dismantling the separation of these queer components
09 June 2025 - 6,935 words
Throughout the past few years, I have been struggling to reconcile my existence as a queer, transgender individual with the broader ideology of our society. I struggle against the dominant ontology1 of gender and sex―paradoxically positioned as a viscerally liberating framework, through which queer existence may be interpreted justly and accurately, while in the same breath denying the very basics of how we understand our self and our position in the society in which we find our self. The mainstream, dominant, and even “progressive” conception of our very being reduces us to merely an insightful piece of evidence suggesting we should simply nudge our liberal frameworks in a different direction, rather than a radically altered way of being mandating a revolutionary reconstruction of these concepts. It is hard, at times, to even begin to understand and reconcile my understanding of my self and my loved ones with these dominating frameworks of interpretation.
My guiding light, through this struggle, has been the body. The body is the very core of my experience. In dealing with this hermeneutical injustice,2 the body has offered me safety and continuity, heralding me through my transition even as I struggle against the only frameworks I am offered to interpret my existence.
So today, in order to alleviate this injustice not just for my self but for my community, I will chart this meaning. I will deeply and thoroughly interrogate these elements that make up our queer existence, the frameworks that have interpreted and underpinned them throughout history, the presumptions that act as the guardrails of interpretation, the narratives that construct our being in a way that denies our complex position, and the conclusions that position themselves as the final authority.
It is clear to me that if we are ever to understand our own experience, it is not just the elements but the factors that construct, interpret, and produce them that must be understood, deconstructed, and reconstructed in our own image.
Most allies and queer people have heard of the sex/gender division―that while a person may be of a certain sex, it does not necessarily follow that they are of a certain gender. In essence, this conception of sex/gender argues these do not necessarily align or bundle. Instead, it argues, they act as two wholly discrete and independent categories. It maintains sex as a specific, biological set of categories of the male/female/intersex trinary, but constructs gender to mold all those who do not cleanly conform to these rigid categories into a different set of essential categories for the interpretation of the outsider.
In its contemporary conception, this acts as the foundation on which trans identity rests. It is critical in various fields that find its neat dividing line to be intimately alluring and seductive. And certainly, it is a very neat little framework.
Yet each time I notice the sex/gender division in my life, it becomes ever more clear it was never made for us. It was never made for queerness. It was made by and for cishet folks. It is specifically such a clean idea that separates the complex from the simplistic, that it appears, on first glance, to be perfect. Dare I say, even liberating. But the deeper we inspect it, the more disturbing the very idea becomes. For this neat dichotomy of sex and gender does not actually account for the complex reality we know. Rather, it serves to mask it, and allow those who adopt it to end the conversation there.
Recently, a professor of mine shared a talk she gave at a conference a few years back on bioarchaeology (the excavation and study of human biological remains). In it, she makes a very important disclaimer: while bioarchaeologists can sometimes infer sex from bones,3 this is not the same thing as gender―these are separate categories. She, of course, proceeded to gender each and every set of bones discussed.
What is particularly interesting here is not that a cis archaeologist chose to gender their skeletons. Nor is it particularly surprising to me that a liberal archaeologist did so while citing the sex/gender division as a protective oath in the manner of a land acknowledgement. What is most interesting to me is that this reveals who the sex/gender division is really for: the academic.
Just a single layer underneath this conception of sex/gender lies a deeper idea that while gender is a fluid, cultural, subjective element, sex isn’t like that. Sex is scientific. Sex is observable, predictable, determined. Sex is objective. While this notion casts itself as a progressive impulse of noting the variation and cultural definition of gender, what it is actually doing is protecting the presumed objectivity of sex.
Her words positioned our particular (cisheteronormative) understanding of sex as not just accurate but in fact universal. That in every moment of time, sex acts as a simplistic, scientific feature. It reveals the colonial desire to not just know, but to enforce your particular understanding on each set of bones that come under your microscope reproduces not just queerphobia, but the fundamental arrangement of power within a settler-colonial society. We argue sex is of the bones. But who might disagree? We may think that, from just a few bones, we can dictate and govern an individual’s body, and that this is just science. Would the bones disagree?
