergo one set of circumstances is limiting and untrue. Transness is so many things that cannot be narrowly placed inside a box or rubric.

Furthermore, you cannot stop trans people for this very reason because you cannot stop people experimenting with gender presentation and identity. There is no way to stop a person assigned male at birth from wearing a dress, changing their name informally, or using different pronouns. These are social constructs that are inherently fluid, and people have been experimenting with them for as long as there has been the concept of gender.

Hell, you probably can't even stop people from buying hormones and receiving illegal surgeries. Trans people injected with smuggled hormones and got under-the-table bottoms surgeries during periods with far less acceptance. I am sure they can manage it again in the Internet age — though, like with the case of abortions, their quality will be much worse.

The only option is to criminalize public acceptance of those things and, consequently, increase stigma against them so that a combination of shame and outward brutality stifle human expression. You make that expression more dangerous, as trans people face violence for being themselves and, in the case of medical interventions, experience harm from unregulated drugs and procedures.

The beauty of humanity is its diversity, and that applies to gender. Transness is a part of gender diversity, and its boundaries are murky. It's like a river, forever shifting, and its edges will never stay still for long, even by those petulantly splashing on its surface.