One of my biggest concerns with tucutes is that they are perpetuating this notion that one can CHOOSE to be trans. I had to wait five years before I could take hormones because my guardian thought I was CHOOSING to be trans because "gender bending" was trendy. Our community has such a hard time trying to convince the cis public that we are born this way and don't deserve prejudice and rejection for something we had no say in (and because no one deserves that): tucutes aren't helping.
This is long, very long, so I tried using good paragraph breaks. I’m sorry to those who have difficulty with long posts. I’m verbose, and it’s a failing, but I desperately want to be understood, so I will discuss things from different angles to try to get through. Please bear with me. (If you’re on desktop and want to skip this post, press J and you’ll move right past. If you’re on mobile, I’m sorry)
First of all, regarding your guardian, no matter what they say, they didn’t get the idea that you were faking or choosing from trans kids on the internet.
I promise you that the cis people who are giving you (and the rest of us) shit about your identity didn’t “learn” that trans people are not real, or are faking, or are making choices or are confused from tumblr. They got it from the same places they’ve been getting it for decades - our transphobic culture and meida, other cis people and their own ignorance.
Your average, run-of-the-mill cis person doesn’t see any difference between trans person A, who calls himself “truscum,” and trans person B, who calls herself “tucute,” and trans person C, who calls themself “too old for this bullshit.”
I don’t want to speak for tucutes (because I’m not one), but I’ve never seen one say that they chose to be trans. What I’ve invariably seen is someone who identifies as tucute identify themselves to others as trans, state that they don’t experience dysphoria, or they don’t call what they experience dysphoria. And then they are yelled at by self-identified truscum for “choosing to be” trans and/or stating that transness is a choice, when, in reality, it usually boils down to a misunderstanding around “identification.”
Identity and Identification
‘When a person says “I identify as a woman,” they are saying “I recognize my culture’s defintion of ‘woman’ as being an accurate descriptor of an aspect of my sense of self as a distinct person with all my myriad characteristics.” If that person was assigned male at birth, then she might also identify herself as trans, because in her culture, trans means “having a gender other than that which is culturally associated to a particular sex at birth.”
Likewise, she might say “I identify as a lesbian” because in her society, a woman who loves other women is called a lesbian. Or, better yet, “I identify as a queer woman, because, while I tend to be most often attracted to other women, I don’t feel that lesbian is a complete description of myself and my sexual orientation within the bounds of my culture and language.”
But often, identity and identify are used by truscum as interchangeable with choice. They are not. You can identify yourself as Bob, for example, because you chose the name Bob, for whatever reason suits you.
That is a choice you made - one that most people don’t get to make because someone else made that choice for them. So you chose the name/identity of Bob and over time, as people come to know you as Bob, those three letters in that order with that pronunciation will become a signifier, a bucket of traits, of who you are as a person in their minds. You chose the name Bob, but you didn’t choose to be All-of-the-physical-metaphysical-and-psychological-characteristics-I-attribute-to-the-person-known-to-many-people-as-Bob. Your identity is separate from the labels you identify as being accurate-ish descriptors of that identity.
They aren’t saying “I chose to be trans.” They are saying “I am trans, but differently than you are, because I am a whole separate person from you and my experiences are different.” Then people are yelling at them for not being trans or not being trans enough or not being trans correctly.
Trans as Choice vs. Born this way
Here’s the thing about choice, though. I don’t care if someone chooses to be trans - just because I haven’t met one yet doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. They should still be protected. They will still face the same transphobia, oppression and discrimination as a trans person who didn’t choose to be trans. Likewise, I don’t care if someone chooses to be gay. They should still be protected. A political lesbian (a woman who actively chose to love other women as a rejection of the patriarchy, instead out of innate attraction) will still face the same homophobia, lesbophobia, oppression and discrimination as a lesbian woman who did not choose to be a lesbian.
I have no interest in convincing cis people that we’re born this way. You see, if you insist to cis people or straight people that the only reason we deserve protections is because we can’t help but be who we are, it turns us into victims, and turns our lives into tragedy, it turns our transness into a pathology - “I’d be normal just like you if only I weren’t cursed with this unavoidable affliction of transness!” It doesn’t inspire them to protect us. It inspires them to fix us or cure us. And once they are satisfied that they’ve found a cure, even though no such cure exists, they’ll remove any protections we had and ignore us when they aren’t stomping on us. And I’m not here for that.
The reason homosexuality was finally removed from the DSM was because they finally realized that they’d spent decades trying to fix people who weren’t broken - and doing more damage as a result. And I don’t believe that it was removed because they realized gay people were born that way. I am pretty sure they removed it because they realized that being gay wasn’t a dysfunction.
They had been assuming that gay people were just straight people with the illness of same-sex attraction. They finally realized that there was no illness to cure - it was the stigma and hatred from an ignorant society which was broken, and which was causing the distress and dysfunction.
Likewise with transness. It’s a feature of humanity in all cultures. We’re not broken - our society is. The stigma, fear and hate that permeates our transphobic and ciscentric culture is what makes us think we’re broken and fills us with shame for not being normal. It’s a contributing factor to the impairment of function which is a necessary component of a Gender Dysphoria diagnosis.
Transness without Dysphoria
As pockets of society improve in their understanding of transness, it becomes possible for people to recognize themselves as trans while not experiencing dysphoria or experiencing it differently. This is a good thing.
There just are not externally determinable bright-line divisions between any two identity terms. Only an individual can actually evaluate the accuracy of trans or cis as it applies to themself. A therapist or psychologist can diagnose them with gender dysphoria, surem but they can’t diagnose them as trans, especially if their non-assigned gender identity is not causing them significant impairment - literally a requirement of the definition of dysphoria.
Let me give you an example of that. I tell you that I am feeling dizzy. I’m not showing outward signs of it, but I know that I can recognized dizziness in myself. You can’t tell me that I’m not dizzy and justify that with “you’re not falling down, so you can’t be dizzy.” No, I’m not impaired by this dizziness, but I know I’m dizzy, so I have to take steps to address that dizziness or take it into account when living my life, regardless of whether or not I’m falling down.
Likewise, someone tells you that they are trans, they recognize themselves as trans, but their life is not significantly impaired by the dissonance between their knowledge of themselves as trans and society’s assumption that they are cis. You can’t tell them they aren’t trans. Suffering is not a pre-requisite to transness. Self-knowledge is. It’s not externally quantifiable, especially by teenagers on the internet.
I want to share with you a quote I really like from tumblr user bramblepatch:
“Welcoming people [into the trans community] who otherwise might have been able to get by in a cis identity weakens the ideology of cisness, not the ideology of transness.
It’s saying, “we can do things for these people that you cannot because of your narrow ideas of gender.” It’s saying, “these are our people to cherish, not your people to shame.” - Source
And here we are, fighting amongst ourselves about who the real trans people are. We are ALL real trans people, in all our glorious diversity. Leelah challenged us to fix society, so let’s stop trying to fix each other, ok?
So yeah, I don’t care if or why someone chooses to call themselves trans.We live in a culture that (supposedly) values individuality and choice. If we insist that our rights and protections are deserved based on our actual rights as human beings, they can’t take those away from us. If we instead insist that we deserve protections only so long as we can somehow justify our transness, they can, and will, take them away, because we’ve already put them in the position of granting them. They aren’t their rights and protections to give. They are ours to keep.
