this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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Changing your legal gender is not what makes someone trans. There are tons of trans folks that never change their legal gender for lots of different reasons, even if they're theoretically able to. It's just one of the steps that trans folks might take, and not typically an early step, but it's by no means a binary that defines whether someone is trans or not.
i think that’s a very important point to make and i’m glad you said it.
my motivation for swapping “changed her legal gender” to ‘“became” trans’ was to highlight how, from my perspective, her gender transition has frequently been talked about as something that’s “done to others”, rather than as just a part of who she is. in the sense that elon musk talks about it as “losing a son to the woke mind virus”. and that sentence of the article felt like it was feeding into that narrative a bit.
but in hindsight, i definitely could’ve worded things better to make that point more clearly. my goal in putting “became” in quotes was to try to highlight how there isn’t really any set of actions people need to take in order to become trans, but it seems like that’s how some conservatives are talking about it. but i also don’t think i made that point particularly clear in my comment either.