Ticking all the trans boxes
No matter how far you go back through trans internet subcultures there has always been a habit in the community to measure trans folk and those we think may be trans by a series of boxes. These exercises range from online trans tests, the diagnostic criteria used by medial professionals, through to the transvestigations done both in jest and with malicious intent. Regardless of the motivation, the fact that there is a list that people can refer to acts both as a potential purity test and an object lesson that teaches people that if you do not fit those criteria then you are somehow not trans enough. As someone who ticks every box of trans characteristics it is easy for me to laugh this off, but the reality is there is a dark undercurrent to trans box ticking, namely that if anyone falls short of trans expectations then they fail whatever purity test the observer is setting.
Gender is not an objective concept, it is something wholly subjective to each of us and the cultures we exist in. What may be understood in white English speaking societies is radically at odds with other communities around the world. Indeed, the very notion of trans identities rests on notions laid down by American and German clinicians over the course of the early twentieth century. To be diagnostically trans is to be defined by there subjective understanding of it. This point is pushed further the more you study the…
