Project Queer

Gender Expression Is Not Gender Identity

artoftransliness:

From the Article:

One of the chief confusions about transsexuality and the decision we make to transition is how, from an outside perspective, with limited or superficial understanding, it can seem that the reason we transition is because we’ve determined ourselves to be female or male on the basis of our personalities fitting better into a female or male identity than into the gender that we’d been assigned, and that therefore we “ought” to be the sex that matches our personality.

That is not how it works, how we came to realize our gender identity, or why we transition.

From this basic misunderstanding a whole host of common confusions and misconceptions arise. This is what motivates people to say that we ought to simply learn to accept ourselves instead, or that if we lived in some kind of post-gender utopia without rigid binaries there would cease to be any need for transition, or that trans people are buying into or enforcing gender binaries and stereotypes, or that trans women are “appropriating” female stereotypes and trans men are simply experiencing “internalized misogyny”, or that we ought to learn to simply be happy with being feminine men or masculine women.

(via genderwarriors)