Transgender people are so often autotheorists -- the trans experience and identity is under-theorized and the transsexual theorist often finds herself with very few trans giants to stand on the shoulder of. In an already self-exploration-heavy context of having to figure out one's own relationship with gender, it is easy to have a very solipsistic view of trans identity.
This solipsism is profound - it applies both to the trans individual considering their own self as the ultimate word in what creates transness, and also to the trans community considering its own self as the ultimate word in what way transness is marginalized. It is not hard to see why this irritates older trans people (in the first case) and trans people whose first allegiance is to a wider struggle than the trans movement (in the second). I consider myself a refugee from most trans groups for the simple fact of finding their exceptionalism exhausting.
To be sure, there are some things truly exceptional about the transgender condition. We are a reviled minority, an immediately legible degeneracy to point to and prove that society could use a little more repression - across caste, class, and national lines. There is a visceral discomfort we inspire in people that seems near universal -- where we are considered attractive, we are seen as possessing a fundamental disqualification (oh, you were born as something else); and where we are considered unwanted, we are emblematic of something deeply wrong. The non-adherence to gender roles has been a reliable indicator of a less-developed civilization in colonial terms - groups that have often also been accused of kidnapping children (examples that jump immediately to mind are the Hijras and the Roma.)
However, the question of "what is a transsexual" or "how does one identify a transsexual" or "whom do you believe when they say they are transsexual" deserves a rigourous answer. One of my favourite central tenets of Donna Haraway's feminist philosophy is to never eschew rigour for wishy-washy constructionism, especially when it comes to questions of gender. Sure, gender is constructed, but there is an ironclad concreteness to womanhood; the woman is recognizable, and her oppression is nameable. Just because this concreteness is denied, questioned, and just because rigour and objectivity have hitherto spelled exclusion for women, it doesn't mean we give up on rigour and objectivity. We have to think of a stronger objectivity with which to characterize the condition of womanhood rather than say "objectivity is the tool of the oppressor, we believe women out here."
Is transsexuality self-identified? Well - there is no meaningful way to identify a transsexual other than to ask her. There is a spectrum of trans expression - it varies from physically presenting as one gender but yearning at heart to be another; adopting clothes and mannerisms of another gender only in safe and private circumstances; moving socially in those clothes and mannerisms; performing body modifications to present in a particular gendered manner; living 'stealth', that is, adopting such an optimal gender presentation that it would be very tough for someone to identify that you're trans; or presenting so androgynously that the interlocutor has to acknowledge your transness.
All these are valid trans expressions (in the interest of rigour, the first may be classified as a trans identity without trans expression). All these also come with different kinds of repercussions, persecutions, and social consequences. For instance, the stealth transsexual may find herself subject to serious, even fatal, violence when someone who believes her to be a ciswoman discovers her past; the socially transitioning person may find her claim to womanhood questioned and her life being forced to go on pause to wait for an overburdened medical system to give her the interventions she needs; the androgyne may find themselves stared at and mistrusted wherever they go; the closeted transsexual must live with the yearning and dissonance of not being seen for who they really are.
These are also differential marginalizations - the internal pain of the closeted trans person is not comparable to the experience of visibly being a member of a reviled class, having to live with what WEB du Bois characterized as a 'double consciousness' in the context of being a Black American, having to see yourself from the eyes of your oppressor and temper your being so as to fit what is acceptable behaviour. 'Difference,' theorize feminists (who, in fairness, have always failed to meaningfully account for the Différance between themselves and transsexuals without being exclusionary), must be embraced within the movement, not falsely flattened into an externally-imposed sameness.
Perhaps the obsession with transsexual self-identification is the result of the liberal inability to contend with the disturbing, the difficult, the uncomfortable, the disgusting, the elephants in the room. Rather than dive into the sordid details of how different the material conditions of one who has to dilate her neovagina are from mood swings that may be experienced by people who are on hormone replacement medication, we prefer to flatten our experiences under the umbrella and pick the identifying factor that is common to every variety of transgender experience: if she says she is trans, she is most likely trans.
This, however, is a necessary cop-out and cannot be the basis for affirmative action. Affirmative action must be specially and specifically tailored to the different strands of transgender life. Asking for this does not amount to dividing the trans population; rather it is a commitment to justice. Sure, we're all trans, but if you've never been kicked out of school, you must give way for those who have and speak on their behalf first. The reality of the capitalist welfare state is that every community that is desirous of welfare and affirmative action within the ambit of this economic model has to go through the dignities and indignities of classification under the law. The law must look at you, find you recognizable, and deem you eligible for benefits. This in turn gives you the right to complain that your tax money is helping certain undeserving people. These are the characteristics of the democracy we have agreed upon. Self-identification cannot and will not qualify you for a reserved university seat, and that's as it should be.
We, in India, in 2026, must find a way out of a regime that wants to strip us to confirm our identity, rooted in a criminal view of gender variance, and the way out is not through liberal flattening of the different strands of transsexual marginality into one act of self-identification. Personally, I must admit that the ones who don't desire hormonal or surgical intervention are being somewhat naive in this regard. I already had to undergo the process of laying bare my psyche and sitting with a psychiatrist so as to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria so as to access hormone replacement therapy. Most people seriously adopting a gender identity different from the one assigned from birth have had to do this - either to get access to hormones, or at work, or to get access to surgery. The exact criterion is a question of democratic debate; but an internal feeling cannot be the only qualifier.
For me and for many many trans people, this is not a problem. Various evidences of my transsexuality have gathered themselves over the years of my presenting an outwardly gender-variant expression. These are not merely medical, and they are all material. Does my position betray some bitterness? Of course! I feel bitter about the fact that medically transitioning has estranged me from my parents, made me much less employable, created an interruption in contexts like airport security, and so much more. There are also many sisters of mine who are in a situation where the safest place for them is the closet. But this means that I am out there actively experiencing the unsafety of being visibly gender variant. There is a distinction here that is plainly unfair to flatten.
It is also a distraction from the impending genocide of our ranks. Can we focus instead on the fact that many doctors who do gender affirming surgery have now stopped doing so because the law threatens them with criminal charges if they lay a scalpel on our bodies? Can we focus instead on the fact that the criminalization provisions will affect the most disenfranchised and powerless among us?
If our trans identity is internal, invisible, and inviolable, why does it need state sanction? Contrarily, if we need the state to support us, why should we be treated as exceptional from every other recipient of reservation who has to prove their ancestry? This is not at all an attempt to compare caste and gender - this is a plain statement of fact regarding what every other demographic has to do to qualify for welfare and an assertion that we are not exceptional in this regard.
Note: this article can be read as a defense of Sumit Baudh. Please feel free to do so. I don't agree with everything he says but I am not quite sure why he is being attacked as this phobe or that phobe.
