I wouldn’t want transgendered people to all make a switch to identifying with the binary gender assigned to them at birth.
Sure, nobody would be picking on us for being trans, because we wouldn’t be trans anymore. We wouldn’t have to deal with any of the awful crap that society presses on us. We wouldn’t have to deal with feelings of discomfort and alienation from our bodies (those of us that have such—it’s not a completely universal trait). We wouldn’t have to worry about things like costly surgical procedures, the availability of psychologically-stabilizing hormone treatments, whether we’ll be able to find clothing that fits and looks good, whether or not we want to aim for passing and how well we can do at that, and so on.
Those are things that make my life difficult, and they’re often pretty horrific.
But the thing is? I also wouldn’t be me. It is conceptually nontrivial to propose “a version of Jandila who isn’t trans”—that is a hypothetical individual who is a fundamentally different person, who experiences the world differently, who doesn’t have my memories and my experiences of the world. Whole different person. Sure, you can speculate what’d have happened in some counterfactual timeline where the person born to my parents never wound up displaying this trait, but then so much of their life would have been so different from mine.
This is a problem for me because if the goal is to do well by people who are still alive, we have to actually listen to them to some extent about their preferences and needs. I wouldn’t suffer so much or have as many challenges if I pushed a magic button that made me cis, but a lot of my problems don’t have to be this way.
I wouldn’t need to worry about surgery the way I do if it were something health insurance covered—my condition is considered medical by all my providers and doctors and insurers, yet surgery to remediate it is handled not by meaningful standards of best practices and studied in medical schools or offered at a typical hospital. Instead it’s a bit like buying a collector’s item—a lot of money, up front in cash, buyer’s remorse is entirely your risk, it’s considered a vanity rather than a necessity no matter what said medical profession’s consensus is otherwise, and exceptions are thin on the ground.
Trans people wouldn’t have nearly as much trouble getting hormone replacement therapy if our own medical needs were taught alongside other parts of endocrinology, and if medical research into our health was mostly directed at longitudinal studies of outcomes, treatment modalities and the like, and not predominantly focused on “what makes trans people trans?” (unhelpful to most actual people who are, but a great way to monopolize what little funding is available for research relevant to trans people)
I wouldn’t have to worry nearly so much about never getting a job, or being assaulted or harassed, if trans people and acceptance thereof were more normalized in popular culture, if it weren’t limited to the “deceptive/pathetic transsexual” dichotomy most of the tiny number of portrayals of us fall into—because more people would be familiar with the idea, and (I can hope) might think of something other than those stereotypes.
There’s a whole lot of stuff that various entities already extant in the world could do that would make it a lot easier for trans people to exist, without just offering us a magic “turn cis in a flash” pill. Yes, if we were like you we’d not be persecuted for being us, but we’d also not have to be persecuted that way if, y’know, people didn’t persecute us. If people could recognize that we’re targeted as a perceived group, lumped together whether or not we prefer to identify and live that way, and that even those of us who have no strongly-felt affiliation with any trans-specific cultural entity still suffer the effects of being perceived as part of that group.
Counterfactuals about making [minority who suffers/is persecuted/has disproportionately bad outcomes] go away by ensuring no more of them come into existence look a lot squickier when you’re a member of that minority who can think of a few much less drastic things the majority could do to accomplish similar ends.
I wouldn’t want transgendered people to all make a switch to identifying with the binary gender assigned to them at birth.
Sure, nobody would be picking on us for being trans, because we wouldn’t be trans anymore. We wouldn’t have to deal with any of the awful crap that society presses on us. We wouldn’t have to deal with feelings of discomfort and alienation from our bodies (those of us that have such—it’s not a completely universal trait). We wouldn’t have to worry about things like costly surgical procedures, the availability of psychologically-stabilizing hormone treatments, whether we’ll be able to find clothing that fits and looks good, whether or not we want to aim for passing and how well we can do at that, and so on.
Those are things that make my life difficult, and they’re often pretty horrific.
But the thing is? I also wouldn’t be me. It is conceptually nontrivial to propose “a version of Jandila who isn’t trans”—that is a hypothetical individual who is a fundamentally different person, who experiences the world differently, who doesn’t have my memories and my experiences of the world. Whole different person. Sure, you can speculate what’d have happened in some counterfactual timeline where the person born to my parents never wound up displaying this trait, but then so much of their life would have been so different from mine.
This is a problem for me because if the goal is to do well by people who are still alive, we have to actually listen to them to some extent about their preferences and needs. I wouldn’t suffer so much or have as many challenges if I pushed a magic button that made me cis, but a lot of my problems don’t have to be this way.
I wouldn’t need to worry about surgery the way I do if it were something health insurance covered—my condition is considered medical by all my providers and doctors and insurers, yet surgery to remediate it is handled not by meaningful standards of best practices and studied in medical schools or offered at a typical hospital. Instead it’s a bit like buying a collector’s item—a lot of money, up front in cash, buyer’s remorse is entirely your risk, it’s considered a vanity rather than a necessity no matter what said medical profession’s consensus is otherwise, and exceptions are thin on the ground.
Trans people wouldn’t have nearly as much trouble getting hormone replacement therapy if our own medical needs were taught alongside other parts of endocrinology, and if medical research into our health was mostly directed at longitudinal studies of outcomes, treatment modalities and the like, and not predominantly focused on “what makes trans people trans?” (unhelpful to most actual people who are, but a great way to monopolize what little funding is available for research relevant to trans people)
I wouldn’t have to worry nearly so much about never getting a job, or being assaulted or harassed, if trans people and acceptance thereof were more normalized in popular culture, if it weren’t limited to the “deceptive/pathetic transsexual” dichotomy most of the tiny number of portrayals of us fall into—because more people would be familiar with the idea, and (I can hope) might think of something other than those stereotypes.
There’s a whole lot of stuff that various entities already extant in the world could do that would make it a lot easier for trans people to exist, without just offering us a magic “turn cis in a flash” pill. Yes, if we were like you we’d not be persecuted for being us, but we’d also not have to be persecuted that way if, y’know, people didn’t persecute us. If people could recognize that we’re targeted as a perceived group, lumped together whether or not we prefer to identify and live that way, and that even those of us who have no strongly-felt affiliation with any trans-specific cultural entity still suffer the effects of being perceived as part of that group.
Counterfactuals about making [minority who suffers/is persecuted/has disproportionately bad outcomes] go away by ensuring no more of them come into existence look a lot squickier when you’re a member of that minority who can think of a few much less drastic things the majority could do to accomplish similar ends.