A quick reference for my thoughts on everything trans
For about a month now I've been drafting an essay on transmedicalism, what it means, and why I call myself a transmedicalist.
The project inspired me to research and study trans politics, culture, and philosophy. Naturally, a lot of thoughts have come up in my studies. I want to put them to paper here without worrying about making proper citations or cross-referencing other texts. I'll save all that stuff for my future endeavors; this is just for me.
I used to write about trans stuff a lot when I was a teenager. I thought of myself as a novice queer theorist. Nursed by the philosophies and discourse popular on Tumblr at the time, I went on a journey collecting and studying trans political/philosophical texts, mostly from the 1990s, all couched in Foucauldian post-modernism.
About a decade later, I no longer identify as queer or align with queer ideology. (I'm not much of a Foucault fan anymore either.) Much of the philosophy I internalized as a youth has been expunged by age, life experience, and new ideas. Spending more time offline than online made me realize how much queer theory dilutes and abstracts lived experiences. More than that, its framework completely falls apart the second you leave academic or queer bubbles and return to the cisnormative world which, whether you like it or not, is never going to fully dismantle notions of sex and gender—nor should we expect it to.
Reclaiming my trans identity after living in stealth for a few years has brought a unique set of challenges. Some I had expected—such as relearning how to stay confident in my masculinity whilst tapping into my trans past. I also expected to encounter some discomfort slipping back into trans spaces online. I'm nearly thirty, over five years into my transition, and pretty established in my identity. I prepared for differences in age, experience, and self-concepts, which I indeed found.
More than that, however, I came into ideological conflict.
The trans discourse of my youth grew increasingly fragmented as I got older. But there was still a base level of consensus across the community as a whole. There were concrete definitions and demarcations; physical sex and its associated gender binary was the foundation in which they were laid.
This is not to say that sex and gender are immutable in nature (as transphobic rhetoric would have us believe), but rather that our understanding of the trans experience must, by definition, be rooted in the interactions between sex and gender as material realities.
Now that is not the case. The trans community has, in my opinion, lost the plot. Labels are both more important than ever and mean as little as ever. Notions of identity are analyzed through a lens of class-reductionist politics; boundaries are drawn between the oppressor and oppressed (and what constitutes as which is never certain); trans people's status as "other" supersedes their status as men, women, or non-binary.
Collapsing sex and gender into immaterial concepts invalidates how and why people are trans in the first place. I won't go into much more detail in this post, but you can look at my other writing on the subject to get an idea of my perspective.
Enfolding social and cultural critiques into what was once a strictly psycho-physiological phenomena has diluted its legitimacy in the eyes of the general public and medical institutions. This paradoxical itemization of what it means to be trans has fractured the justification for our existence and arguments for necessary medical care. How can "trans" be accounted for when the answer to what it is is no longer clear?
My main point is this:
By aggregating individual experiences, identities, and demographics into broad ontological banners, one is then enabled to superimpose any number of political praxis onto a myriad of sociocultural realities that would otherwise resist categorical conglomeration.
It is this schism of thought which all of my trans writings are founded upon.
Returning to a foundation of physical sex and binary gender, the trans experience is measured by the presence of gender dysphoria rather than arbitrarily assigned by way of social/cultural signifiers which vary from group to group. Gender dysphoria as a diagnostic criteria is helpful in several ways: it is measurable, universal, and persistent across any range of identities and experiences. More than that, it establishes that trans experience is defined in relation to physical sex and gender, not against.
To illustrate this philosophy, here's an excerpt from my draft on transmedicalism—edited and abridged to better serve the purpose of this post.
Gender dysphoria varies from person to person and exists within a broad gradient of experiences. There are also different components of gender dysphoria. These are most commonly referred to as: mental, social, and sex.
Dysphoria also exists in totality, and each component manifests in relation to each other; to that end, mental and social dysphoria are the outward results of a misaligned physical sex, which manifests in sex dysphoria with physical transition as is its natural conclusion.
The time of dysphoria onset, whether or not sex reassignment surgery is required to be "fully" trans, the inclusion of nonbinary people in the trans community or lack thereof, the severity of dysphoria, etc is determined by personal opinion, subjective experience, and community consensus.
Given my personal philosophy, I prefer to call myself a transsexual and conceptualize gender identity and physical transition as individual transsexualities, all of which I collapse into the term "transsexualism".
Though I emphasize sex dysphoria in my trans formulation, I believe that transsexuality is modular (i.e.: different transsexuals require different interventions to treat different degrees of dysphoria) and in some instances manifests in non-binary identities (i.e.: not all non-binary people are transsexual, but some transsexuals are non-binary).
I plan on going more in depth in future essays and research. I just wanted to make a post that I can use as a reference when I write of trans discourse more casually.
So, I guess that's it for now, lol.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. If you wanna talk about what I've written, whether you agree or disagree, I am always open to chat through e-mail.
✘ Posted on — 06/16/25
✘ Last modified — 2 months ago
✘ Link — https://blog.xavierhm.com/a-quick-reference-for-my-thoughts-on-everything-trans