One of the things that transphobes like to say is that gender can’t be changed. They cliam that if you are born male you will always be male and if you are born female you will always be female. And you know what? I agree with those statements, but I don’t think the transphobes really understand the true meaning of them.
Transphobes, of course, think that birth genitals determine a person’s gender. Heck, they even believe that when an intersex child is born with ambiguous genitalia that the parents have a right to pick the gender they want the child to be and that plastic surgery to alter the birth genitals somehow magically confers a particular gender on the baby. To transphobes, gender is just something society assigns to you and then you are never allowed to question it for the rest of your life.
But of course, reality is more complex than that. Intersex people are not mere aberrations to be arbitrarily forced into one of two categories, and even more importantly gender is not actually inextricable from genitals. There are plenty of people whose gender does not align with their genitals, because gender is one’s own sense of identity, and it’s seat is in the brain. Sure, most people’s gender lines up with their genitals, hence the confusion of the two by so many cis gendered people, but every trans person, every non-binary person, and every genderfluid person is a living example of how gender and genitals can be out of sync with each other.
But can gender actually be changed? Well, genitals certainly can be changed, so there is that. We have pretty darn good surgical techniques available, at least for trans women, and trans men also have surgical options available, though they sadly are not as advanced. What about the brain, though? Can the brain be changed to alter someone’s gender? This is a subject of ongoing argument. I won’t grace it with the word “debate” because the side that argues it can be done, the conversion therapy supporters, really have no evidence on their side. Just like with gay conversion attempts, people who undergo gender conversion have a strong tendency to convert back to being trans again. The brain will not be denied.
So gender, in the brain, seems to be unchangeable. Something you are born with. Here, I am thinking that non-binary and genderfluid, are themselves valid genders just as male and female are, and when a genderfluid person “switches” from male to female or vice versa, I don’t actually classify that as a change because they still remain genderfluid. Also, I am not discounting the fact that many trans people question their gender in their egg phase. I see that more as a process of self discovery and overcoming societal training to be their assigned gender, rather than as a process of changing gender. I went through that process myself, of course.
Now, this is obviously not a rigorous scientific argument. That’s not my interest here. I’m really more concerned with the moral implications. If, as I assert, gender is truly in the brain and cannot be changed, then conversion therapy must be seen as a kind of psychological abuse and banned, with those practicing it being punished. That leaves us with transition, both social and medical, as the only rational response to being transgender.
So there’s my rejoinder to the transphobes: gender can’t be changed, so the transphobes are the ones who need to stop trying to change people’s gender. We trans folk are simply doing the most logical thing when we transition, and we deserve the full support of society in this.
Postscript: After posting this I came across an article discussing the known physical differences in the brains of trans people versus cis people. It’s worth reading.
Leave a Reply