On the Character of Transgenderness

Common folks assume throughout their life that gender and sex are identical concepts, which shows that the conceptual distinction made in the last century has yet to become common sense. A corollary of this is that, when one meets a transgender person for the first time, one is flabbergasted. Suddenly someone appears not only proposing a radical idea – that being of a certain gender means identifying with it, whatever that means -, but also embodying this idea in their own selves. The radical idea of gender identity. My objective in this essay is to explore the coherence of this very concept, along with trying to understand what it means to be transgender.

Aside from those who have some sort of prejudice against the concept of transgenderness or transgender people themselves (which are different kinds of prejudice, however related they might be), most people accept the concept of gender identity very enthusiastically. People are always eager to learn about trendy ideas, for it enables them to mold their discourse in order to signal others how trendy they are. And also how much of a good person they are, due to the self-righteous nature of contemporary social justice movements. I mean, how could someone be against justice?!

But that is not all. This new view of gender also has, prima facie, great appeal. Of course people who were born with a penis have the right to shave their whole body, to wear dresses, to perform deference, to enjoy knitting and french literature, to have breasts, or to engage in late night gossiping. Because that is what it means to be a woman, right?

Well, no. The big question that comes to my mind when it comes to gender identity is this: what actually constitutes womanhood or femininity? And the same goes for manhood or masculinity. I really don’t think that being a man means being assertive, dressing a certain way, having massive amounts of BRUTE STRENGTH, or enjoying a good beer whilst watching the Eagles take a beating from the Giants. Just like I don’t think that being a woman means any of the stuff mentioned in the last paragraph.

Being of a certain gender does not mean performing a certain stereotypical role, nor having a certain personality or mindset, and affirming the contrary seems to me very offensive to pretty much every human being ever, especially to women. If none of those can be the content of a gender identity, then what does?

Unfortunately, I still have not studied queer theory with any decent effort. But, from what I’ve seen on numerous blogs on transgenderness and endless internet discussions, the current gender theory in vogue do not escape the polarization between femininity and masculinity. This is obvious by taking a glance at the (partially plagiarized) Genderbread Person, even if it is not a comprehensive representation of ideas surrounding gender identity.

It seems to me that the concept of gender identity presupposes and reaffirms the notion of gender roles, otherwise what sense does it make? Moreover, it seems that people’s image of what it means to be a man or a woman do not escape the common-sensical formulation of gender roles. Isn’t defining oneself in terms of these two stereotypical, restrictive, and sexist roles precisely what one should avoid doing? And if one forgoes all patterns of behavior and thought in their formulation of (wo)manhood, then what is left?

By asking those questions to myself, I came to realize that the concept of gender identity is either offensive and reaffirming of old sexist notions, viz. femininity and masculinity, or a meaningless term. If we’re going to dismantle gender roles and stereotypes, we will end up dismantling gender identity as a meaningful concept, and totally not how we should understand gender. Perhaps I may discover that this conclusion was too hasty, and that there actually is salvation to the concept of gender identity to be found on queer theory. Which I haven’t studied. But so far, this is how I understand the issue.

However, this conclusion leads to a conundrum: how should we understand the experience of standard transgenderness? This is the project I have laid myself in the latter part of this essay.

So, people who are transgender experience identification with the opposite gender, the one that isn’t consonant with their biological sex (or their assigned sex, in cases where biological sex is non-binary like Turner’s or Klinefelter’s syndrome). This is the definition of what it means to be transgender, which I call transgenderness. However, depending on our concept of gender, transgenderness takes a different meaning; the way I’m using the term is to be understood in terms of gender identity and queer theory. This is the meaning I intended when I wrote standard transgenderness in the last paragraph.

The inevitable and bitter conclusion must be spelled out, before anything else. If being of a certain gender does not involve gender identity, as we concluded in the former part of this essay, then most people’s claim to being a woman with a penis, or a man with a vagina, is unfounded. For the simple fact that what most transgender people experience, in the way I see things, is not what constitutes (wo)manhood. Keep in mind that I am only talking about those transgender people who claim to be of a certain gender merely because they identify with it in some way or another.

This does not mean that people who go through these experiences are lying in any way, or that they have mental illnesses, or anything a clearly transphobic person might be pleased to hear (which is the case for many radical feminists, but not necessarily so for radical feminism in general). In fact, they might be more authentic than a lot of people, because they behave accordingly to their deepest feelings of who they are, instead of living on a sort of auto-pilot characteristic of most people. The thing is that, whoever they feel they are, they cannot feel that they are of a certain gender, because that would require gender roles to be defining of (wo)manhood.

In conclusion, standard transgender people exist, and they are seen socially in a different way than other groups. But it does not make sense to assign them a certain gender based on their identity, because that is not what being of a certain gender means. This leads to two questions, which I intend to explore in the future: What is a coherent concept of gender? and What does non-standard transgenderness look like in light of this concept of gender?