Assigned gender at birth is not destiny
To state an obvious, feminist, point: the gender/sex you are assigned at birth does not and should not dictate the path you follow through life. No matter the culture or society you inhabit, what sex/gender marker you are assigned by a doctor at birth inherently gives other people a conception of what you should be. If you are assigned female, you will have more restricted options than if you are assigned male, yet in that assigning the doctor has no idea about who you will blossom into as you grow up. In that growing up you develop a sense of self based on the media you consume, your parents, friends, teachers, what the law bounds, amongst a vast array of influences. If that is self-evident, then why do we place such emphasis on biology dictating what our lives should be?
Yes, as a trans* person I believe strongly that gender is a self-understanding and self-expression and that it is society that causes many of the mental health issues trans* people face. In rigidly enforcing assigned gender-as-destiny, society essentially says that what a doctor perceives is a prognostication on entirety of our lives. Many people have medical interventions to correct hearing loss, poor eyesight, hair transplants, organ transplants… I could go on, all of which subverts the biological destiny we were handed at birth. Why should the chromosomal biology conceived in the womb dictate the gender identity we are allowed to express and inhabit?
If you break gender down as pure biology you essentially treat the body as sacrosanct, a temple to society’s narrative of what we should be, not what we could be. That we treat sperm donation or gestation with semantic narratives says as much about the societies we live in as it does about the individuals who give or receive gametes. This is not to reduce manhood or womanhood to simple gametes, yet the fact that this is often where the conversation ends up, in reducing gender down to who provides and who gestates. For those who do not do either, why do we insist on gendering them? Could it be that our societal gender narratives are so entrenched that to conceive of a gender framework outside of giving and gestating is both heretical and perverse?
Women have had penises as long as intersex people have been forced to inhabit a strict gender hierarchy. Men have had wombs as long as patriarchal strictures have forced women to be an inferior part of society. To be man has been to inhabit a position of power and authority, to be a woman has been to be inferior and under men. This is why gender-as-destiny has held so much narrative power, because to be a man is to be the vessel through which power flows. To subvert that, to declare yourself woman in the face of assigned manhood-at-birth, is to say that in actuality that destiny is faulty, that to be something perceptibly lesser is more worthy than all the power on offer.
This is why trans* women as seen as a threat, because they inhabit bodies both subverting masculine power and retaining the phallic power that society declares is a weapon against all decent women. To be a penis owning woman is to be locked and loaded, packing heat. You are an absolute threat because you have slothed away the masculine skin but retain the centre of masculine power. Of course this belies the fact that most trans* women would be absolutely mortified to show a bulge or reveal their genitals in public. They are the boogey women invented to replace the threat of the black man; don’t go in the restroom as the scary trans* woman will get you.
By placing such power in assigned gender at birth you instil in society the message that what is inherently personal belongs to the State, belongs to the collective whole. Your very identity is classified, controlled, policed, and punished based on what they want you to be, not how you feel you should be. If a man can bear children, he remains legally a mother because motherhood is a legal construct not a matter of personal opinion. You want to inhabit your life as you see fit, right up until society wishes to reinforce what it wants your destiny to be. Whose destiny is it anyway?
