If you’d told me a few days ago that I was going to get called out in an Ashley Rindsberg article in Fox News, I would have had no trouble believing you. My first guess for the cause of the callout would not have been a fairly tame Wikipedia article I wrote that just lists some works that depict Jesus as queer—not even my edgiest article on that topic—but I wouldn’t have been surprised either. I would have also readily believed that Mr. Rindsberg would put scare-quotes around “trans” and “nonbinary” while also not volunteering any alternative label. I have been, I must confess, a regular reader of FoxNews.com for over a decade, in which time I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the chaotic dynamic between normal journalistic practice and frothing propaganda that plays out in their coverage, sometimes in the span of a single sentence, which often leads to this comical refusal to either affirm or reject trans people’s genders.
¶What’s more surprising is the way Mr. Rindsberg continued that sentence, noting that I “reject[ ] the notion of gender identity”. One friend, who wisely does not spend much of her time reading FoxNews.com or its comments section, had a charmingly charitable interpretation as this being an accusation of hypocrisy on my part. But I am pretty confident that, even if Ashley Rindsberg actually took the time to parse my words, he well enough knows the readership of Christian-outrage-bait schlock to not expect them to understand that. (Scroll down to the comments and you can see, among other things, people complaining that Wikipedia is scared to say anything negative about Muhammad, who at press time we describe as having had sex with a nine-year-old.) No, I think Mr. Rindsberg’s point is much simpler: “Tranny says woke thing.”
¶Which is funny because I don’t think most woke people would consider rejecting the concept of gender identity to be woke. I also don’t think Fox News’s editors, who routinely give “gender identity” the scare-quote treatment too, would consider it to be woke. So there is a certain hilarity of being criticized by a journalist who’s deep in the tank for Donald Trump for agreeing with Mr. Trump that gender identity isn’t real.
So let’s talk about that. What do I mean by rejecting gender identity? Why do I, someone who left the U.S. because of its increasingly hostile treatment of trans people, at the end of the day agree with at least one part of the reasoning used to justify that discrimination: that gender identity is a fundamentally flawed concept?
I’ve written in the past about why trans rights failed in the U.S. and (very much in vain) how that failure could maybe be arrested, and in that context I’ve explained why I think a focus on identity-based appeals to trans validity doomed our community. I haven’t said as much about why I personally disagree with that approach, mostly because when the whole point is that the vast majority of Americans reject that approach, it doesn’t really matter whether they’re right or wrong; what matters is that they’ve made their mind up. But I don’t think that rejection is just a matter of bigotry or narrowmindedness: When you actually take the time to try to justify the concept of gender identity in a framework that doesn’t assume it dogmatically, you run into a lot of problems very quickly.
Let’s start with how the word “identity” is usually used in cultural contexts. If I talk about my ethnic identity, I am talking about how I see myself, how I see the communities I am part of, and how those communities see me. The extent to which I am willing to call myself Louisiana Creole, for instance, is very much a function of the extent to which I—someone raised north of the Mason-Dixon line as part of a white part-Creole family—am seen as Creole by people who are less ambiguously so. One could construct the phrase “gender identity” in this way—in other words, the degree to which someone is accepted as a member of a gender-based community—but that’s not how the term is normally used. And I don’t think it’s how people want it to be used, since that would mean trans people are only valid if society says we are.
Instead, “gender identity” means almost the opposite of what “identity” means when talking about race, ethnicity, or religion. Gender identity is, supposedly, your internal sense of your own gender. That’s a kind of strange definition if you think about it. Gender is a social construct. Gender is defined by how a society perceives a person. Someone’s gender can change when moving from one culture to another without anything changing about them internally. (A butch lesbian is “ma’am” in the U.S. but “sir” in some parts of Southeast Asia; her gender identity does not change on the flight over.) So what would it mean to have an internal sense of a social construct? That would make as much sense as having an internal sense of being funny or attractive, to pick two other arbitrary social constructs.
We have a word for how we see ourselves: self-perception. I can perceive myself as being funny, but that’s not my “funniness identity”. The fact that others also usually perceive me as funny isn’t because they affirm my identity, but because their perception of me happens to match my self-perception. Gender, like funniness, is culturally relative regardless of how one perceives oneself. My dry New England wit works well with Northeasterners and Brits, and less well with Southerners. When I lived in South Jersey, wearing blue jeans would be gender-conforming for a woman, but go a bit inland to Amish country and it’s cross-dressing.
