Evan Urquhart

Now, a small digression- gender dysphoria isn't necessary to transition, or to be trans, or be valid. If gender dysphoria did not exist at all, I'd be all for people changing genders whenever and however much they wanted as a matter of freedom, autonomy.

For most trans people, now and historically, a framework of choice doesn't quite fit. Choice doesn't quite fit the intensity of desire to change genders, the pain and failure of trying to force oneself to conform, the lengths people go to to transition, the risks they take.

Now, saying it's not a choice to be trans doesn't prove it's not a social phenomenon. It's not a choice to have been raised Catholic like my parents, or Unitarian Universalist like myself, but each has had profound and indelible effects.

But, we do know that people living as a gender other than their assigned sex is not a product of our specific culture. Something like it exists, in recognizable but culturally different forms, just about anywhere you look historically and today.

An aside: You might have noticed that I'm not talking about the binary or separating binary trans people out much. One area where my thinking has changed is that I've come to see the binary/NB division as much less salient than I'd thought.

Cultural and historical evidence suggests that people living as the opposite binary sex happens widely, that having some people outside of the binary happens widely, and I doubt it's possible to draw very strict lines around those two groups.

Anyway- the point about finding something like trans people in other cultures and in historical cultures, is that this is not what we expect to see in a primarily social phenomenon.

We also wouldn't necessarily expect medical transition to work as well as it does in a primarily social phenomenon, and we wouldn't expect people who transitioned to mostly stay transitioned and not want to change back.