For the Transsexual, Assimilation is Liberation
Or, Wait a minute, why are the transmeds arguing that "trans" is a socially constructed identity!?
“Assimilation or liberation?” was the question that gays and lesbians faced in their quest for social acceptance. The respectable “homophile” posed the thesis, and the unapologetic “gay” posed the antithesis. This dialectic eventually produced the synthesis of same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage was not a means of “respectability politics,” but the end itself. Evangelicals were aghast, and moderate conservatives offered civil unions instead, but gay activists demanded marriage, as gay dignity had become wed to the bourgeois family. Assimilation into marriage called for the visibility of “gay pride,” as the romantic passion animating gay rights naturally lent itself to the assertiveness of liberation.
In some respects, the trans cause is the opposite of the gay cause. The gay rights movement celebrated “coming out of the closet,” the ritual which divided a repressed life from a free life. Meanwhile, transsexuals celebrated the legal sex marker change, the ritual which afforded legal privacy. Some of us would move cities and begin life anew, a decision which was drastic yet liberating. In socially conservative situations, gay people keep their orientation secret while longing for the day they can be “out” with their partner. Even in left-wing situations, transsexuals strive to “pass” and hate being “clocked.” (Including by trans-aware “allies.” Especially by trans-aware “allies.”) Gay rights thrived on visibility. Trans visibility only teaches all the ways to spot a transsexual. Transition, the act of becoming, is inherently assimilatory.
This past decade has exposed the contradictions when the New Left lays claim to an assimilatory minority through the politically trans-gender. The politically trans-gender seek to stand out. Transsexuals yearn for normalcy. The politically trans-gender announce their pronouns. Transsexuals want our gender assumed. When pronoun culture becomes a norm, the exception to the rule becomes the rule.
The term “norm” is instructive. Since the sixties, the New Left has challenged normative assumptions that center dominant groups such as white Americans and heterosexuals. Heteronormativity, for example, implies that opposite-sex relations are normal and encourages them. Today, the New Left promotes a kind of trans-gender normativity. Through their proposed new pronoun norms, and new language such as “birthing person,” they wish to normalize the trans-gender umbrella into the fabric of society. While transsexuals are objectively atypical and rare in the population, trans-gender normativity implicitly encourages all people to question their gender to entrench the politically trans-gender as the new normal.
Our support groups are occupied by a new cohort more interested in being “trans” than passing. An LGBT club bans discussion of dysphoria, not to afford gays their own space, but because dysphoria is too controversial for the Queers. A transsexual mother and her husband are put in the uncomfortable position of explaining to their adopted son why his friend’s pronoun phase is different from mom’s situation. Pre-existing transsexual understandings and customs have been erased. Transsexuals are not being liberated. Rather, take transsexuals seriously as a colonized minority, each puppet state with a new pride flag.
Gay liberation icon Michel Foucault argued in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 that premodern legal codes regarded same-sex relations in terms of action, not identity. In the nineteenth century, a medicalizing and pathologizing discourse constructed the “homosexual” as a category of person. “The sodomite was a temporary aberration, the homosexual was now a species.” Hannah Arendt made a similar argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism. “Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape.” During the fin de siecle, the exoticization of Jews and “inverts” blocked their assimilation, transformed the “suspect” of a “crime” into the “objective enemy” with a “vice,” and created the preconditions for the Holocaust.
Today, the New Left transforms action into identity. In identity politics discourse, just as everyone has a sex, race, religion, and sexual orientation, now everyone has a “gender identity” – “cis” or “trans.” When “transition” was regarded as an action, a former man could be a woman, and just a woman. Today, she is boxed into a new social category, “trans woman.” Before, transsexuals could leave our transition in the past and assimilate. Today, we are told we will always remain “trans.” The politically trans-gender transition into being “trans.” Yet, the medically transsexual are told we can never be “cis.”
Therefore, trans-gender discourse renders transsexuals unthinkable. Transformed into identities, heterosexuality and homosexuality did not easily describe all preferences, necessitating more sexualities such as bisexuality. Today, “trans” as an identity allows for people to transition into being “trans” and for people to be “trans” despite not transitioning. Meanwhile, the “cis/trans” conception does not account for assimilated men and women of transsexual history, or for detransitioners. Not only does trans-gender discourse shape the understandings of society, it deprives transsexuals of the language to articulate ourselves, even in our own thoughts. Not only do well-meaning liberals no longer understand why they shouldn’t disclose transsexual medical history, the woman-born-transsexual herself lacks the language to explain why she doesn’t want to be known as “trans.”