Self-perception matters for a lot of things, but we don’t usually say it matters for how others should treat us or how society should categorize us. I was blond as a kid, and when I picture myself in my mind’s eye, I often see someone blonde. I can dye my hair to have my presentation match that self-perception, but choose not to because I don’t actually mind being brunette; should people nonetheless see me as blonde? Most people would say no, but in that case, why is gender special? Why is self-perception of gender a matter of identity, under a novel definition of “identity” meaning some absolute truth that should steer others’ behavior?
I have asked a lot of people this question and never gotten a good answer. I don’t think there can be a good answer, because fundamentally the concept of an internal sense of a social norm is incoherent. It resembles much less any insight into the human mind and much more a religious dogma. This is not surprising. As I wrote about regarding American politics, one thing that’s become much clearer to me since leaving the U.S. is how thoroughly Christian theology infuses the paradigms of our ideological movements, even the ones that see themselves as decidedly un- or even anti-Christian. One of the cornerstones of Christian and Christian-influenced philosophy, from Augustine to Kant, has been the idea that a thing’s essence is different than its external form. In a Christian-derived Western framework that cares deeply about the ontology of things, there is great appeal in a kind of trans validity that says not just that trans women are women and trans men are men, but that this is based on some inherent attribute deep in their souls… err, identities.
Why is self-perception of gender a matter of identity, under a novel definition of “identity” meaning some absolute truth that should steer others’ behavior? I don’t think there can be a good answer, because fundamentally the concept of an internal sense of a social norm is incoherent.
Naïvely, this dogma might seem to at least have the saving grace that it is kinder to trans people. I don’t think that it is. If anything, it’s an end-run that allows culturally Christian people to preserve Christendom’s fundamental rejection of gender variance. It lets a liberal-minded Westerner accept a trans woman as a woman or a trans man as a man without actually accepting that gender is something constructed both by those who perform it and those who perceive it. If that trans woman simply is a woman, because that’s the fundamental truth deep in her soul identity, then no act of understanding or love is required to affirm her. To look at someone who wishes to be seen as a woman, but was not born as one and has some body parts you would not associate with womanhood, and to accept that you do not know for certain what is in her mind, and that, even if you knew for certain that she fully sees herself as a woman, this would not necessarily make her a woman, and nonetheless to treat her as woman because that is how she communicates she wishes to be perceived—that is an act of understanding. It is an act of empathy. It is an approach that requires you to actually engage with how someone chooses to interact with the world, as we do when approaching any other matter of perception and belonging, rather than hiding behind the deus ex machina of an invisible daemon that controls objective truth.
This latter approach, one that relies on gender presentation (something that objectively and concretely exists) rather than gender identity, is not just easier to explain. It’s also the approach that makes life far easier for the vast majority of trans people. Most trans people fall into one of two categories: those who live as their self-perceived gender, and wish for others to perceive them as such; and those who do not live as their self-perceived gender, and are somewhere between content with and resigned to the reality of not being perceived as such. Many in the former group are directly harmed by gender-identity-based logic, with their hard-fought gender presentations not seen as sufficient to establish their gender, contributing to the oft-observed paradox that trans people are misgendered more often in liberal areas than conservative ones. It is the latter group, meanwhile, who are often cited to defend perpetuating the myth of gender identity, but in practice it does very little for them. If they are not doing anything at all to signal their self-perceived gender, then people—even other trans people—will still treat them as the gender they present as, no matter what is in their soul.
There is only one group who could be argued to do better under an identity-based approach overall, and that is people who only partly live as their self-perceived gender and do not intend to ever change that—for instance, trans women who wear feminine clothes but do not wish to take HRT. But even for them, in practice the identity-based approach still barely makes a difference, because in any space woke enough to follow that norm, someone merely saying “I’m a woman” should be enough to count as living as that gender.
