As we begin to expand and explore the frontiers of gender and sexuality, there’s an underexplored topic in trans identities that I see becoming increasingly important. This is that being transsexual and being transgender are two separate things. They can co-occur in the same person in a way that makes it seem as if they’re the same, but correlation is not causation.
Transsexual refers to a desired change in biological sex. While this is often framed as strictly binary changes, it would be absurd to restrict transsexuality to such a narrow window. Biological sex is already a more expansive spectrum that includes varieties of intersex individuals. Our society has historically labeled anything outside the binary to be an undesired abnormality, and this bias persists in the mainstream view of intersex persons. Because of this, people are more inclined to accept that someone with sociotypically idealized genitalia on one side of the binary might want what’s found on the proverbial other side. It is, however, entirely possible that someone might also want what’s found somewhere in the middle. It’s entirely due to discriminatory biases and phobias against intersex people that we don’t consider that someone who feels out of place in their own biological sex might want to be intersex instead of an idealized binary sex.
In fact, my experience in trans communities is that the desire to shift one’s place slightly on the sex spectrum is actually quite common, rather than launching oneself to the perceived polar opposite. Of course I fully support my trans peers who want to be on the so-called other side of the binary, but I know far more people who want to be somewhere in the middle. I’ve known a significant number of people who go on hormones just long enough to feel like they’ve shifted their body in a way that’s satisfying to them. I’ve known many who are interested in some kind of top surgery but not any kind of bottom surgery. This clearly points to a very diverse spectrum of transsexuality that mostly goes unacknowledged. This doesn’t even get into the fairly common fantasy of some sufficiently advanced biotech that would allow changing one’s sex to whatever one happens to be feeling that day.
The other important factor of note here is differences in dysphoria. Transsexual dysphoria is a feeling of misalignment in the experience of one’s own body. It’s the feeling that the body should be or should’ve been something different than what it is. This is the form of dysphoria that gets the most media attention because surgery and medical shows get viewers. However there’s an entirely different form of dysphoria that I think is far more common.
Transgender dysphoria is experienced based on the perceptions of others. There are plenty of books and resources that cover gender theory extensively, so I’ll summarize here by saying gender is an internal felt sense. It’s likely infinitely expansive and highly socially constructed. The validation of gender thereby is social, and any sort of gender dysphoria is felt by the lack of that validation.
Someone who is transgender has changed their gender from what their surrounding society assumed that it was. In a society that never assumed gender, there would be no such thing as being transgender. Any felt sense of gender exploration would simply be validated by the surrounding people, and identities would evolve at a rapid pace. Transgender is an unnecessary concept in a society that isn’t myopically bigoted in its understanding and acceptance of new and evolving identities.
A transgender person in our own myopically bigoted society is someone who finds social pressure and barriers against exploring and evolving their own identity. In order to continue their personal growth journey, the individual must shatter the societal barrier keeping them contained. The act of shattering that barrier is the definition of becoming transgender. The gender dysphoria one feels is the social pressure attempting to push them back inside of the societal box. This is a fundamentally different dysphoria from feeling any sense that one’s body somehow feels off. Many transgender people feel a strong sense of gender dysphoria without feeling any sense of body dysphoria. Thus many transgender people are not transsexual.
This brings us to an important updated understanding. Transsexual is not transgender, and there’s no prescriptive framework for how the two might align. Someone might feel gender dysphoria without feeling any body dysphoria. Someone might want to change their body in one way while continuing to explore genders in directions that do not align with societal expectations of the way(s) they want to change their body. Body changes might be moving towards anywhere on the biological sex spectrum, not only two places. Gender is an infinitely expansive part of human identity exploration that’s only being held back by societal limitations. Let’s stop trying to fit everything into increasingly smaller boxes and instead break down barriers to see what’s created when people are encouraged to expand as much as they desire.