By marginalizing sex to the objective, the scientific, we alienate it from our self. Because if all there is to the body is the matter of bones, tissues, and chromosomes, then it is outside our self. It frees archaeologists to prescribe their beliefs to the bones they study, but it binds us all to a particular body prescribed to us by a universalizing hegemonic order. It restricts all of us from speaking as the body our self, and transfers that power to the archaeologist, the doctor, the king.
So instead, we conquer. We speak for the bones, speak through the bones, interpret what they are and what they say through the narratives of our society. This is the danger of constructing the body as little more than a piece of meat for our objective study. For if we may speak through the skeletons as if we know what they really are, then who else may we be allowed to speak through? And what narratives may be essentialized and mandated despite the wishes, the experiences, the knowledge of the queer society, always and forever living within our midst?
I am the bones that are being spoken for and through. What narratives are being told through the appropriation of my very existence? And, when I, the bones, find the power to speak to you, what narratives may I begin to tell?
If gender is so untethered from the body, then why must we change it? For years, I struggled with this question. I struggled to reconcile my endless desire for the modification of the body with the unyielding demands of what I was told of feminist philosophy. You see, if I am separated into the body and the mind, the former holding sex and the latter holding gender, then why must I exert the mind over the body?
My mom recently told me that in college, she wrote a paper on this subject. In it, she argued that trans people should not make such intensive modifications to their body. That trans people could socially transition, sure, but not quite take hormones, absolutely not get surgery. Because is that not just plastic surgery, the desire of which is derived from body issues implanted in us all by patriarchy and transphobia? Does the very pursuit of those stereotypical conceptions of gender not justify and reproduce gender as an ontological authority?
God, there is such an allure to the argument. Its seductive logic intoxicates me, begs me to embrace it, to deny my desires, to fulfill its demands. And yet, its consequences seem undesirable, toxic. Why must I forgo the modification of the body? Is my desire for modification purely derived from body issues? Does the embrace of femininity reassert gender as an oppressive apparatus of patriarchy and cisheteronormativity?
There is a certain narrative all trans people know, especially those who medically transition. (I will be telling it from my perspective, as a transfem.) I was born a woman. I have known my whole life. When I was young, I used to wish to wake up as a girl. Sometimes, I would dream it. When I look into the mirror, I expect to see a woman, and feel misery when I see something else. I used to dress up in my mother’s or my sister’s clothes when I was home alone. I have tried to deny it and hide it my whole life, but I cannot any longer.
Do I believe most of this? Of course not. But we do not tell it because we believe it. Really, it is not even us speaking. Rather, our society speaks through us, just as it speaks through the bones, and this narrative is what is produced. Our society speaks through us to justify and reproduce its own narratives, its own ideology. And we allow our society to speak through us, because we know its what they want to hear. Our doctors. Our therapists. Our parents. Our employers. Our teachers. Sometimes even our friends.
Even if it is not us who speak the words, it is the story through which they recognize our existence. And if we do not submit our self to the narrative, our desires, our needs, our medicine, and most of all, our agency will be delayed and denied.
But what does this narrative really tell? Where does it really come from? At its core, the narrative tells a story of two components of being: sex and gender. When we tell it, we are telling them that our gender is out of phase with our sex. We simultaneously submit to the authority of a natural, essential sex that conforms to a specific gender. We suggest that when we look into the mirror and suffer, our suffering comes from a sex that aligns itself with the wrong gender. We submit our self to a naturalizing conception of the body.
What really is a natural woman or a natural man? Do we transition out of the desire to be one? Queer people are often cast merely as trying to find our true self. We do not choose to be gay, we just are attracted to people of the same sex. We do not choose to be transgender, we just were born in the wrong body. We come out and say, “I am supposed to be a natural woman!” And we do this to satisfy a very specific requirement set by a very particular framework. We must appeal to this framework, and in doing so, we justify our desires for the modification of the body with a narrative of pain and dislocation. We say “imagine if you were born in the body of the opposite sex!” as if there is any such thing as an opposing sex, as if it is simply that our body is fundamentally wrong and must be corrected, as if the extent of our experience is an improper separation between sex and gender.
