Honestly it's roughly analogous to asking if men who have sex with men are "really gay" or had "other reasons" (men in all-male settings like prison or the army in the old days etc) The correct answer is really "who cares" Does anybody do anything without "other reasons"
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(Ironically Jesse Singal was embarrassingly interested in that whole fad of talking about "down-low culture" and Black men who have sex with each other but "aren't gay" before he made trans children his new "beat")
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Like look I've said I don't really think George Eliot was trans because she never "presented as a man" in normal day to day life, she used she/her pronouns and wore dresses and her husband and her family and everyone called her "Mary Ann" But ultimately so what
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There are people in our modern world who are "only trans on the Internet" about whom you could say the same thing Only difference is today we have a word and a concept "trans" allowing them to confirm it with the words "I'm trans but only on the Internet"
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What we do know is that the George Eliot "persona" mattered to her, on some emotional level, it was something she was personally defensive of after it no longer served any mercenary practical purpose She wouldn't let them change the name on her books long after she was outed
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There's obviously SOMETHING there, in the ballpark of what we'd call "being trans" You can tell because of the degree to which TERFs have to make shit up to deny it was there ("There were no lady novelists back then and if Eliot had been outed she'd have gone to prison")
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Applies historically and currently!
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Oh, yeah, i'm not trying to draw a distinction between "real trans person" and "not-real trans person"; i'm trying to say that the whole IDEA of "transness" is dependent on a particular, historically/socially-contingent conception of How Gender Works.
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Were (a whole lot of) Greek men gay? Was James Barry trans? Well, what's the result of dividing 0 by cucumber? The question isn't meaningful.
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Guessing someone else’s identity feels like trying to describe the color orange — there is no reason to do it and you’d probably be wrong in some way.
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