It seems nearly criminal to say that I’m a woman because I choose to be one, even as this statement is much truer to my experience than the more acceptable narrative that I was born trans.
In all honesty, I had very little idea about being transgender when I was four, five, or six. Even when I was twelve, I still thought of myself to be a boy. I think, if I were to visit myself in middle school again, who I am now would come as a great surprise to me.
It was only in high school that I seriously began to consider a new person, a new gender. At the time, I had just come out as bisexual and discovered to my disappointment that it did not make me feel any freer to be myself. The idea of being trans, as a consequence, began to take on the possibility of radical self-reinvention and liberation that coming out as bisexual had failed to realize for me.
The moment when I committed to my trans-ness, it was with the conviction that I decided to change my identity so that I would have autonomy over my self-expression – and therefore, a kind of radical freedom. This freedom, for me, contrasted with the oppressive determination of how I could express myself brought about by masculine gender norms. So, I suppose, the impetus for my being trans was primarily a rejection of the involuntary imposition of masculinity on myself. Femininity, in expressing all the feeling masculinity seemed to deny, simply presented a convenient destination.
Later, I would consider whether this might imply I was non-binary, and not a trans woman. I decided that, since I had experienced becoming a woman, even as I understood myself (and others) to possess dimensions beyond gender, I was still as much a woman as anyone could be.
This narrative, of course, runs headlong into the problem that the debate against transphobia revolves on the axis of whether or not being trans is considered a choice. In that respect, what I have written above superficially appears to confirm transphobic arguments. These are: that, since I did understand myself to choose, my act of choice was either morally wrong or else reveals the inauthenticity of my gender. I believe neither claim to be true.
In the first case, the argument from the religious right, that being trans is a choice which goes against God’s will, and is, therefore, a sin punishable in Hell, is nothing more than the idea of “might makes right” dressed up in theological clothing. This argument bases itself on the assumption that religious dogma is true morality. Nonetheless, it invalidates the very moral position it claims to maintain since it reduces the morality of any religion to unquestioning obedience to the demands of an arbitrary and petulant divine dictator.
The more dangerous transphobic argument arises not from religion but biological determinism. It begins with the common assumption that our understanding of gender arises from immutable biological characteristics. Judith Butler, in her 1990 book Gender Trouble takes aim against this idea by pointing out that the biological conception of gender – or rather, sex – is determined by our concept of gender and not the other way around. Hence, the biologically determinist argument is circular.
Sadly, the belief that we can only justify our being trans by appealing to biological determinism has persisted within the trans community in the ideology of transgender medicalism.
Transgender medicalism assumes that being transgender is a medical condition, caused by some as yet unidentified anatomical disorder. What makes this ideology appealing is that it appears to short circuit conflict with those who would argue that being trans violates the immutability of gender. If being trans is an inborn medical condition, then coming out has in no way changed one’s gender.
Transgender medicalism, however, is problematic in that it, by assuming a biological basis to gender, assumes a biological basis for gender stereotypes, and then forces transgender people to justify the authenticity of their gender by appealing to these stereotypes. In this way, it presents a kind of internalized transphobia by holding up the stereotyped cisgender expression of gender as the truth we must appeal to. The authenticity of a person’s gender, then, becomes determined by its proximity to being or passing for being, cisgender.
In my experience, even though I do pass, the validation of my gender does not rest upon other people’s perception, but my being at home in it, even and especially in moments where the way I express my gender may be idiosyncratic. To be a person, after all, contains so much more than is considered either strictly masculine or strictly feminine. This is a principal lesson being trans has taught me.
To choose not to have gender imposed upon me, except by my own affirmation of it, has left me with the sense of possessing some strange and wonderous key to the universe. I am proud of the radical freedom it has brought me.