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Is there a “trans politics”? Not yet. But if there were a trans politics, what would it be? Would it be a practical claim about a specific group’s right to medical access? Would it be a request for the institutional recognition of an infinite number of identities? Would it be an attempt to problematize gender as such? No one really knows. Perhaps we should look back on prior attempts to proletarianize the sexual. In the 1990s, queer theory, a new lens of social analysis inspired by post-structuralist thought, attempted to form a “queer” politics around non-normative sexual/gender identities. “Queer” came to signify the political substance that constitutes the identities that emerge from the social failure inherent in heteronormative bodily norms. It’s worth emphasizing a point Andrea Long Chu made in the 2019 article, “After Trans Studies”: most trans people don’t want to live radical anti-normative lives.1 We want to suffer, love, cry, piss, shit, play, and fuck like everyone else. Still, this seems too much to ask for when the simple act of taking-a-piss-of-as-a-trans-person is enough to provoke national scandal. Far from being a rejection of politics, it is precisely in trans people’s desire to be like everyone else that we find the problematic through which a democratic trans politics emerges.

Before we start this excavation, we have to define some terms. As the leftist theorists Laclau and Mouffe have argued, democratic politics is the open-ended struggle to establish a social order in the name of a universal principle.2 Successful democratic movements and revolutions, even if they take the oppression of a particular minority as their catalyst, appeal to universal ideas about the needs and rights of human beings. Look no further than the prototypical True Revolutions–the French and Haitian Revolutions did not secure democratic victory by simply naming the grievances of specific historical actors, but by appealing to larger universal principles about human rights.

Much of the focus of American trans activism today is in securing trans people’s right to medically change their sex. But this alone isn’t really a political struggle. While the fight for universal health coverage, especially in the United States, is one of the great political fights of our time, that isn’t the claim currently being made in trans activism. There’s a difference between claiming that people, by virtue of their humanity, possess the right to medical treatment in general, and the claim that a specific group has a legitimate need for a particular treatment. The first claim, like all truly political claims, is a universal statement that applies to all people. The second is an appeal to medical expertise on behalf of a specific group. Usually, that second argument goes something like this: trans people, for whatever reason, experience a pathological incongruence between their sex assigned at birth and their internal sense of self that, according to our current medical knowledge, can only be treated through transition. Even if this argument is logically sound and empirically true, there’s several reasons why it fails as activism.

Let’s cover the obvious problem first: medical expertise has always been politically constituted. This is a point Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas hints at in his concurring opinion in US v Skrmetti, the 2025 case in which the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormones for transgender minors. Thomas writes that “courts should not assume that self-described experts are correct,” citing a 1927 Supreme Court case which upheld the practice of forced-sterilization in Virginia by appealing to the scientific sheen of the eugenics movement.3 What makes science both great and terrible is also what makes it a poor vehicle for social change. The exercise of modern scientific expertise is based on an inherently anti-democratic form of authority. If one day medical institutions decide that trans people’s claim to medical care is illegitimate, then our access to physical transition (mostly) disappears. Or, even worse, if, hypothetically, a bunch of lunatics gain access to the levers of institutional power and do unprecedented damage to the credibility of American scientific institutions, then the legitimacy of our claims may be forever tarnished.

By now it should be clear that both of these things are happening. We are living in the worst case scenario or something very close to it. But if there’s any hope to be found in the crisis of scientific legitimacy, it’s in the opportunity to detach the legitimacy of trans identity away from scientific expertise. Any good student of Foucault knows that knowledge is constituted by a regime of power, and thus, acts as a site of political resistance. To activate this political resistance, however, we need real political claims. Without a universal political articulation, trans activism can only meddle about as a humble request to politely entertain a private fantasy. If trans politics is to be a politics at all, then what we must advocate for is a universal right to change sex.

