So Jay, just like me, tends to get kinda ranty whenever anyone denies ambiguity in his current bodily circumstance, or elides it as part of his claimed body:
Some people tell me that by having surgeries and taking hormones I’ve lost my ambiguity. Usually they make these statements as expressions of their own ambivalence around transsexuality.
Wonder what they’d think if they saw me in my birthday suit?
A commenter, EL, articulated something that’s bothered me for a long time:
What I’m saying is that the cisgendered folks who feel so self-righteous about “calling out” transfolks on their “buying into gender norms” and such are rarely themselves radically transgressing norms of gender expression, and have few qualms about it. It’s cool, in their minds, to play “male” or “female” straight-up, but if someone is going to have the gall to transition, then by golly, they better be confounding gender norms externally every minute of their lives.
What ze said, except I would describe the argument as going even further. If you transition, you cannot possibly confound gender norms externally or conceptually; you’ve gone and sold out to them, and defined your life and identity in service to them.
My transition did not make it more difficult, let alone impossible, for me to personify either ambiguity or human variance from inhumane gender rules. All it did was give me a different set of laws to deviate from. I’m not sure why passing as a woman prior to transition somehow fails to play into people’s assumptions in ways that passing as male post-transition succeeds.