Considering the paper my mother once wrote, I realize it hinges on the false conception of transition as being premised on the idea that the body is wrong and must be corrected. That we hate our self so desperately we choose morph our body to fit the culturally approved conception of the body. And that we desire to be feminine because we believe it is what a woman must be. But is this true? Do we transition only out of pain, dislocation, self-hate, and social pressure? To some extent, we do. But to a greater extent, for many of us, we transition out of joy. Out of the euphoria one finds within their transition. The happiness and ecstasy one feels when they look into their mirror and see their “Dream Girl.” And at the end of the day, it is the modifications we make that free us from our self-hate, not because we now have a body that patriarchy and transphobia find agreeable, but because we have found a kind of liberating agency over our self that we never could imagine before. Because it is so freeing, so liberating, and so euphoric to have that kind of agency over your own body, and to experiment with your body however you please. This is why we transition.
It was never simply that my sex was out of line with my gender. I do not modify my self merely to rectify an incorrect sex. And this very narrative has a particular origin―what is that origin? This narrative is constructed in a particular way―what is that way? And on the dissolution of this narrative, what presumptions might incidentally be destroyed? These are the questions we must consider before moving forward.
When I first began transitioning, my goal was simple: to become a woman. Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal quote, “One is not born a woman: one becomes one” stuck in my mind and guided my path (The Second Sex). And her argument against the conception of a “natural woman” is one to which a lot of trans people can relate to, I think. Many of us, like me, likely have it coursing through our brain, justifying our actions, comforting us in the darkest of times. And yet at the same time, many of us feel this kind of impulse to define our selfs as originating in the soup of hormones and chemicals in our brains, or as a strange mutation transpiring in our very genome. We feel the need to proclaim our selfs to be born as a woman. And I believe many, like myself, feel conflicted by this prospect that we are simultaneously “natural woman” and also that nobody is “born a woman.” We feel entranced by the notion of womanhood as a kind of becoming, a doing, a living, yet feel the pressure to subscribe to a biologically-originating gender.
We don’t really know what else to hold on to. We know we must do as we feel we need to, whether due to dysphoria or euphoria, and without this framework of birthright, we do not know how else to justify it. The binding narratives through which we are forced to articulate our selfs overwhelm our sense of self. We are diagnosed with gender dysphoria and are told everything we do as trans people is to cure it. We ourselves sometimes say, “Like it or not, gender dysphoria exists, and transition is the only proven treatment,” framing our very being as little more than a medical and social intervention. And in doing so, we devalue the very means through which we exist as trans people. We devalue the very process of transition.
Yet is this conception of transition itself as a process of such worthy acclaim? Is our existence only demarcated by a kind of exceptional, temporary, and painful excursion from normal life, with which there is a distinctive pre- and post-, that itself has little value outside of the conclusion which it meets? Must one ever find the point at which they are no longer becoming a woman, but have become one?
Despite what you may believe, the conception of creating a natural woman or man is not unique to trans individuals. It was actually sexologists who first mainstreamed the conception of constructing a new gender, separate from one’s sex. You see, with the closing of the nineteenth century, the field of Biology had a bit of a revolution. The discovery of evolution heralded in a new era of research and discovery, and this brought with it some startling discoveries.
Alexander Avila, in his video essay How Conservatives Invented Gender Ideology, charts the history of what is today labeled by the far-right as “Gender Ideology.” In it, he discusses the point at which “sex” as a monolithic essence diverged into the sex/gender division. Biologists actually initially expected to validate their belief in an essential sex, and
find some kind of final essence, some fundamental distinguishing characters that would finally explain all of the assumed differences between men and women. The masculine and feminine. The metaphor to end all metaphors. The logic of difference itself. But instead, they found something else. (43:21–43:38)
Rather than confirming their belief in an essential and total difference between the male and the female, they actually discovered that nature is rather queer:4
Biologists discovered that sex wasn’t a simple binary division symbolically contained in a genital. Sex was a complex system of hormones and internal bodily communication all intertwined with other functional systems. Biologists found that many species were naturally “intersexual,” or at least that most lifeforms carried diverse sexual potentials. And they eventually came to find that humans weren’t so different. (43:49–44:16)
The issue is, all of society was structured on the premise that “males” and “females” are two fundamentally different creatures―different bodies, different organs, different brains, different desires, different functions―so if “maleness” and “femaleness” might not even really exist as concrete categories, what does this say about society?