To illustrate what this looks like, let’s first consider why the plaintiffs in United States v. Skrmetti failed. The plaintiffs made two central arguments. The first: that Tennessee’s law discriminated on the basis of sex, since whether one can access treatment depends on the patient’s natal sex. The second was a more particular identity-based claim: that trans people are a distinct, historically oppressed minority entitled to the Court’s special protection. Both failed in instructive ways. Against the sex argument, the Court held that Tennessee’s law discriminated on the basis of diagnosis, not sex. Against the identity-based argument, Justices Barrett and Alito argued that transgender people are not a “discrete group” but a “large, diverse, and amorphous” category.4 If gender identity is, as Justice Alito phrased it, merely “an internal sense,” then courts and legislatures cannot feasibly protect a group with ambiguous bounds.5

If trans activism is to have a future, we must start by giving up on one of the most taken-for-granted claims about trans life: the idea that gender dysphoria is a condition that belongs exclusively to trans people. Read Tennessee’s statute closely and you’ll find that they don’t believe it either. SB1 permits doctors to prescribe the very same hormones and puberty blockers to treat any “abnormality present in a minor that is inconsistent with the normal development of a human being of the minor’s sex.”6 Justice Sotomayor’s dissent spells out the inconsistency. A young cisgender girl distressed by facial hair can be prescribed testosterone suppressants; a transgender girl distressed by the same facial hair cannot. A cisgender boy distressed by breast tissue resulting from gynecomastia can be prescribed hormones, even undergo surgery; a transgender boy “experiencing the same (or more) distress must be denied the same prescription.” Tennessee and other states with similar laws fully recognize that a body can fail to match one’s desired sexual presentation, that this incongruence produces suffering, and that hormones/puberty blockers effectively relieves it. The only difference is the direction of treatment. Treatment for cis kid’s dysphoria is perfectly fine, while treatment for trans kid’s dysphoria isn’t. The state simply does not want trans people to exist.

But what if we were to rethink gender dysphoria? Dysphoria, far from being a minority pathology, is a suffering that can be felt by anyone. By any male or female who hasn’t felt big or small enough, smooth or hairy enough, loud or quiet enough. It seems that, almost by design, this is what gender is–a regime of attachment projected onto a body that can never fit what the attachment compels. And, sure, we should all do our best to question the influence of patriarchal norms on our desire. But sometimes maybe you really are too small and smooth. I’d like to live in a world where you have the choice to do something about it. And, who knows? In a world where we have the ability to radically change our body, the body’s oppressive function as an exclusionary signifying structure or site of coercion might begin to collapse. We can only be so hopeful.

Liberalism, the ruling ideology of the late 20th and early 21st century, contains no explicit claims about what gender is or how it emerges, only that it is to be understood as a form of expression. Whether one is a conservative who believes gender to be the expression of some biological/spiritual core or a progressive who believes gender to be the quasi-voluntarist expression of individual selfhood, both frameworks provide a blueprint for the institutional recognition of gender. I propose that trans politics reject the regime of recognition. Trans politics is the acknowledgement that, despite the universal desire to have our gender recognized, all attempts at recognizing it will necessarily fail. It is not a denial of the reality of sexual difference, but an affirmation that sexual difference is, and always will be, impossible to symbolize. Every institutional, individual, or communal attempt at totalizing gender into one essence, substance, binary, spectrum, or relation, will always fail.

Why is this important? The failure to symbolize sexual difference is the same failure that creates the conditions for democracy.7 As Claude Lefort argues, where once, the figure of The King stood as the physical placeholder of society’s unity, democratic systems empty out this place of power to create the terrain for popular struggle.8 Democracy isn’t what happens in the moment when the people reach political consensus, but in the struggle itself, in the void of power that allows for true democratic contestation to occur. Gendered freedom is conditioned by a similar emptying. To strip the sexual relationship of the burden of specific content is not to declare its unreality, but to realize this impossibility of signification as the site of freedom. Gender is the open-ended site where one struggles with and against norms, others, and oneself.