This last bit is crucial. Arguments for gender validity based on presentation are often tarred as privileging “passing”—whether someone is able to make themself look cisgender. This is just more societal internalized transphobia, more of the same reasoning that makes us think trans women are more valid if they have a magic spirit inside them that says they’re women. It’s entirely possible to at once affirm the notions that gender should be inferred based on presentation, and that whether a person appears to be cisgender is not a part of that analysis. That is, indeed, how many cultures throughout the world approach gender, including some where it is unremarkable for transfeminine people to have facial hair. The question is not whether a person looks like a “real woman” or “real man” in the eyes of the beholder, but what message they are beheld as communicating to the world about their gender. The more overt the communication, the more people will recognize the intent, but simply saying “I am a woman” while otherwise presenting male is an expression of intent, and there is no reason to disrespect it other than wanting to be a dick to someone.
The question is not whether a person looks like a “real woman” or “real man” in the eyes of the beholder, but what message they are beheld as communicating to the world about their gender.
No one should have to pass as a cis woman in order to be treated as a woman. But it is not unreasonable to expect someone to make some overt sign, as would be understood by the community she is in, that indicates she wishes to be treated as a woman, in order to be treated as a woman. When the dogma of gender identity reaches its logical extreme, it vilifies trans people who actually want to be seen as the gender we perceive ourselves as (which is, to be clear, the vast majority of us). The rhetoric shifts: “You don’t need to pass” gains an air of “It’s bad to want to pass”; “You don’t need to physically transition” gains an air of “None of the physical stuff matters”. That emerging taboo against trans people acknowledging that transition is an important part of being trans contributed to perhaps the trans rights movement’s greatest strategic failure, investing little to no effort into promoting and preserving access to HRT for adults. A trans commentariat terrified of talking about transition allowed hundreds of thousands of trans Americans to struggle with the basic logistics of social transition, while instead focusing on unwinnable issues like identity-based access to women’s sports. As adult HRT bans proliferate in the coming years, perhaps some can take solace knowing that, according to a strictly identity-based theory of gender, none of us should mind this, because we’re all valid based on what’s inside us.
If there’s one thing that I think trans people and TERFs can agree upon, it’s this: there is a difference between living as a man and living as a woman. If that difference doesn’t matter, why the fuck are we doing any of this to ourselves? Why have we feminized and masculinized our bodies, jumped through legal hoops, risked social and professional estrangement, if none of this matters, if all that matters is identity? Presentation matters to us. That’s the reason so many trans folx chafe when asked to state their pronouns after years of effort at passing as their self-perceived gender.
A presentation-based approach to trans issues basically instantly kills the most potent arguments transphobes have against trans rights. The hypothetical “man who suddenly claims he’s a woman” has been the most effective bogeyman in every debate about the role of trans people in cis society. Now of course, as acknowledged at the start of this essay regarding Mr. Rindsberg, transphobes do not argue in good faith, and so if that strawman were not there they’d pick another one. But if we look at how dramatically unsuccessful the identity-based approach to trans rights has been at convincing anyone, even most liberals, of its core tenets, we ignore the persuasiveness of that strawman at our peril.
Similarly, a lot of the hardest questions that trans-rights skeptics have had to ask go away without the myth of gender identity. The cursèd “attack helicopter” joke, mocked but never really answered by the trans community even as we quietly use our own versions of it in private, suddenly loses its rotors. “Why are transgender people valid but transracial people aren’t?”, which has never had a coherent answer that doesn’t rely on holding up the DSM-5 as a work of divine provenance, finds a simple answer: Just like transgender people who live as their gender, transracial people who live as their race are considered valid: It’s just that race is not physiology and the average person who meets this definition is someone who looks Asian but lives as part of a white family they were adopted into, not a white woman wearing blackface so people will think she’s Black.
Because gender isn’t special. It’s just one social norm we use to divide humans along lines that vaguely correlate with sex. Nothing magical happens inside our brains or souls that instantiates some objective truth about gender. Yes, some of us have very strong desires to be perceived as a specific gender, but some of us have very strong desires to be perceived as a specific weight, or skin tone, or degree of musculature, and put just as much work or more into making our bodies look those ways. None of this is identity. This is how we perceive ourselves, and how we modify our appearances so that others will perceive us the same way.
And what do you call your act?
Gender-identity-critical, of course.
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