That is not to say that “woman” and “man” as social constructs do not or should not exist. For me, the very fact that many trans people construct their bodies and selfs in line with these constructions is enough proof to justify their existence. I do not seek to prescribe any origin of meaning. But we must acknowledge that there is no concrete “matter” to these concepts. Historically, we have believed that there is some kind of intelligible origin of “women” and “men,” and that we would find it by dissecting our brains, our bodies, our genome, our hormones. The reality is, however, that differentiation does not occur on such rigid, binary, essential lines. The reality is that humans, just as all of nature, are messy. That our sex may not be cleanly cleaved into male/female.
And yet we still view the differentiation of nature as not merely an element of fluid variability, but of essentializing naturalization. That we diverge not into a soup, but into rigid categories with clear, definable, and observable boundaries. And it is a struggle, for many of us, to reconcile our existence with these processes of categorization.
For sexologists, solving the crisis was simple. Just close your eyes. Feel the world as one of definable boundaries. Feel the body that does not conform. Pick a category. Pick up your scalpel and your suture. Fix the body.
You see, maybe sex really is fluid. But we know better than nature. We are civilized. We know the difference between man and woman. So those whose bodies do not, we will ensure they do. If sex is so wild, then let us manufacture gender as a dimension of civilization.
So at its core, the resultant differentiation between sex and gender freed gender from sex. And that meant we may freely modify the body to enforce gender upon it. So when intersex children are born, we do just that. We mutilate them without their knowledge or permission. We tell them how they must dress, how they must act, the kind of person they must marry. We tell them, if they do this, society will love them. Their heterosexual spouse will love them. And in fact, we do this to each and every baby born. We write on their birth certificate what gender they must perform. We tell them it is essential to their very being.
And when I, a trans person, suggest that I was actually born a woman, we modify the birth certificate to say that all along, I was truly a natural woman. That my very essence is somehow of woman. And just as intersex babies are shuffled through hospital rooms as an essential and natural gender is imposed onto them by scalpel and suture, so too am I shuffled through medical rooms as a doctor, a therapist, an endocrinologist, and whomever else evaluate my gender essence. So that they can say, “I’m sorry to tell you, but you have gender dysphoria.” So that I can then say, “Why did I have to be born wrong?” So that my doctor can say, “Don’t worry. Before you know it, you’ll be as natural as any other woman.”
As long as we follow the rules, as long as we proclaim our self to be a woman by birthright, as long as we proclaim transition to be a dreadful ordeal that exists merely to affirm our essence of gender, as long as we never tell our doctor there may be more to the body than either womanhood or manhood, as long as we never reject the authority of a legal document proclaiming our naturalness, as long as we shut up until we pass so well nobody would even think we transitioned so much as enjoyed it, only then might we be allowed the right to speak, to fight, to demand. And we may never be allowed to render our body ours by reconstructing it in an image that denies the essence of civilized gender.
But at the end of the day, we must hate the fact that we are transgender. We must dread the acknowledgement of our transition. We must, at some point, bring it to its end. Because at some point, our sex has been brought into alignment with our gender, and the naturalness of our gender has been proven undeniable.
Those of us who are free do not obey. We render the body ours, and do not simply fade away into the background, pretending we never transitioned. And for this, we are incoherent to the outside world.
Must I submit myself to others’ coherence? Must there come a day when my transition is over and my existence is once again coherent?
The very proclamation of transition implies its own end, and denies its own meaning. It demands a kind of transversal journey from one island of coherence to another. It constructs itself incoherent because it is a process of morphing one coherent category into another, the male into the female, the female into the male. But if these very islands do not even exist, why must I give my self up in the Sisyphean task of conforming?
Are any of us truly coherent? Does the varability of our bodies produce an inherent incoherence? Truly, from this lens, the need for gender is clear:
They assumed that nature would give them that coherence, and when it didn’t, they created that coherence at the expense of the lives they labeled incoherent. (Avila 57:28–57:37)
For if sex is incoherent, then we must produce coherence through a natural gender. Yet instead, I choose to embrace the incoherence. To embrace the divergent variability of our bodies, to recognize the means of transition as the lesson, and the ends of it a red herring. I will make myself incoherent, and if you see me as coherent, I will tell you how you are wrong. I will take a radical agency over my own being and render the means and the ends of my transition one. And, I believe, the body will serve as the playground in which these means will transpire.