What seems an abstract conceptual shift is, in fact, a material struggle. If we understand that every attempt to symbolize or institutionalize gender/sex is always a material struggle over the means of bodily production, then it follows that the political substance of trans life lies in affirming the universal right of all people to freely access gendered technologies. All humans should be free to use the hormones, labels, genitals, pronouns, and identities that enable them to live as they are. Gender should not be abolished, but expanded. Normative attachments should not be disrupted, but experienced as the diffuse materials by which we narrate our selfhoods. Hormones should not belong to any particular group, but become the means by which we particularize ourselves. Can you imagine it? Walking into any convenience store where the depo-testosterone is as cheap and easy to purchase as a pack of gum?

You might be wondering about the practical consequences of a society with such a loose relationship to bodily norms. Can people really be trusted with such easy access to life altering decisions? No. But that’s the risk that democratic freedom requires. It is only in making a choice that we find out that it was the wrong choice. We already understand this broadly. That’s why it’s perfectly legal to tattoo a giant cock on your forehead or spend your life savings on a new pair of tits. We are willing to bear a lifetime of wrong choices for the chance to make the right choice.

Some people might wince at the idea of framing trans life as a matter of choice. While no one chooses to feel gender dysphoria, we do decide what we do about it. To choose to transition as a trans person is to choose yourself. You can’t choose what you are but you do have to choose to live.

For trans politics to live up to its most radical promise we must move on from the notion that we are fighting for the inclusion of trans people into what already exists. Trans life is a living fight for the possibility of an ethical sexual existence. Trans life and history is one particular manifestation that affirms that universal sexual freedom is possible. For sex to be the site of an uncertain antagonistic gap is not an impediment to gendered freedom, but the very condition of its possibility.

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By the difficult age of 14, I had fully accepted my trans identity as a certainty. No longer just a thought, dream, or proposition, it was now the precarious reality of who I was and what I was going to become. This is one of the most distressing parts of a trans person’s life, where the ecstacy of naming your condition comes at the cost of realizing the tragedy of your body. It is a cruel nightmare to discover this in the thick of puberty, right at the moment before your body betrays you beyond recognition. It was too late to escape puberty and too far from adulthood to do anything about it. The opioid-like refuge of girlhood fantasy had given way to the reality of becoming a woman.

I did everything I could to hide what was happening to my body. Without access to chest binding materials, I resorted to baggy outfits, sweltering layers, and permanently hunched over to conceal my growing chest. Though I got away with passing as a smooth little sissy to some, womanhood has a way of forcing itself upon you, inviting others to claim parts of your humanity as you bleed it away through a thousand little cuts. I remember a moment when my father, the person most disgruntled with my boyish proclivities, was once introducing me to a few of his work colleagues during a weekend outing. He was already anticipating the awkward, “What’s your son’s name?” that was becoming more common those days. He was fed up. This time, before his coworkers could introduce themselves to me, my dad grabbed my baggy shirt and stretched it tight behind my hunched back, revealing the shape of my body. “You see,” he laughed, “she’s a woman.” I shrugged his hand off my back, but I still felt it years after, as if any way I moved would risk betraying the shape of my body, as if becoming anything other than invisible would reveal my terrible secret.

It isn’t uncommon for cis women to feel a similar estrangement from their changing bodies. My older sister once told me stories of doubling up on her sports bras in the first years of puberty. So why is it that I have a mustache and she doesn’t? In the book Self-Made Men, social researcher Henry Rubin interviewed trans men on their experience of adolescence, noting a continuity between trans men’s accounts and cis women’s retellings of puberty in other studies.1 As it turns out, few women experience puberty as the beautiful blossoming it’s often made out to be. Most described their feelings as ambivalent to negative. So if puberty is a shitshow no matter who you are, what’s the qualitative difference in the experiences of girls and not-girls when it comes to impending womanhood? I’ve come to learn that there are many ways to become a person. You can feel happy or sad about becoming yourself. I’ve been both. But what makes a gender trans-gender is a need to escape the horror of becoming something else.

