Gendered Becoming contra Gender Identity

I’ve always had an issue with the concept of a “gender identity,” to the point that I blocked my own transition for a number of years because I could not for the life of me understand what it would mean for a male-assigned-at-birth person to “identify” as a woman. I never really gained much clarity on this even years into my medical transition. My transition had very little, if anything, to do with how I “identified” and so much more to do with following my heart and becoming more of what I felt gave me a sense of fulfillment, peace and joy. I didn’t even start going by she/her pronouns until I got to the point that people would just assume I was.

Bypassing any notion of a singular gender identity, I tend to think in terms of bi-dimensional gendered becoming. There is at a base or foundational level what can be called “gendered aspiration” or “aspirational gender.” It’s based on the intention to become this or that, to realize this or that for one’s own (and others’) benefit. But aspiration often falls short of what we can call “gendered identification.” This resembles the idea of “gender identity”, but puts more emphasis on the others’ perceptions, so gendered identification is about how people perceive and identify you, not how you identify yourself. In this schema, “gender identity” comes after gendered identification, meaning that you identify as a certain gender because people identify you as that, not the other way around.

Gendered identification is not absolute or permanent. It is actually highly contingent on the biopsychosocial conditions that give meaning to gender as a socially constructed concept capable of producing effects on materially embedded reality. It is also dependent on someone imputing you as this or that, which means that it is quite radically impermanent and context dependent. But that doesn’t mean it can’t exhibit a certain level of regularity which, when abstracted as a stand-alone continuum, can constitute the basis of a “gender identity.” In simpler terms, it makes sense to me now to “identify” as a woman because of the regularity with which people see me as such. But that doesn’t mean I “am” a woman in any absolute, essential sense. And this applies to cis people as much as it applies to trans people! Decades before the emergence of the “trans tipping point” Simone de Beauvoir pointed out how womanhood is a process of becoming, a process in which, in proper existentialist fashion, existence precedes essence and not the reverse.

So to summarize: in contrast to the static, typically essentialist and often mystical, notion of a singular and inherently existing “gender identity,” we can think of gendered becoming as being constituted by two interdependent dimensions: a foundational level of “gendered aspiration” that marks the initiation of a trans person’s process of transition to deal with their dysphoria (defined minimally as the viscerally felt dissonance or friction between what one IS at the present and what one could or OUGHT to be) and the consummated level of “gendered identification” signifying the self-realization of that aspiration, even if it only comes in flickers and fragments.

Love for oneself (and at its deepest, love for others) is what powers the path from the initial foundational aspiration to consummated self-realization. Love is the beginning and end of being trans. I transitioned not because of my “gender identity” (whatever the hell that is supposed to be) but because my love for myself and others compel me to become that version of myself that can better meet the needs of others — including myself! — to the best of my ability.

Just to clarify, I am not suggesting we dismiss with the language of “gender identity” outright. It has its uses. It is a simple notion and it is effective in its simplicity, but it is also dangerous for that very reason. I am just offering a different framework, born out of my own lived experience as a working class immigrant transsexual woman of color, that might offer more clarity, more precision, and more effectiveness, than the simplistic notion of “gender identity”. It is a framework that recognizes gender as not just private but also deeply public; not just innate but also deeply relational; not just a timeless aspect of the human condition but deeply historically conditioned; not just an aspect of my own, individual being but an aspect of my process of becoming in communion with others.