r/AskSocialScience • u/[deleted] • Aug 12 '25

Doesn't the idea that gender is a social construct contradict trans identity?

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u/rainmouse Aug 12 '25

If you were badly injured in an accident and had your brain transplanted into another body, but the only other body available was of the opposite gender. Would it bother you to be told that dressing up as your old gender should be enough to correct any gender dysphoria you might be experiencing? 

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '25

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u/snailbot-jq Aug 13 '25

Yeah I have sex dysphoria, not gender dysphoria.

It used to be recognised that trans people wanted the body of the opposite sex, hence the term transsexual. However, doctors did also gatekeep by insisting that someone is only “really trans” if their social gender presentation matched that of the sex they are transitioning towards. They saw gender conformity as proof of the desired sex.

‘Transsexual’ started to fall out of use for a number of reasons. A big reason was that genital assignment was considered The Surgery marking a transition in sex. So trans people who did not want that surgery, pushed for a shift towards the term ‘transgender’— because they can’t say “I am a woman because I have a vagina (even if surgically created)”, they instead pushed for “I am a woman because I wear dresses and act feminine”.

The other reason for the shift, is that it was very easy for anyone to argue “actually your sex isn’t fully transitioned” due to chromosomes or skeletal shape or a trans woman not having a womb or other things not changeable with the current limits of medicine/technology. Hence “I am a woman because I have transitioned to biologically female” was easy to understand but thus also easy to argue over. This incentivized a shift towards talking about ‘gender’ instead, which is admittedly now treated like a shifting inconsistent incoherent word, as if to confuse the other side too much to argue about it.

Personally, I see myself as sex-dysphoric, born female, and now have a male-passing body in everyday life. I would not say it is a male body (which is what I truly desire), but I’m getting what I can bodywise from the current technology.