The maleness or femaleness of individual bodies is measured through scales and ranges: your testosterone level places you among men or women, as do the answers you provide to multiple-choice tests. Gender is a question of numbers — though of course these numbers are inscribed in a discourse relying on “nature,” so that uncommon ranges are labeled “unnatural.” Wrong numbers have to be corrected so that the individual (the subject?) can reenter the ranges of normality — a process similar to the “coding” inherent to territorialization. Coding, in Deleuze and Guattari's perspective, is always “trans-coded,” that is, deviated from its recurring schemes, its territory, and carried away toward a line of flight. Gender disruptions open up the space between plateaus, the uncodified smooth space where affective intensities, not language, matter. Trans people know very well how aleatory it is to pass, how random the reading of the signs can be: a few more facial hairs, a shirt more or less open, a slightly uncontrolled voice, and you are on the other side. The product of particular intensities — your body processing hormones, clothing, surgery, moods, environnement — becomes a pattern of signs, read through social patterns re/territorializing transgender bodies.
Matt Fournier, Lines of Flight in Transgender Studies Quarterly.