On my first read through of Gender Trouble, I interpreted gender to be the focus of discussion, and the theory of performativity to be deeply focused on it. I really struggled with the book, not just intellectually, but personally. I felt so conflicted. Because if gender is nothing more than a performance, a “doing” that only creates the illusion of a natural gender, then what is the justification for altering our sex to align with our gender? If there is no natural gender, then why not just be the sex we are assigned at birth?
After about a year of contemplation and further exploration, I have realized that my internalization of the sex/gender division greatly misled my reading of Butler. The theory of gender performativity is obviously discussing something fluid, cultural, constructed, and according to the sex/gender division, must therefore be speaking exclusively of gender―after all, sex isn’t cultural, is it?
But the body is not simply a vessel in which the performance of gender transpires. Rather, the body is the performance. The body is not merely a surface onto which gender is inscribed. Rather, the body is the substance of the performance.
How do we define the body? Is it the raw muscle and bones, the color and finish of the skin, the structure of the chest and limbs, the extent of protrusion of the hips? Is it the chromosomes, the genes, the blood? Is it the ribcage, the femur, the pelvis? And most of all, where does the body end and the self begin?
If you’re at all into style, you are probably well aware that the clothes one adorns modifies the body. It morphs and modifies the silhouette, alters the way you are viewed and gendered. From one set of clothes to another, others may see you in a radically altered light. An observer could read you as male, female, or simply be overwhelmed by confusion.
The eyeliner changes the shape of my face. The blush alters the texture of my expression. The lip tint enlarges or shrinks my lips. By taking estrogen, the very governing chemistry of my body morphs to conform to my vision, my self. At will, I can morph and mold the substance of my being―not merely as a canvas, but as my self.
Must there be a doer behind the deed? I must admit, I am embarrassed to write this, but shortly before I realized I was transgender, I tried to adopt some masculine characteristics. I bought masculine-smelling deodorant for literally the first time in my life, tried to find a more masculine style beyond the bland sweatpants-and-t-shirt style I could bear wearing, and thought I would be happier if I just was a bit better at being a dude. I leaned into the performance in the way society told me I must, but it failed make me any happier. But must this mean I was simply “naturally” a woman this whole time, lost without knowledge of my “true self,” my governing essence?
I have realized the performance is not just a theatrical layer of natural gender, but rather the very essence of gender itself. In other words, if there is any truth to the self, any site from which to derive meaning, any essence that is “us,” it is the body. That each act I do, each piece of clothing I adorn, each movement I make, each word I speak, and each alteration I make to my body demonstrate a certain kind of self that I perform. And frankly, this framework has felt deeply liberating. Because it frees me from the burden of finding my “true self,” whatever that could mean, frees me from a teleological narrative that instructs and informs my histories and struggles, and allows me to sculpt my body and its adorned elements however I please with no fear of mistake. For if there is no end at which I must arrive, I may only ever live within the process.
I find this alternate narrative so appealing. And yet, I have still felt there is a piece missing. The narrative compels me to tell it, but I fear an incomplete story. This missing piece tugs at me in irritation, demanding I continue my exploration. Recently, however, one last piece of the puzzle has made itself known to me.
While this idea, in my opinion, properly rejects the conception of either gender or sex as a kind of “essence” in which our authentic pre-discursive5 self originates, it replaces it with another kind of essence―the essence of the body. Because if we portray the substance of being as little more than the matter of the body, we render the body the sole authority in our experience, in our being.
Considering the history of gender in the twentieth century, it is all too easy to return the full authority of our experiences over to the body. Seeing the desecration of our bodies and the denial of our agency to it, there is a startling temptation to render the body the authority, to suggest that there is nothing beyond its walls. However, I believe the scope of possibility widens upon moving beyond this mistake.
In order to account for this mistake and finally move forward, there is a particular framework through which anthropologists tend to view both the human body and our culture that may serve useful: Bioculture.
Biology and culture, just like sex and gender, have often been severed and defined in opposition to one another―where culture is socially defined, biology is objective, scientific. In fact, the very sex/gender division is often predicated on the idea of culture and biology as being cleanly separable. I was once taught that gender resides in culture, and sex resides in biology. But are these so separable? Do these two components of humanity exist in stark contrast between one another, with borders as clearly defined as that of two states?
