Partaker in Maidenless Behaviour

A major new survey from The Trevor Project released on Wednesday (6 May) has found that transgender and nonbinary young people who wanted hormone therapy but were unable to access it were nearly twice as likely to report a suicide attempt in the past year compared to those currently receiving hormones.

According to the report – which included over 10,000 responses from trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people – 15% of trans youth denied access to hormones reported a suicide attempt, compared to 8% of those able to receive care.

this only makes sense if you believe that "transfemininity" was a freely-made, vibes-based gender category with no prior anchor in the world. bioessentialism requires prescription by the accused bioessentialist; it requires that your imagined bioessentialist (me) decide post-hoc that certain biological claims about a person determine whether they can be transfeminine or not. if transfemininity was just a set of expressions, forms of behaviour and labelling, a particular aura or whatever, it would be indefensible to gatekeep people from it based on assignment. but that's not what transfemininity is.

transfemininity as a term developed to describe a category of gendered subjectivity in response to transmisogyny. the transfeminine isn't just a particular appearance or set of labels—transfemininity is anchored to the way transmisogyny shapes the subject-formation of those people who are subjected to it. like being a trans woman, being transfeminine is a politicized positionality determined thru cisnormativity and its reflex, transmisogyny. and the logic of transmisogyny operates precisely thru birth assignment.

here is a second clarification: birth assignment is not a biological fact about someone. birth assignment itself is a bioessentialist social action done to someone in the maintenance of hegemonic sexgender. the corrective machinery of gender then sets its normative expectations in accordance with ASAB, and metes out its punishment likewise. and transmisogyny is the specific genre of punishment reserved for those who have betrayed the expectations of being coercively assigned male at birth: the class of failed men who become an underclass of failed women because they cannot even perform the kinds of reproductive labour expected of women "proper". the transfeminine is a subject formed in response to this experience: a gendered category that coagulated against the stream of transmisogyny. it was not an invention ex nihilo, but political development.