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If you ever decide that you don't want to live any more and want to access quick and efficient euthanasia, I recommend reading the Paris Review profile on Masha Gessen alongside Masha Gessen's new essay about trans kids and healthcare.
I have no idea how people like Gessen come to be of the opinion that those advocating for greater easer of access to blockers and HRT for young people believe that "transness is an inborn and immutable trait," and that it is this view that is causing the backlash in the UK.
The argument here (if there is one) seems to be that there is a dominant point of view in which gender and sex are things capable of being discrete or stable, which can differentiate trans from cis people in the first place, and this is rhetorical limitation on trans advocacy.
Gessen ends with a "both sides don't have the full picture" thing - which is ridiculous, when you remember who we're talking about, the UK anti-trans crusade - and ends with your standard "gender is fluid and everyone is always changing" correction of the "binary trans" figure.
This article was more of a critique of a concept of transness that the author doesn't hold than a critique of a very real and very violent material attack on transness more broadly. The irony of course is that the transphobes hold Gessen's point of view to be the dominant one!
I feel more and more that it doesn't matter what any of our personal ideas of transness are. Articulating the "correct" ideas of sex and gender are not going to improve the lives of trans people - are not even a stepping stone, no - especially not when we "go before the law."
I say this as someone who (obv) does believe that you can write about theory and transness in the same breath without being executed for hypocrisy. It's tempting to go a bit farther than that, though, and to believe that our lives would be better if only our ideas were better.
What this leads to is nothing more than a critique of other trans people and of the way their ideas have been eaten by a society that is not trans - in this case, those for whom sex/gender can be stable, for whom transition is something irrevocable, and important for that reason.
Why does this happen so often and so easily? I think because no one really gives a shit about us. No one really cares enough to think as deeply about our motivations and our articulations of our being and their comparative contradictions as we do.
I apologize sincerely that what began as a shitpost turned into some sincere thoughts and self-critique about writing and thinking as a trans person (none of this is really about Gessen or this piece specifically, because who cares). I won't let it happen again!!