In a class I took on indigenous North American cultures, my professor taught us the way to remember the Aleut was by the pointy “A”―the Aleut, a tribe in the arctic, learned to mold their finger nails into tools by sharpening them into pointy A’s. In essence, a cultural component is dependent on an element of human biology, and included modifying the body into a tool. While we think of technology as a purely cultural element such as sharpening rocks into axes or fastening bows from twine and wood, for the Aleut, technology includes molding the body into a tool. To us, this is transhumanist―for them, it is little more than a clever technique learned and honed from skill and experience. Their culture is dependent on their biology, their biology dependent on their culture.
A classic example I was taught revolves around food. Where we medicalize fat as a pathological problem that requires intervention, often of the medical nature, it in reality is a production of culture. Where we individualize our bodies and sever our selfs from our society, the reality is that our culture, our society, instructs what and how we eat. Our culture, and our position in society, molds our body in a particular way, and interprets it accordingly. At one point, in European societies, when food was scarce and work was not, it was seen as the height of privilege and wealth to be fat. As biology was molded according to the division of resources and labor, culture changed with it, as one. Today, as obesity rates skyrocket in the United States, we live in a society in which fatty, caloric dense foods are the most abundant, and excercise is a privilege, gym memberships and time to run in the mornings scarcer than food. Accordingly, our biology and culture change as one. Where the poor once were scrawny and the wealthy were plump, the poor now are fat and the wealthy are lean. And, simultaneously, where fat was once a symbol of wealth, it is now a symbol of individual failure and poverty.
Although we think of culture as a tool through which humanity adapts to its surroundings, and biology as the basis through which we are unified objectively, these two elements work in conjunction with our identies, our social and individual agency, and our environments to produce a cohesive subject. The individual body is as imagined as is the society in which we emerge.
If anything, “The Body” is not so much a material substance, but a symbolic product, an imagination and extension of so many elements of how we understand and have narratively produced our “self” that reside not simply in our mind, but in our society, and in our blood. It is a symbol that is imposed upon us, often violently. It is a symbol that we recreate and reproduce with each step we take. It is a symbol that is inferred and reinterpreted countless times until we no longer see the text, and instead merely the interpretation.
And when we choose to rewrite the words, or to tear up the symbol and start annew, or to demand that our interpretation, our reimagining of the symbol is real, we are told that our interpretation doesn’t change the text. We are told, in so many words, that we are insane.
While the body is seen as authoritative, concrete, permanent, the truth is that it is nothing more than a sock puppet with the hands of so many controlling it. It is the shadow on the wall when one manipulates sex and gender within the limitations and narratives of one’s society, of one’s world. It is an ecosystem of change, of relationships, of creatures that cannot merely be understood atomistically and only holistically. The body does not derive meaning from itself. It is the derivation of meaning produced by innumerable features, organisms, variations, changes, histories, interpretations, actions, choices, mutations, and so much more.
There is a certain form to the body. But to suggest one could hope to understand that form on its own without grappling with the biocultural ecosystems it resides in is to declare oneself God, harbinger of objective truth. When I gaze upon my hand, I do not just see my hand as it is. I see it as it is produced within my culture, modified and affected by my biology, my society’s biology. I could not hope to understand it and my relationship with it without grappling with how the color of my skin is understood, what the length of my fingers means to me, how my veins are produced and understood, what brought about my injury and how it is considered, the length and shape of my finger nails and why they are that way, how I have used it throughout my life. I do not simply see “my hand,” but rather a text that changes me and is changed by me through interpretation and relation.
Understanding the body to be not an authority but a product reveals the dimensions of it and frees us to explore each and every component of this illusion in the fullest sense. It is not that the body is irrelevant, or that there is no “Gender Identity” that matters, but that each and every one of these components influence one another in a tight-knit web of order, consequence, and influence, producing one final substantial product: The Body.
There is one last question that may leave us asking: what is it that compels us to construct our bodies in the way that we desire? What creates, envisions, and maintains this desire in our self? What leads to its drifting throughout our life? Why do we chase the performance?
