I recently conducted a straw poll at our transgender peer support group to find out how many of us there felt we were “born this way.”  The result was unanimous, though with a shrug or two.  Yet a student from the university across the street had responded to a claim that trans is a natural, biological phenomenon by calling it “essentialist,” an ostracizing label that has been called “a sophisticated form of academic name calling.”
Certainly we are not pre-modern essentialists, for whom being born prone to “women’s problems” meant that a person was endowed with the essential gender markers of the “weaker sex,” the qualities of emotionality, passiveness, fickleness, and the rest.  Nor are we modern patriarchal essentialists who believe that women should keep to domestic and subservient spheres of action.

  It is understandable that feminists should react negatively to any hint of a return to these sorts of essentialism, even as feminism is founded on the essential dignity of womanhood.  Radical feminists have even practiced their own form of essentialism by excluding trans women from their spaces for not being “womyn-born-womyn.”  Taking their refuge in their essential identification with their sex, women have (rightly) aimed their sights at the dominating dichotomy of our socially constructed notions of gender.  Queer studies have followed suit, claiming sexuality as an essential identity with which they were born, as Lady Gaga sings it.  The two, joining forces in gender studies programs, generally maintain the doctrine that gender is entirely a social construct that determines our perceptive capacity and practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm all of us.  This is of course natural enough from the perspective of the social sciences, but in no way does it hinder academics from active agency against that construct.


Yet viewing sex or sexuality in conflict with the gender construct sits poorly with the transgender experience, which views the conflict the other way around.  Ours is a gender identity that is in conflict with our assigned sex, and with gender roles and expectations that are socially derived from that assignment. Many of us have acknowledged our innate gender identity only after crawling out from under the heavy overburden of social conditioning, so we are as acquainted with that oppressive dichotomy as anyone born a woman.  But instead of locating our subjectivity in our sex or our sexuality, it is found in an aspect of gender that is invisible to most, buried as it were beneath their sex, with which it happily accords.  Because it is discordant with our sex, we see it only too clearly, and see too that it is distinct from both sex and social conditioning.  Nevertheless it must find expression in a socially conditioned discourse, in the same way that our natural instinct for language finds expression in the language of a particular society.  We are seeking only to re-express ourselves.
This discord between sex and gender identity creates in us an intense longing for coherence, the very coherence that our culture presumes, namely that our sex should accord with our gender expression.  Our only way out of this double bind is to change our gender expression (whether part or full time), and if possible our body image, to accord with our innate gender identity.  The remedy is radical, but the goal conventional.  With our lives we demonstrate the radical fluidity of a non-dichotomous gender, even as we are often chided for “reinforcing the binary” by transitioning to a conventional gender when that happens to be our gender identity.  The conventional revile us for subverting nature, while the radicals rebuke us for not being sufficiently subversive of convention.


So trans folk do not begrudge feminists or queers the right to claim they were born that way.  We only ask to be accorded the same right, acknowledging at the same time that (somewhat like those born intersex) we were born both ways: one way anatomically and the other way psychologically.  We claim nothing more than an innate predisposition toward a particular gender identity (comparable to but distinct from sexual orientation).  We claim too that everyone is born with such a predisposition, but most are unable to see it.  This proclivity gives us a perspective on gender that is hidden beneath the sex and sexuality of others—and the social construct derived from them.