Where the agency comes in is in the ability to change what your body means, to yourself and to others. It’s something that we don’t have agency over. To be ‘transgender’ is to feel the need to move across the boundaries placed on the un-chosen starting place from which we are thrown into the world.

We all get assigned to a social category-a gender-based on the appearance of our body, backed up by medical science, underpinned by cultural beliefs about gender and about what our bodies mean. In our culture, that ‘seeing’ is linked to medical authority, with the ultrasound technician or gynaecologist or obstetrician or nurse saying at birth: ‘it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl.’ That initial pronouncement launches a whole cascade of events having to do with our cultural beliefs about the relationship between our physical bodies and how our bodies become socially categorised, what social categories are available to be assigned to or identify with, about what is within the purview of science and what is not. We now live in a society that, when we’re born-or even before we’re born-subjects our bodies to the ‘medical gaze.’ Of course, noticing genital difference at birth is something common to human cultures, but it varies from culture to culture and over time what that observed difference means. The way that I think about the word, and I say this both as a transgender person and as somebody who studies this for my work, is to say that ‘transgender’ involves a movement across the socially imposed boundaries of your assigned sex at birth.

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

Snorton black on both sides