To be honest, I don’t really have a good answer. And I, personally, am not interested in looking for one. I perform my body in the way I do because I do. I continuously reformulate my body as I do because I wish to, for fun, for exploration, simply to satisfy the interest, the need, itself. If you wish to pose, suggest, or advocate for an answer, be my guest. But I do want to say that I do not think we need one, necessarily. I would hope we do not necessarily need justification to reimagine our self in our own image.
That said, if you are looking to explore this question, I will leave a few breadcrumbs to follow―beware, they may lead you astray. First is the primacy of the self, in that we are strangely born with some kind of desire, path, or goal we must pursue. This path suggests some kind of determinism or pre-destination, a simplistic and neat (but not necessarily incorrect) answer that allows us to pursue our paths as we desire without fear.
The alternative path is perhaps more treacherous. If you align your self with the post-modernists, the very idea of an original essence may leave your stomach turning, and you may desire another path away. Perhaps there is no pre-discursive self, no pre-destined path, no determined desire. Instead, perhaps, just as The Body is an ecosystem, so too is your self―imbued with every experience you and your family has felt―every sight, every word, every feeling, every scent, every touch, each and every bit of your existence mixing into a soup unique enough so that none will ever share it with you. Perhaps it, like everything else, is in large part a product of some form of socialization, of cultural narratives and metaphors, of stories told to you at bedtime (or simply the lack thereof), of characters and plotlines and settings in which you found your self immersed at a young age. And if you were to ever look back at any of these components, none of it would add up, or perhaps all of it would, in a special kind of way that you could never predict, simply because at a certain point, the whole becomes too divergent to break into its parts. And most interestingly of all, perhaps that soup is never final, always changing, always mixing in new elements, always evolving, until you have lived a life full of exploration and euphoria, where your body has never remained static.
Regardless of your answer, if you have one at all, I hope you’ve learned something from this post. I hope you look at the world just a little bit differently. And most importantly, I hope you can never look at your self the same way again.
Please note, this blogpost has been rewritten. For the old version, see here.
Ontology is the study of being, or existence. Here, I specifically refer to a specific construction of our existence produced and informed by our culture and society. ↩
If you would like a full explanation of hermeneutical injustice, I would direct you to my prior blogpost, Liberating Biology. The short explanation is that it is a kind of extra injustice produced by not being able to articulate the injustice you face. ↩
Please note the heavy emphasis on sometimes. Despite what some may believe, it is actually usually not possible to infer someone’s sex from their bones, even with a complete skeleton, and this process is itself heavily subject to cultural bias. For example, a professor of mine shared a story that at a certain prominent museum, curators realized the large majority of skeletal remains had been labeled male, despite there obviously being no reason for “male” remains to be more common or recoverable than “female” remains. They realized that there was a heavy bias to label indeterminate sexed remains as male, simply because male is seen as the androgynous default. Nowadays, most remains are labeled as indeterminately sexed, with only a relatively small number being sexually differentiated enough for archaeologists to tell the difference. Additionally, it is never absolute, rather, a matter of likelihoods and probabilities. Take for example, a contemporary method of determining sex, where archaeologists study the tooth enamel. Bodies with a present Y chromosome have a certain element in their enamel, so depending on if it is present or not, archaeologists can define a probability of chromosomal sex. Of course, even then, there are plenty of humans whose chromosomal sex does not conform to their phenotype in the conventional western way we presume it to, even tens of thousands of years ago. Finally, do note that as explored in my previous blogpost, Liberating Biology, sex is not binary, and therefore there is not so much the ability for us to determine a person’s sex, so much as we are able to determine the sexual differentiation of various components of their body. ↩
Please see my prior blogpost, Liberating Biology, for a more detailed look at this. ↩
This is a bit of jargon used in a lot of post-modern writing, but I find it to serve a useful place for the sake of clarity. You can think of it rather literally, meaning “before discussion,” which is like another way of saying something that exists the way it exists “before” any kind of cultural or social factors or experiences are applied to it. Post-modernists tend to scoff at the idea of anything “pre-discursive,” because a key component of post-modernist philosophy is that ontology is exclusively cultural. You’ll see this layered through a lot of Butler’s work, for example―the very theory of gender performativity denies a “being” (especially pre-discursive) of gender, instead arguing that the “doing” of gender creates the illusion of a “being.” ↩