Sasha Carney
In defense of social contagion.
The first thing you are told when you begin to understand yourself as transgender is that you had no choice in the matter. “Born this way,” “born in the wrong body”: these same ascriptive phrases were the soup of the day on Tumblr in my teenage years of the mid-2010s, where anxious young trans and nonbinary people reassured ourselves, and each other, that we were born into transness. Centre-left human rights discourses embraced the tendency to theorise gayness and transness alike as unchanging, essential, and instilled in the body since birth. The ease of the narrative was, and remains, excellent fodder for shiny liberal media consumption: in a 2016 Guardian profile produced, it seems, for the consumption of cis people, trans university student Keith testifies that “it’s not a choice. Nothing has happened in my life to make me trans. I was born trans.” Under “born this way” logic, identity is not something formed through living in the world, but rather a nugget of information to be excavated, polished, and eventually presented to it.
The belief in an innate gender is an understandable defense against a homophobic and transphobic world: Lady Gaga sang “Born This Way” to a pre-Obergefell v. Hodges America, after all. Queers are prickly in the face of conversion therapy logic, which is correctly perceived as the attempts of dominant society to nudge aberrant desires towards more palatable ones. If we as trans people did not choose our strangeness, if it is, instead, a naturalized, cradle-to-grave form of human difference, then it follows that it can be tolerated in the name of equality; maybe even, in extraordinary circumstances, embraced.
The alternative notion—that queerness, particularly transness, is conditioned by the social rather than intrinsic to the self—seems to be the domain of right-wing news outlets, Republican lawmakers, and the occasional classical liberal professor. Over the last few years, trans children have been thrown into the harsh spotlight of national news like never before. Over on Fox News, Tucker Carlson decries trans childhood as “grotesque” and an instance of “ventriloquism” where children are unwittingly puppeted to political ends. The logic of those in Carlson’s camp, echoing and informing the early 2020s’ spate of anti-trans American legislation—what the historian Jules Gill-Peterson terms the recent emergence of “the cis state,” the specific wielding of state power to preserve the cisness of its subjects—is characterised by two entwined arguments. First, it is trans children who need to be protected from their own transness. Their desires to transition, whether socially, hormonally, or surgically, will not help them, but rather lead them further astray. Second, and crucially, these protective interventions are required because the children in question are not truly trans. They were not born this way. Rather, they are corroded into transness, which sweeps the nation like a disease. As Nicholas Christakis, sociologist and Sterling Professor at Yale, has written on Twitter, “I think there is a large element of social contagion with respect to transgenderism.” He placed the desire to transition in the same category as bulimia, peanut allergies, and “(mild) autism.”
When members of this camp—let’s call them the social contagion critics— talk about trans people, they constantly invoke the horrors of a surgically changed body in hushed, fear-stricken tones. The primary body under threat is, for the social contagion critic, that of the young teenage or prepubescent “girl” or person assigned female at birth: always white, vulnerable, and constructed as lacking its own autonomy. (It must be noted here that transphobes primarily construct trans men and transmasculine people as “victims” of transness, and trans women and transfeminine people as predatory “perpetrators” of it. The body at threat is always that of a young woman, or “woman,” whether at risk on the operating table or in a women’s restroom.) The cover of Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book Irreversible Damage—an anti-trans text I have never read, and never will—features this horror embodied: a young white girl with a pixie cut and a hole where her reproductive organs should be. That a sickness has been produced in “our” children that might lead them to “mutilate” what is healthy is the greatest, most soul-striking fear of them all. As gender-affirming surgical and hormonal procedures become increasingly thinkable over the course of the last few years, with waiting lists at gender clinics swelling to years-long wait times, their visibility circulates as the transphobe’s nightmare. Surgery, for the social contagion critic, is the logical endpoint of a society that allows its children to be cross-contaminated by inappropriately gendering ideas.
A gender-affirming procedure is usually a life-affirming one. Though statistics alone can’t define the value of a trans life, a study led by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that gender affirming surgeries were associated with a 42% reduction in psychological distress and a 44% reduction in suicidal ideation. Even these statistical rebuttals, though, are unconvincing to the social contagion critic, since they hardly get to the heart of their fear mongering. The transphobe is terrified of the creep of inauthenticity, and wields that terror effectively. The idea that ventriloquised, aberrant gender can be separated from “authentic” manhood or womanhood works so well because it is the process of questioning the purity of one’s motivations. Your desires are not your own, transphobes of all stripes argue, not truly desired. If you can only disentangle the toxic terminology of gender from what you truly want, you will be free to be in your own body without alteration.
This is ultimately premised on the idea that transness alone is inauthentic, that all other expressions of gender are naturalized. “Born in the wrong body” activism attempts to rebut this by naturalizing transness: by testifying to the lack of choice we had over our trans identity, we hope to make ourselves immune from the social contagion critique. But what might it mean, instead, to reveal all gender as inauthentic?
Gender is inherently a process of social relation: who you are as a woman or man or otherwise forms in relation to the gendering of those around you. A cisgender man in a locker room may feel socially compelled toward certain motions, phrases, or stories to affirm and solidify their own manhood in the world. What is so “natural” about that? Ask yourself now: how do your friends perform, or ‘do,’ gender? Your mother, your father, your partner? Is the performance of cisgender heterosexual manhood, for instance, any less determined by who you are friends with, the insecurities you have around your body, or your desire to amass social capital? Brazilian waxes and pre-workout smoothies alike are gender-affirming processes; shaving your face or wearing a dress can be, too. We can scarcely conceive of gender without these social rituals and practices. There is no true Archimedean standpoint where we can live outside gender as we speak about it: cis or trans, we are, like Heidegger’s subject, always already thrown-into-the-world as gendered beings. To rephrase Christakis, I think there is a large element of social contagion with respect to gender—not specific to trans people, but with respect to the territory of gender itself.
And what of it? Of course, not all forms of social contagion are healthy or positive. Gender can hurt as much as it can heal. But I believe we, as trans people, lose more than we gain by pretending that gender is ever, has ever been, separable from the realm of the social. To slightly bastardize Lady Gaga, I’m on the right track, baby. I—just like you, whoever you are—was formed this way.