What does it mean to become who you are? According to the good ol’ liberal status quo, we typically treat identity as the expression of an individual’s request for recognition. Gender, under the liberal regime of identity, becomes a demand to be labeled and grouped under a particular sign. Yet, we know that gender identity is much more complex than a process of claimmaking. As I’ve come to understand it, there are several components to gender identity, including but not limited to:

1. Solidarity with a historically and materially defined community

2. The phenomenological sense of gender

3. Uses of technologies of the body such as hormones, genitals, pronouns, clothes, etc.

4. Self identification with a particular label

5. The psychic economy of sex/gender

This list does not comprise a set of prescriptive criteria on what it means to belong to this or that gender identity, nor should we advocate for such a criteria to exist. Rather, against the liberal version of gender that sees self-identification (#4) as the totality of what constitutes gender identity, we all benefit from an account of the ways gender is actually lived.

For a prime example of the way the regime of identity actually confuses the way we speak about gender, look no further than niche debates in trans circles. Take the popular discussion on the status of trans men who feel a “connection” to womanhood or identities traditionally held by women. The examples are endless: trans men and mascs who identify as lesbians, trans men who label their childhoods as “girlhoods,” trans men who use the term “AFAB”, trans men who claim they’re “female socialized”… and so on. To be clear, this is not a new conversation. What was amusingly labeled the “FtM/Lesbian Border Wars” in the 1990s has been written on extensively by Jack Halberstam, Jay Prosser, Henry Rubin, Leslie Feinberg, among others. Even back then, Hablerstam’s list of novel trans masculine identities speaks to a long history of wide-ranging gendered possibilities:

“...guys with pussies, dykes with dicks, queer butches, aggressive femmes, F2Ms, lesbians who like men, daddy boys, gender queens, drag kings, pomo afro homos, bulldaggers, women who fuck boys, women who fuck like boys, dyke mommies, transsexual lesbians, male lesbians…”

Is this list simply the result of a community that “didn’t know any better?” Some contend that trans men’s identification with the lesbian community is an artifact of historical necessity and transphobia, and that any connection between trans men and lesbianism/womanhood is an inherently bioessentialist enterprise that excludes trans women and fems. But boiling down the diversity of queer identity to pre-Transgender Tipping Point naivete flattens the complexity of early queer history. Even so, let’s put aside any appeal to history as a basis for the legitimacy of complex identification.

It’s important we make a distinction between a trans man who actively identifies as a lesbian/dyke and a trans man who feels that the experience of forced womanhood is a core part of his biography. I tend to fall into the latter category, and I suspect most trans men do as well. This claim about a “connection” to (forced) womanhood is not a prescriptive claim about taxonomy. Oftentimes, the claim of a relationship to a category is mistaken for identification with a category. For a trans man to claim a “connection” to womanhood is not to make a claim about the legitimacy of all connections to womanhood. A trans man can identify as a man, and still claim a connection to womanhood as a way of making sense of his past. This doesn’t mean he identifies as a woman nor is this a claim about whether womanhood requires a particular assignment at birth. It is a descriptive statement about the ways technologies of womanhood have been imposed on his body.

The hegemonic imposition of gendered technologies is often called “female and male socialization.” But these terms might confuse one to believe that socialization is a static category rather than a process. While female and male socialization exists, there’s no such thing as someone who is simply “female or male socialized,” as if socialization is something that happens to you once. It is a lifelong negotiation. We all inevitably fail at our social roles and have the agency to remake them. A trans man is not “female socialized” and a trans woman is not “male socialized.” Socialization is our relationship to imposed roles, with many of us fighting for the boyhoods and girlhoods that we were denied.

