Transgender Identity: An attempt at a quick and more complete explanation

A lot of people seem to have trouble understanding how someone can be transgender and what that means--but it's actually a pretty simply concept.

1) The key to getting it is to understand that you were raised with a simplistic understanding of "gender" that doesn't allow for trans people to exist. You have to let go of that definition.

What you were taught: "Gender" is male or female, only, and can be determined by looking at a baby's genitals even before birth. This anatomical fact by some magic translates into calling the person by different pronouns and other words, having them wear different styles of clothes, conform to different standards of attractiveness, go into different public bathrooms, etc.

The reality: "Gender" is a social construct made to limit people and guide them into certain roles. The underlying sexual dimorphism is (a) not really binary and (b) not a moral justification for limiting how people are treated and allowed to act in society. One example of sexual dimorphism being non-binary is intersex people (those whose reproductive organs don't fit into either "male" or "female" categories), but there are many other examples as well. Say you think "men" are supposed to do the manual labor in a household because men are stronger than women. In reality, there are some households where the strongest member is female-assigned and the weakest member is male-assigned. Or take facial hair--we in part recognize people as men because they have it and women because they don't, but many men have little or no facial hair and many women grow at least a little--the distributions overlap, forming one bimodal distribution. And there are tons of other things, like long hair being associated with female and short hair with male, that are completely made up, and seem to exist mainly to force people in that androgynous overlap into neater, disjoint categories. Think about how we color-code babies, who otherwise have no visible sexual traits when clothed.

Okay, so now you know that "gender" isn't a hard, physical reality and that it's really weird and illogical to go from a real thing--a set of bimodal distributions in biology--and conclude that we should put everyone in one of two categories and treat them differently. What does that have to do with someone being trans?

2) Since we assign everyone a made-up gender without asking them, there's nothing to ensure that gender actually works for each person. And sometimes it really, really doesn't.

Sometimes for trans people, it probably doesn't even have anything to do with the culture getting gender wrong. It's the body that got mismatched anatomy--the brain's expecting something different than is actually there. This can cause lots of different negative feelings for a person, and the treatment is to fix the mismatch with hormones and surgery. But the cultural mixup on gender still comes in, because gender norms mean people who need this medical care have to face transphobia--the culture says that they are the gender they were assigned and that the body they can get from treatment is wrong.

But it's usually hard to untangle trans-ness, even gender dysphoria about one's body, from cultural ideas of what "man" and "woman" mean. People who transition in a binary way--claiming a male identity when they'd been assigned a female one or vice versa--are those who find they're more comfortable being perceived as one gender than the other. Sometimes this is the gender they perceive themselves as, but others don't feel that either male or female is truly who they are, yet still feel better when others see them as one or the other, and/or feel better with the medical transition care that as a side-effect causes them to fit the cultural idea of one category rather than the other. Other people who know they don't fit the category they were assigned or the other binary one go for the long struggle to be recognized as some other gender (there are many non-binary genders, often described in relation to the gender binary, such as bigender), and other binary and non-binary trans people allow themselves to be perceived as their assigned gender despite not feeling that it fits.

This awareness that your assigned gender really doesn't work for you? That's what it means to be trans.

3) But isn't that just bucking gender roles?

The difference between being trans, and, say a feminist, is that if you're trans, you feel like you are not the gender you were assigned (could be all the time, could be some of the time). If you're not trans, you feel like you, as a person of your assigned gender, shouldn't have to live by those rules. Personally I think that's splitting hairs, but they're important hairs to a lot of people.

4) You should respect people's understanding of their own gender.

There isn't any objective standard for what gender is or what a certain gender category is. You aren't ever being inaccurate for accepting another person's identity. And you are being hurtful and contributing to oppression when you fail to do so.

Some examples:

If someone says they are really a woman, then they are really a woman. The definition of "real woman" is someone who feels like a real woman.

If someone says gender identity is a construct that doesn't make sense when applied to them, then don't try to label them "agender", "genderfluid", or anything like that.

If someone says their gender identity is defined by their ear piercings and Star Trek enthusiasm, try to think about how style, interests, and behaviors are prescribed and proscribed by gender categories. Ask the person to explain if they want to, because that's the best way to get closer to knowing what someone means.

If someone says their pronouns are "ze", use them! The pronouns a person chooses for zirself are more legitimate than the gendered pronouns embedded in the language as a tool for segregating people into gender categories without their consent. (And those gender categories exist, of course, for the sake of the patriarchy, oppressing women and forcing men into life-or-death competition.)