Trans people are currently in the spotlight of American consciousness. Like never before, trans people are challenging entrenched narratives about gender, politics, and the limits of human freedom.
Their challenge comes not merely from a dialectical shift but from their mere existence. Just being a trans person in 21st America is a political statement in its own right. As the saying goes, existence is resistance.
One of the narratives that trans people are challenging is the immutability of biological sex.
How is it we define the concepts of "male" and "female"? Typically, it's done in terms of gamete production: males have the developmental capacity for producing small, mobile gametes and females have the developmental capacity for producing large, immobile gametes.
But another conceptual approach to sex is to define the male vs female binary in terms of the developmental capacities that produce the majority of sexual dimorphism in physical and behavioral phenotypes. And when we look at that, the answer is clearly sex hormones: estrogen dominance vs testosterone dominance. Sex hormones determine much of phenotypical, behavioral sexual difference.
So it's not implausible to define the concept of sex into two classes: males are dominated by testosterone and females are dominated by estrogen. And if we think about sex that way then modern hormone replacement therapy has the technological power to change biological sex because it can take a testosterone dominant creature and turn them into an estrogen dominant creature.
Personally, I am agnostic about what the right conceptual framework is for thinking about sex. It kind of seems arbitrary based on our explanatory goals as theorists. But nevertheless, the fact that trans people are routinely undergoing hormone replacement therapy represents a conceptual and existential threat to entrenched narratives about gender and sex.
And especially now that estrogen and testosterone are available for sale on the black market practically anyone can obtain these powerful agents of biological change, essentially engaging in a kind of "gender hacking".
Just like post-humanists are turning themselves into cyborgs, now pretty much anyone can become a gender cyborg i.e. a person who has used modern synthetic hormones to alter their biophysical makeup for whatever reason. Believe it or not, not everyone who desires to gender hack is doing so for the identity issues typical for trans people. But trans people have made this possibility part of the techno-cultural landscape.
And that's just sex. Trans people are also in the process of uprooting preconceived notions of what it means to belong to a gender class albeit man, woman, or something else. Many trans people are discontent with either the category of "man" or "woman" and seek to carve out another space in between or outside that traditional binary.
But even for a trans person firmly within the classical gender binary, their very existence is a political statement. It cannot be otherwise because many people would like nothing more than for trans people to be eradicated by society by making social and physical transition impossible. Means to accomplish this social genocide are already being enacted e.g. outlawing trans people from using the public bathrooms they feel are safe, banning trans people from the military, maintaining the legal status quo that allows trans people to be fired for being trans or transitioning, legally sanctioning housing and medical discrimination, and in general making trans people to be second-class citizens.
Gay people used to occupy the position trans people do today in terms of being targets for conservative "wedge issues" that drive people to the polls as a distraction from more significant issues. The increased visibility of trans people in the media has only accelerated the cultural scapegoating of trans people.
Yet we are here to stay. We not only have our own thriving culture but we are now part of the American psyche. Unfortunately, that tends to manifest in just us being the butt of jokes. But modern identity politics in America can now be largely framed in terms of whether you are "with" trans people or "against" them. They have become a lightning rod for the culture war between "social justice warriors" and everyone else.
And of course that culture war in reality represents a complex spectrum of political opinion that is wildly diverse. But nevertheless trans people have become the go-to thought experiment for thinking about gender, power, and the limits of identity politics. Few people actually know a real-life trans person but almost everyone has an opinion on how we should live our lives.
Transgender ideology has become a dominant culture force in society at the same time trans people are being routinely murdered just for being trans. We represent the bleeding edge of the progressive movement while also being paradoxically in the shadows, being talked over, and having our narratives told by those who have not lived our lives.
But like it or not, trans people have arrived and we're not going anywhere. Things are going to get more intense. The culture war will be accelerated and history will remember this moment in American history.
a steemit original
images: pixabay