Trans-medicalization transforms identity into action. Medical discourse regards transsexualism, characterized by persistent sex dysphoria, as a temporary condition that may be corrected through transition. The role of medicine is to normalize the patient into society, no longer a person with transsexualism, but just a man or woman. Trans-medicalization does not make, but refutes, normative judgements about transsexuals. The medicalization of homosexuality claimed that same-sex relationships were not just atypical but abnormal. Trans-medicalization does not pathologize transsexuals, but recognizes that sex dysphoria inherently impairs quality of life, and therefore transition is medicine. Meanwhile, the very “trans-gender umbrella” is defined around crossing gender norms. Trans-medicalization asserts that transsexuals are not “trans-gender” because a medical condition is not an issue of gender norms. While the trans-gender umbrella tries to claim transsexuals a common history with drag queens, trans-medicalization offers a future with the allergic and diabetic - normalization into society through the value-neutrality of a medical condition.
Our objectivizing comes not from medical doctors, but Queer Theorists. Since the 1990s, transsexuals have fought and lost out on several wars to resist incorporation into the trans-gender political project - a process noted by Vivian Namaste, who believed it was imperialistic. In 2014, transsexual Talia Mae Betcher reflected upon the troubling shift to the trans-gender narrative away from medical narratives that, whatever their flaws, promoted assimilation. Today, the definitions in use by establishment LGBT organizations reflect Queer theories divorced from transsexual realities. Papers erase us by dictating, “You Are Not Trapped in the Wrong Body, You Are Oppressed” and scrutinizing our Internet activities, as if we are a curiosity, while biasing imperialist over defender. Deploying academic expertise and moral authority derived from cultural nostalgia of the sixties, the social sciences reduce us to objects of examination for activist projects. Our enemies are not Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin, but Leslie Feinberg and Rubin Gayle.
Far from challenging trans-gender discourse, the “truscum” are only the ultimate reflection of the Tumblr culture which spawned the term. When the politically trans-gender say, “You don’t need dysphoria to be trans,” they frame being “trans” as a club with requirements, or lack thereof, to join. When the “truscum” merely reacted with “You need dysphoria to be trans,” they accepted the premise, and the very labels, of the politically trans-gender, thus conceding the battle. Being a “truscum” meant “I identify as having dysphoria,” “validate me!” and “not like other girls.” The “truscum” focused on proving who was “truly trans,” emphasizing “trans” as the primary identity instead of a stepping stone to “man” or “woman.”
Only by transforming “trans” from identity into action can we recover “man” and “woman” and think clearly. For someone considering transition, the question is not “Are you trans?”, but “Would you be better off as a man or woman?”, a matter of behavior and will to integrate. Identity politics, which sorts people into the immutable characteristic of “cis” or “trans,” is a harmful presumption for the nuances and highly personal decisions of medicine. Rather than “cis” or ”trans” as identities, “transition” as action is more inclusive towards assimilated men and women of transsexual history and towards detransitioners. Therefore, instead of the ill-defined and trans-gender normative “gender identity,” transsexuals should seek protection under the broad “medical history,” which also explicitly defends privacy. Finally, the they/them woman is disruptive to society not because she “fakes being trans,” but because preferred pronouns don’t stop society from gendering her as a woman. She merely demands that others deny gender. Through political trans-gender identity, the New Left appropriates transsexuals to disrupt gender norms. However, transsexual liberation - the pursuit of normalcy as the other sex - is a radical assertion of assimilation.
The transformation of the action of “transition” into the identity of “trans” shackles transsexuals to the past. Medical discourse is liberating because it regards transsexualism as a temporary circumstance that does not determine one’s destiny. After treatment "trans" loses real life significance, and becomes just a footnote within one's medical past.
There would be no need for any “liberation” had the “trans-gender umbrella” not annexed transsexualism and convinced the world that what matters is “identity.” The women we knew who underwent treatment in the sixties and early seventies just went on after they healed to live normal lives as a matter of course. Back then, "identity" had no meaning except to scholars who studied us. We ourselves just had a problem that needed to be fixed. To regain our freedom to live our lives as normal members of society at large, we must reject discourse of identity, reclaim assimilation as our goal, and reassert it as the criterion by which we measure our liberation.
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