Unlearning seeing sex as binary actually does so much for my dysphoria. I definitely need to medically transition, but it's hell of a lot easier to tell the difference between my true desire and linear expectations of transition when I remember that some typically male presenting men have chests like mine, whether through fat or gynaecomastia, and some men are as short as me and have as high voices as me. Some men's bodies are shaped exactly like mine. And some of those men are trans. And some of those men are cis.
I beat myself up because I don't fit the ideal hegemonic masculine beauty standard, and I think that's because I'm trans. But there's cis guys out there feeling insecure for the exact same reasons— short, high voice, wide shoulders, small feet, small hands, small dick. We're not so different.
I think I'm exiting the place of needing to know I'm like cis guys in order to feel justified and valid. But what is still important to me is how arbitrary our sex boundaries can be sometimes. What got me started thinking about it was how not only is controlling who can go in bathrooms violently transphobic, but it always enforces a standard of women's beauty that will exclude both cis and trans women. Any cis woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome who happens to be considered too hairy to be a proper woman gets excluded. Hell, sometimes people are like me, and are trans masc and identify as both lesbian and as a man, but you know what? I don't pass as a man, I'm pre everything and I'd rather use the women's room because the men's room is guaranteed to be gross and also not safe for me. So I'm gonna use the women's bathroom, and I started having people try to chuck me out of there when I was fourteen. Back then my family had no inkling I was trans but I fully looked like a teen testosterone-puberty-expectant boy.
Sex being binary is as bullshit as gender being binary, we just have a lot less people willing to admit that, and gloss over how similar the experiences are of trans people within their preferred gender and other people who hit multiple aspects of not being a man/woman in the "right" way.
-chris