Trans childhoods are always non normative childhoods, yet all of us, whether trans or cis, construct narratives of self out of the materials given to us by social norms. Though one of these materials is our gender assignment at birth, we use these materials in ways that give our initial assignments subversive meanings. One person’s statement about their relationship to the gender they were assigned at birth is simply one statement, and has no inherent implication about the meaning of another’s assignment. We can be critical of how we frame or understand our assignments without denying people’s agency to define them.

But what about active claims of belonging to a particular category, as with the case of trans men who identify as lesbian, even post-transition? No doubt, there are trans men who identify as lesbian because of a bio-essentialist understanding of lesbianism as belonging to “female-bodied people”2 that excludes trans women. Any ethical queer community should reject such exclusionary framing. Still, there exists a large contingent of trans men who identify as lesbian/dykes in ways that do not exclude trans women. Here, we return to the different ways we understand gender beyond abstract categorical identification. A trans man might feel a sense of historical and personal solidarity with an existing community of lesbians, and understands lesbianism and their relationship to it, not as a descriptor of who they are or what gender they were “assigned,” but a descriptor of how they love, what they do, where they are, or who they’ve been.

Why does this phenomenon seem unique to trans men and mascs? In the time that I’ve researched this issue, I’ve found that it’s much more common to find trans men who feel a connection to womanhood than it is to find trans women who feel a connection to manhood. The most uncharitable among us like to argue that these trans men must “secretly want to be women.” This is a simplistic and condescending reading. Others argue that, within progressive spaces, taking on an oppressed identity confers a type of social capital that encourages people to avoid privileged identities like “man,” thus encouraging trans men to “appropriate womanhood.” While this reading is slightly more plausible than the first, it still undermines trans men’s agency to define their own experience.

The question itself is valid. After spending so much time fighting to be recognized as a man, why is it that I still feel some sort of connection to womanhood? Even though I wasn’t a woman, girlhood and womanhood still felt like necessary detours that brought me to where I now belong. Is my memory of womanhood as death by a thousand cuts an experience of womanhood or the slow death of unbelonging? Both? I have no answer, only the scars of an ungrievable loss.

Part of why this might be confusing to others, especially trans women, is that we often make the mistake of juxtaposing trans men and trans women’s experiences as direct opposites of each other. But transfemininity and transmasculinity are not inverted forms. They contain distinct political relationships to identity.

Much of trans men’s lingering attachments to womanhood and girlhood has to do with the fact that manhood really has no specificity. To become a Man is to become the taken-for-granted universal signifier. This is how systems of oppression operate–they reserve universal status for the privileged group, relegating social specificity to Others as a way of denying the Other’s interiority. Whiteness/Manhood/Heterosexuality is synonymous with humanity, while Others are excluded from self-determined existence. Living as a woman felt traumatic, impossible. Being a man often feels like being nothing at all.

Though the solidarity I felt with other girls and women was based on a false premise, it was, at least, solidarity. Now, as a man, the dominant form of solidarity between men is simply patriarchy, it is simply the given form of social organization. When trans men leave the specificity of the female social role,3 we enter a role whose (non)specificity has been historically defined through patriarchal dominance.

This gives transmasculinity a difficult, but radical potential.4 In taking on an identity deemed the “neutral” universal, we are given the opportunity to contest its very universality from within, to build new forms of solidarity outside of hegemonic masculinity.

These new forms of solidarity will require a rethinking about how we draw the lines of gendered solidarity today. We should invent parallel forms of solidarity outside identity, based not only on categories, but our relationships to these categories. Whether your manhood is cis or trans does not negate the integrity of your manhood, but it absolutely changes your relationship to this manhood. There are not just masculine or feminine genders but also trans and cis genders. To be trans-gender is to be conscious of multiple forms of gendered becomings and belongings. Belonging to gendered categories is just as important as the process of coming to and coming from them. Trans-gender solidarity is not just a claim about the right to belong to a category, but a claim about how we unbelong to categories, how we create free access to the technologies that define these categories, how we affirm the agency to re-define these categories, and how we can enable each other to become more of ourselves.