Our sex should obviously not be a major part of our lives outside of, like, medical things. But our society forces gender on us as a set of roles, expectations etc. to follow based on our sex. So, ideally, there would be no gender, right?
But trans people throughout history have wanted to present as the opposite gender. This is in addition to cis people who oppose their own gender’s roles and do the opposite things. But trans people, obviously, go much further than any cis person does.
Is this because trans people want to actually be the opposite sex and for a long time being the opposite gender was the only possible thing? But now thanks to medical advancements they can get closer to that goal than any other time?
Why is this? Is it something in the brain, like with gay people? So, can you do a brain scan to see if people are actually gay or trans? Would that even help? Actually, I can imagine it helping in an ideal world, but in our fascist reality that will probably just end up genociding people. So, uh, scrap that.
Any essential books for reading up on all this stuff? Thanks
Differentiating only between sex and gender is also an intellectual dead end that cannot adequately explain transness. You need at least a three-dimensional model for that, like Leslie Feinberg's split between gender identity, gender performance and biological sex characteristics. You can subdivide this further, biological sex is a mosaic of all kinds of factors (hormones, genitals, various secondary sex characteristics most of which only anatomists and the most deeply dysphoric trans people are even aware of etc.), but these broader categories are much more useful for most discussions unless we're getting into details. Under a 2D model that only knows sex and gender, we quickly see how limited it is once we move beyond the most basic explanations of how society shapes gender performance - for example, it becomes impossible to explain the difference between a butch cis lesbian and an AFAB transmasc enbie with the same gender performance as the butch who doesn't medically transition. If you only know sex and gender, it's literally impossible to tell why one is cis and the other is trans. But differentiating the two is a trivial task under Feinberg's model, because the butch's gender identity is woman and the enbie's gender identity is masc-leaning nonbinary person.
Most early terfs that actually started out as second wave feminists do not get that and because they're all incredibly hung up on their grief with Judith Butler and her sex-gender dichotomy and eventually their own GNC performance of femininity, they have constant brain farts as soon as trans people enter the picture.
I agree though that biological sex (as in: hormonal sex) and gender role are very closely intertwined, and that there is also some connection to gender identity. I need estrogen to feel at home in my skin, and that's not only because it physically turns my skin into the smooth and soft one i want for myself, it's as if estrogen is the only operating system that fits my brain. On testosterone i always felt on overdrive even when i was super low energy and could barely do anything. Without estrogen, i also struggle to live as the empathetic, warm, cuddly, outgoing and agreeable person i always wanted to be, but on estrogen, it comes naturally. I already discarded the walled-off, emotionally stunted masculine gender role i had been bludgeoned into before i started HRT, that just imploded as soon as i realized i'm a woman and hate it to be seen as a man. But i didn't get nearly as far as with my endocrinological backup, and i'm going a lot deeper into what kind of woman i want to be now that i'm settling into that and get treated as a woman by my friends.