On trans people.

I'm writing this in good faith and I really hope that you can read the whole thing and answer the same way. After all, the linked article isn't just a short comment either, so it would be very difficult to give a good response in that form. Thanks!

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I'll give it a try. I think the article was genuinely well-written, but I also think that some of the arguments are flawed and I disagree with the conclusion. Also, I am what you would call a trans person, and while you could argue that this makes me biased, I also think that it gives me a different, valuable, perspective.

First off, here is what I agree with. I agree with the fact that being transgender is made up. I also agree with the fact that sex is real and physical, and roughly binary. I agree that with cultural shifts came very significant differences in human experiences, and that people subconsciously change the way they exist and react to things based on their environment.

I think the author's points are somewhat adjecent to my beliefs. He essentially says that gender norms are a bad idea, and we should embrace gender non-comformity, which I 100% agree with. However, I completely disagree with the following conclusion that the idea of being trans was created to compensate for this.

I grew up in a Christian conservative country. I never played with nor liked dolls. I never felt that I wanted to wear dresses. I wasn't stereotipically feminine at all. I was not born a girl, either.

However, from a very young age I felt like I wanted to be one. I didn't want to do everything that girls "had" to do — I was much happier doing "boy-ish" things with the boys. But I still had this unexplainable feeling that I'm *not* a boy.

And this is where I feel like the author's arguments start falling apart. He decided that being trans is rooted in non-comformity with your assigned gender, your sex, while for me it was the opposite. It was never about doing girly things at all.

So as I grew up, my body evidently started changing. I still didn't know what a trans person was, or that it was even possible for someone to be a different gender than what they were told. I still didn't do any girly things, or otherwise had any interest in doing them.

Even so, I started to get less and less happy. It killed me that people talked to me as to a boy. I looked at the girls with jealousy, because it wasn't fair that they got to be themselves and I didn't. I regularly had dreams about waking up and just being a girl, only to actually wake up and face reality. But whenever I imagined myself like that, I was not conforming. I never wore dresses or make-up, or whatever else. Some of these things were even repulsive to me.

I think that conformity and gender are separate things. We treat a masculine woman differently than we treat a masculine man. However, both of these things are made up by society; it's an entirely arbitrary decision to socially differentiate between males and females. And I think this is something that the author missed — he correctly identified that gender roles are arbitrary and sometimes harmful, but he failed to see that gender itself is also just a made-up human thing to cater to our need for categorization. We could just as well categorize around height, or eye color.

So if gender isn't "real" (even though it is *based* on a real property), of course the concept of being trans is also not real. Just as some people don't feel like they want to conform to a set of rules determined by whatever genitals they were born with, some people also don't want to be treated as a certain gender because of that. It's not such a leap.

The question of why we should respect the pronouns that someone wants to be called, or why we should consider a trans person of a certain gender the same as cis people from that gender† implies that gender is this real, immutable thing that is just inherent to the human body. An analogous statement could be made arguing that we shouldn't allow non-conformity since men should act manly and vice versa, because that's what men do. But this ignores the fact that both gender and gender roles are completely made up, so any conformity to them is also made up.

† Save for obvious differences in anatomy. Just as we would consider *any* deviation from a norm — using the very example that the author gave, when considering a group of boys we might want to account for how they conform, or don't conform, to the gender norms assigned to them.

I want to reiterate that gender does *not* simply discriminate over genitals, as socially I think you will agree that men and women are treated differently, even outside of anything that could be explained by genitals. Gender comes with many more assumptions than just the thing in your pants, since as I've already pointed out earlier, a masculine woman and a masculine man are not treated the same, even by a person that does not at all consider gender norms as part of society.

So for this part of the argument, my main conclusion is that gender itself is made up in the same way that gender norms are made up, so it follows that any deviation is equally made up, but is not "bad" or "unnatural" the same way that the original concept is not.

Now, for the second part I want to focus on physical unease with one's body. This is something that I've also experienced, and these experiences have also happened way before I found out about the Western formulation of trans people — or any formulation, really. Also, I think it makes sense to divide these, because there are people who only feel the former, while there are others only feel the latter, and they are very distinct phenomena with different explanations.

Well, I did say different explanations, but I'm not aware of *any* explanation. It seems that some people feel very uncomfortable with the way their body has decided to develop, so they long for a way to make it stop. To reverse it. To make it do the "right" thing instead.

For me, one of the first times I've felt like that was, predictably, around when puberty started. I hated the way my features developed. How my voice got thicker. How my facial hair started coming in, and no matter how much you shave it the shadow just does not go away. My chest was flat. My genitals always got in the way, and I wanted them gone. It was disgusting, all of it. As a reminder, I still did not know that people could feel like that, so I didn't tell anyone and "dealt" with it on my own.

I put that word in quotes because I didn't really deal with it, I didn't even know what I should have been dealing *with*. I fell into depression. I felt like I didn't belong anywhere, because I was ugly and everyone hated me. Just look at me, I'm disgusting. Obviously, nobody actually thought that — I was just a regular boy to them. But *I* did, and it destroyed me.

To me, this defies explanation. I'm content with that, because it's a human thing, and human things aren't generally easy to explain. But noticing that it *is* a human thing is enough for me to conclude that it's not that different from other weird human things. I feel like this, I'm confident in saying I wasn't influenced to feel like this†, so it's real enough for me. And feeling like this really degrades my quality of life, so why shouldn't I look for a solution?

† There is absolutely no way that in a Christian conservative country, where I never saw *anything* outside of the norm of what a "good citizen" is supposed to be, I got influenced by the ideas of the West. Besides, all this happened before this was being talked about publicly in the West, too.

So, to recap. Someone was born a boy, conforms to the norms of what a boy should be, and likes their gender role, too. Nobody ever told them that being something else is possible. Even so, they have, from a very young age, felt like they wanted to be a girl, while retaining their personality and style. They also feel extremely uncomfortable with their appearance and anatomy.

This can't be described by the framework proposed by the author. At all. I've seen many similarly "unconventional" stories from other people, too.

The reason is that none of this is about gender norms. Yes, gender norms are made up, they suck, so let's do less of that. But the very concept of gender is *also* made up, and while most people consider having a specific set of genitalia the only criterium, being assigned a certain gender comes with a lot more inherent assumptions, separate from genitalia, gender norms, or gender inequality. We see a woman, any kind of woman, differently than we see a man. We don't think of her genitals when making this distinction, because for most purposes they are entirely irrelevant. The concept of "woman" is ingrained in our understanding of people, and it means *a lot* more than "female genitalia".

There are people who would like their bodies to have developed similarly to the opposite sex, while retaining the gender that they were assigned at birth. So any combination of gender, physical attributes, and gender (non-)conformity is possible.

Being trans is made up. But unless we get rid of gender itself, it's essentially a correction term in an equation that doesn't perfectly describe humans. Because there is no such thing.

As a note, and some food for thought, I'd also like to bring up intersex people. They represent quite a small portion of our population, but they can offer a very interesting perspective. Someone who is intersex might have both a penis and a vagina. Or a combination of them. They might have no reproductive system at all. When they hit puberty, their body might produce both sex hormones in significant quantities, or neither. How do you class them? And more importantly, since most of them, just as most anatomically regular people, including you and me, have a binary gender that they strongly identify as, what does that say about the association of gender and sex? At the very least it means that it's a lot more complicated than we like to assume.