trans | [Controversial]There's a calling out that needs to be: Identity, medical issues, community

There is a tendency among many trans people to label their transness as “strictly a medical issue”, usually as an excuse to insist that they do not identify as trans or that they do not consider being trans as something that can be part of an identity, period, for the less offensive version. While I do not intend to force them into the fold and consider identity an issue of self-determination, this way of describing it needs to be called out for the ableism inherent in this position. I can’t recommend reading Culture as Disability strongly enough.

This position essentially rests on a false dichotomy: the erroneous idea that medical issues can not be issues of identity, and also quite often, but not always, on a very real lack of understanding of what people with disabilities or intersex people face from the medical community when their “medical issues” are seen separately from social or identity concerns. Strict medicalization essentially results in one major result: loss of independence in the face of medical science.

This tends to also lead to another situation, medical care is centered on the idea of “the fix” and pity, rather than actually letting people keep some form of autonomy or be treated as full human beings.

The “fix and pity it” approach doesn’t necessarily have to be reparative therapy as the better known problematic model would have it. Simple medical control over transition, with the base assumption that all trans people will be mainstreamed back into the gender binary, somehow, and the stricter the better, may also be that fix. Trans people become non-people, pitiable in some way, always, the courageous wonder tranny. It also ends up not taking into account the plurality of what gender is. And it ties with the issues intersex people have, in that their bodies are changed against their wills not to “make (cissexual) people uncomfortable”, again, not taking into account their own gender identity or desires, but strictly depending on the closest chromosome pair their genes might be.

This tends to also too easily deny the community that can and will form around people with shared medical issues: there are, on the contrary, a lot. And acceptation of these issues as strictly medical issues has done little to actually help them not be discriminated against. Far from it. If anything, sticking to that model only fosters pity and dependence on medical professionals.

It makes their cultural production seen as, merely, a(nother) crutch. A sign of what they lack rather than what they have.

Instead of it being one piece of a person... it remains all the world sees.

x-posted to danaelaurm.