Shape-Shifting: Becoming Other Gendered

I admit I can't comprehend why people make such a fuss over others' decisions to alter their sex or gender. Cis people pay big money for plastic and other image-altering surgeries every day, in order to counteract the normal course of what people call "nature." They rely on insurance companies to pay for hormone therapy when their natural levels wane: estrogen and testosterone replacement have become big money these days. Another craze sweeping the country, and the world, is the injection of a peptide, or hormone, to alter the fact and effects of obesity, often because it's viewed as unhealthy, but for self-image reasons as well. That is, people shape-shift routinely, on an unimaginable scale, the corporeal state to which "nature" or human habit has consigned them. So why the big deal?

Could it be the the entire patriarchal system that has undergirded most western cultures since the dawn of christianity is predicated on a false notion of sex and gender as fixed? Or a wayward notion that god and nature are one? Tell that to pre-christian cultures like the Greeks and Romans, who saw nature as highly mutable, and quirky, allegorized in a huge cast of animist divines, changeable to the core and not at all stable. Nature itself, and bodies in particular, were fluid to them. The examples are way too numerous to cite here, but anyone interested might take a look at The Odyssey alone (c. 750 BCE). Its hero is the original shape-shifter, practically a drag queen serving now he-man, now beggar realness, just two points on a spectrum of identities. 

What's more, Ovid's Metamorphoses (c. 8 CE) presents over 250 stories the point of which is to say that all bodies are in flux. For example the female Caenis is turned by Neptune into the beefcake, Caeneus, for a host of complicated reasons. And Iphis is born a girl but lives as a boy. When s/he becomes an adult, about to marry a woman, they get their wish and are transformed into a man. Moreover the male prophet, Tireseus, is transformed into a woman for seven years; his experience working "both sides" of some fantasmatic binarism makes him a seer with great powers, as has been the case historically, all along, for example with two-spirit individuals in several Native-American tribes. 

It's clear that the ancients thought a lot about gender and sex fluidity; in fact to them it was a normal part of life, and it seems that most of that pragmatism ended in the christian era. Michel Foucault points out in his book about Herculine Barbin the devastating effects that kind of ignorance has had for individuals whose bodies and lifestyles are nonconforming, in their case in the nineteenth century. Herculine was born intersex. They were assigned a male identity by the medico-legal establishment but were raised as a girl. In so many ways they didn't fit in any sex or gender regime––and deeply felt the disharmony brought to bear by the powers that be. They committed suicide ultimately because of the clash between a gender ideal and their lived experience. In fact empirically speaking Herculine was in no way unusual. We know now that one or two of every hundred births are and have been intersex, and given that in the US alone there are around 3.6 million births annually, that means the number of intersex births today is somewhere between 36,000 and 72,000 each year. 

So why the fiction that nature essentially only turns out cis girls and boys? Why the fantasy? Who does it serve, and why? If it's true that "nature" might waffle about consigning sex to bodies, why wouldn't it also work similarly at the emotional and identifactory level––that was Ovid's point with his trans characters. One of the wonders of modern science––ask any of the 1.8 million Americans annually, male and female both, who go in for plastic surgery––is that the kinds of alterations that can be effected these days, surgically and hormonally, are endless. In fact the sky's the limit, though even minor changes like donning a hairpiece can achieve the same end. They're all versions of gender-affirming care

I now know a thing or two about the subject personally, beyond the effects of simple aging. As part of my treatment for cancer I'm on hormone therapy to eliminate testosterone in my system, which acts like firewater on a blaze where cancer is concerned; the goal is to flatten the level to near zero. The immediate effect is menopausal symptoms, including hot flashes, joint pain, mood swings, and sleep disturbances, but my body is metamorphosing in other ways too. I'm gaining weight for one, despite the fact that neither my diet not exercise regimen has changed. My skin is softer, doughier, at least below the neck, where coincidentally my body hair has fallen out. I'm not quite an Odalisque yet, but I feel I'm moving in that direction. 

I still read as male, and I will never know what it means to be a woman, including what women go through physically, socially or culturally, except for what I've learned from them––so I make no facile claims in that regard. But I can say that much of what I'm experiencing in my testosteroneless life, for now at least, tracks with the experiences of women I know. I feel them. The point is that for me and the 1.5 million men treated for prostate cancer alone each year, hormone treatments change everything. They might also be labeled a kind of gender-affirming care. 

Why is all this so difficult for opponents on the right––and the left––to wrap their heads around? Nature itself fidgets with hormone levels and body alterations, as every person who makes it to age seventy can attest. In the most bizarre twist I've seen in the US, maybe ever, the newly branded secretary of war, who's made a point of drumming trans people out of the military, has mandated that US service members, men and women both, over thirty, must soon have their T-levels monitored––and "corrected." The nagging moral question this raises is why there's no recognition in the administration of the rank hypocrisy of the policy. 

Every human is a shape-shifter over time, either by election or by passively letting nature do its thing. I understand that more and more each day since my diagnosis, how easy it is to flatten gender and sex binarisms, and the degree to which that happens everywhere always. Many aging men develop breasts, and some women develop whiskers, to name two minor, natural alterations. Efforts to alter them or any naturally-occurring changes are also examples of gender-affirming care, however one chooses to define those terms. 

So, again, why the fuss? Given the ubiquity of altering bodies, why should anyone give a damn about the choices one makes regarding their own body? It's so undemocratic for one––what about the right to the pursuit of happiness? Worst of all it makes liars out of people who claim the government has no business intruding in their lives, then commandeer the levers of government to force others to conform to their way.