Authenticity, intersubjectivity and the ethics of changing sex

Displaying Gender: Transgender People's Strategies in Everyday Life

“…Taking into consideration the continued strength of gender binaries in contemporary Western societies, transgender people's use of gender markers, and their awareness of the consequences of gender accountabilities, I consider four interrelated strategies for displaying gender in relation to gender subjectivities that emerged from data analysis, which show both the agency and the conditionings of displaying gender. These were “blending in,” “masking,” “naturalizing,” and “subverting.” These strategies are closely associated with conditioned “choices” of being or not being perceived as transgender people in the eyes of others and thus also associated with different politicized transgender narratives (Mathers ; McQueen ).…”

“…These were "blending in," "masking," "naturalizing," and "subverting." These strategies are closely associated with conditioned "choices" of being or not being perceived as transgender people in the eyes of others and thus also associated with different politicized transgender narratives (Mathers 2017;McQueen 2016).…”

“…Johnson (), McQueen () and Sanger () offer insightful, critical discussions on the incorporation, production, and regulation of transgender subjectivities.…”

Trans youth in Portugal: gendered embodiments

“…Trans people's experiences of breaking with this normative assumption have thus been influenced by the medical establishment, including controlled access to genderaffirming medical procedures (Davis, Dewey and Murphy 2016). Medical practitioners have been accused of employing a gatekeeping role, limiting the attribution of a Gender Dysphoria diagnosis to trans people who conform to the ideal of the 'true transsexual' (Dewey and Gesbeck 2017;McQueen 2016). This ideal is based on the notion that one's assigned gender at birth, one's gender identity and biological sex characteristics should be aligned.…”

“…Because of this, while some trans people may wish to display their gendered selves within the framework of gender binaries (Marques 2019), others may feel pressured to conform to dominant gender normativitiesthat is, to align their bodies in accordance with the ideal of the female-bodied woman and male-bodied man (Davis, Dewey and Murphy 2016). The medical narrative appears to draw upon what Bettcher (2014) calls the 'wrong body model', within which trans people are said to be born in the wrong body and thus need to change it in order to realise their 'true' selves (McQueen 2016). The privileging of the medical model can be illustrated by what Johnson (2016) calls 'transnormativity' in the form of: a hegemonic ideology that structures transgender experience, identification and narratives into a hierarchy of legitimacy that is dependent upon a binary model and its accompanying standards, regardless of individual transgender people's interest in or intention to undertake medical transition.…”