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It is time for a new transgender philosophy
We all live in a post-Magnus Hirschfeld world, one laid out in Harry Benjamin in his Standards of Care over the 1950s. Simply put it assumes that trans people suffer from gender dysphoria to the point where the only option to salve their pain is to medically transition into a cisnormative adjacent life. This centres the trans experience on pain, suffering, and the necessity of medicalised intervention, focusing the desire for change and normalcy as the twin reasons for a person to transition. This wisdom was developed by Hirschfeld in his observations of trans people in 1910s and 20s Germany, one which has not been successfully challenged by within the trans community because it offers the most straight forward way to an affirmed identity.
Conceptually it leaves a gaping whole at the centre of trans identities. It assumes that to be trans is to suffer, that to align one’s body with an internal conception of self must come a place of dysphoria. This philosophically makes sense if you assume that the human condition can be reduced down to normative understanding and that enough overlap exists between trans people for a causative link to emerge. The problem with this is that this conceit is never applied to cisnormative bodies, especially those bodies who undergo the same procedures trans people do. It assumes that transness is the outlier, when in reality the desire to…
