Indeed, twentieth-century trans medicine encouraged the negation of trans as an identity, choosing a curative temporality—one that implied an acute condition—over a durational identity model. In this framework, a transsexual ceased to be a “transsexual” if they were able to integrate into cisnormative society. Like Clare, trans theorist Sandy Stone saw the siren song of the curative as eradication in disguise, describing the transsexual as a person who was “programmed to disappear.” Stone’s term “posttranssexual” names a person who has undergone forms of medical transition and still considers themself trans, not a “woman” or even a “woman of trans experience.” In order to articulate this temporal state of being, something beyond either chronically dysphoric or successfully cured, a “post” needed to be amended. For Stone, “transsexual” alone could not endure as a sign under which to organize a social and political movement because it had been scripted, within the medical regime, as a transitional state and not an identity at all. A “transsexual” was, in essence, a moment in time, not a type of person.
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Community recognition as an authenticity marker produces a different type of “acutely” trans subject: not someone who has been “cured” but whose gender(s) or gender identities might be flexible, contextual, or unstable. Shifting transness away from chronic temporalities might also disentangle trans politics from Eurocentric models of identity legitimation. After all, while white bourgeois trans politics have long attempted to delegitimize situational gender expressions (such as drag or cross-dressing), such distinctions fail to account for the ways that gender operates in communities of color, working-class communities, and non-Western contexts. As b. binaohan, Martin Manalansan, Marlon Bailey, and others have argued, huge swaths of human experiences of gender are based on non-distinction between identity and behavior, rendering gender as mobile and changeable as other human actions. Even among white Westerners, many trans activists now consider having genders that vary based on time and context to be a perfectly legitimate expression of something called “trans.”
Cassius Adair, Is Transsexualism Chronic?
