Before I explain what it means to be transgender, I need to offer a working definition of gender itself.  The temptation to cut-and-paste from a dictionary  enormous, but I assume that you have not read this far to hear what Merriam, Webster et al¹ have to say on the subject.  I remind my esteemed audience that I claim no expertise beyond being the world’s foremost authority on my own story.  For this chapter, I invite you to join me in the ER, where you find me clad in charcoal gray² scrubs, explaining some tidbit of healthcare to a adult, whose precocious three-year old abruptly interjects:

“Are you a boy or a girl?”

Though this happens several times a year, it still manages to catch me nearly as off guard as the mortified parent, who generally undergoes an interesting color change at this point and issues a shushing that would frighten a cobra.³  Before I can mentally retrieve whatever brilliant answer I thought I had figured out last time, the poor mom or dad almost always beats me to the punch, usually informing my little inquisitor that I am a boy.  Here the curtain falls on our melodrama–within seconds the child has moved on, a shining beacon of contentment in a room befogged by an awkward question.  My response to her inquiry will have to wait.  For now, I would like to spend a few moments considering why the parent was sure, and why the child was not.

The vast majority of adults see sex and gender as synonymous, if anything assuming that gender simply a more polite and/or scientific term.  They have simply never had any personal or social experience to cause them to question whether this is always the case.  Simple answers are time savers, and most people hang on to them until there is a compelling reason to think otherwise.  The Moon goes around the Earth in a circle.  Unless you are tasked with landing a rocket on it, the answer is close enough.  Life is full of uncertainties that clamor for our attention.  At least what makes a man a man is settled business, right?

The child, in contrast, is in a constant state of exploration.  She just gained the capacity of speech within the last couple of years.  Already she is processing information furiously, seeing patterns and developing rules of thumb.  Not all of her guesses are right of course, and big people are constantly setting her straight.  She is used to it, and she values them for it.

How might my young inquisitor define gender?  She almost certainly wouldn’t use the word at all, but if she did, her definition would read almost exactly like her question, something along the lines of, “it’s if you are a boy or a girl.”  Until I walked into the room, she thought she was really good at placing people on one side or the other of that division.  Now, for the first time that she can recall, she meets someone for whom her rules of thumb do not work.  The primary difference between the parent and the child is that one has solidified their⁴ rules and the other is still testing them.

My forthcoming explanations of transgender identity depend on the idea that sex and gender are not interchangeable terms.  Whether or not you accept this is up to you.  When I refer to sex, I mean one’s biological form, in terms of  genitalia, genetics or both.  When I refer to gender, I mean one’s sense of self as male, female (or something else), regardless of what it is precisely that causes this sense to arise.  

I admit from the outset that I don’t know what that is, although that won’t prevent me from trying on the old Theorizing Hat next post when I pick up with what it means to be transgender.

_¹ Irony

_{² Uff da}

_{³ Or not.  Cobras are sensitive to ground vibrations, but they do not hear ambient noise.}

_{⁴ Apparent grammatical error intentional.  More on pronouns later.}