more seriously though like as someone who is arguably "binary-adjacent" (I am genderqueer but I also identify as "a man" and "not a woman [anymore]") the idea that it is not specifically my transgender (specifically, transmasculine) status for which I am persecuted is absurd. it's not just the fact that I'm on testosterone or that I want phalloplasty. it's the fact that I was "born a woman". it's the fact that my biology is considered incompatible with my identity. it is the intersection of that biological/developmental history *with* my chosen (yes, CHOSEN, bear with me) life path and preferred way of presenting that is the problem.
convincing people that we actually just have some kind of genetic or developmental anomaly that makes us Need transition in order to be our Real Ideal Selves is fucking stupid. if you think of your transition that way? cool. I'm happy for you and glad you can frame it in terms of that kind of actualization, genuinely. but that's not what it is to me. I don't HAVE an Ideal Self. There isn't a One True version of me where I have Become Myself. And there NEVER WILL BE. That is something that has been perennially true throughout my life. I am not more Me than I was before 8 years of HRT. I will not be more Me after surgery.
What I am is happier. These are things that have improved my life, made me feel joy, made me like myself and like being myself more. And that's what I mean by these are chosen things: I can't control what makes me happy, but I can choose what to do about it. A lot of people choose not to pursue transition even if it would make them happy, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is financial or social pressure. Sometimes, people even pursue transition and find it doesn't actually make them happy (we often call these folks detransitioners when they decide to go back to living as cis, but I've met plenty of nonbinary and even binary people for whom this is the case too - they realize that it isn't the medical transition that they want, it's other things like the social role change or simply the recognition and legibility of their feelings).
The problem is that "need" is being used fast and loose here - it's being treated here as if such a need is strictly biological or medical, when the psychological/social/cultural context absolutely cannot be ignored.
A personal example: I don't actually need top surgery, but I want it for very specific reasons. I actually think my chest is fine how it is. It doesn't bother me; sometimes it even makes me feel sexy - my partner likes it and I like that he likes it. But when I go out in public, I bind my chest, and I am strongly considering top surgery (albeit maybe a radical reduction or contouring procedure instead of a fully-flattening mastectomy). This is because the way people look at my chest, the way they perceive me as an individual with a chest that looks like this, makes me unhappy. It's the social and cultural baggage attached to my chest that I find upsetting. Others don't see me the way I see myself - I am not legible to them.
This is very different from the reasons I want phalloplasty - to put it very bluntly, I want that for sex reasons, and little else. I don't care if other people can see my dick when it's covered up by pants; I don't pack, I just wear loose pants. Most people do not give a shit what a man's crotch looks like, or at least, it's considered very impolite to share one's thoughts on the matter, especially to the man in question. At worst, I might be perceived as under-endowed, and frankly I don't give a shit - it doesn't prevent people from seeing me as a man, and from treating me roughly how I want to be treated.
Gill-Peterson's article acts as if these social consequences are immaterial, and as if there must be some kind of transcendent biological reality behind gender transition, even if possibly more complex or nuanced than the long-debunked brain sex hypothesis - but the problem is, they are immanently consequential in terms of how they effect our everyday lives as trans people. If an employer or landlord sees the fact that I have an estrogenized chest, it allows them to perceive me as trans - it compromises my ability to go stealth, that is - and may cause backlash that can include adversity as severe as unemployment or homelessness. Conveniently for me, I'm okay with going stealth - it doesn't feel like I'm being misrecognized when I'm treated like "just a regular guy" the way I'm misrecognized when I'm seen as "a woman on androgenizing steroids" (i.e. the way transphobes perceive me). To close trusted people whom I know to be allies, I likewise don't feel this misrecognition - they see me and treat me the way I want them to even when they know what I look like under the binder.
Visibly-nonbinary people don't have the luxury of stealth, but they still have to contend with the threat of misrecognition. No matter what they choose, unless they remain completely surrounded by good allies, they are misrecognized - there is no socially-normalized role in which they can take refuge. Note that I'm not talking about passing privilege - what I'm talking about is legibility. There is no way for androgynously-presenting individuals to be fully perceived and treated outside of the normalized binary schemas except by people who actively support and accept nonbinary people, other than by fully thwarting attempts to discern their AGAB and "passing as nonbinary" (which does not allow them the "just a regular person" status, i.e. the evasion of transphobic adversity conferred by stealth, and which very much varies by exactly who is perceiving them - they may get variously treated as women or men by different observers, as opposed to being uniformly treated as neither by everyone).
But we critically need to emphasize that this is the same type of misrecognition as the kind binary trans people face. It's not that we're not being recognized as the gender we Should Be, and that surgery can rectify this, it's that we're not being recognized as the gender we are. We don't need to invoke a teleological reason for our transition, an Intentional and Righteous theoretical state that we have not yet achieved.
It's that our own claims about ourselves - self-evident conclusions we draw about our own ego states - are ignored by a transphobic society. Whether I'm claiming that I Should Be a man, that I need to transition in order to Properly be a man, or that I already am one exactly the way I am whether I get surgery or not, the transphobe's answer is not only that I never will be one in any hypothetical future, but more consequentially, that I am not one now. It doesn't matter what I will be in the future if I never am in the present. There will always be another goalpost, another horizon after I crest each new hill. If it's not my chest, it will be my surgical scars, my genetics, my hip bones, my inability to reproduce externally, the fact that any erections I get after phalloplasty will come via the assistance of an implant, etc. Transition, in my mind, becomes Sisyphean when framed only in the future tense, as some kind of Nietzschean super-ideal that I can only grasp at but never attain.
So my demand is not to be allowed to endlessly pursue, to be told it is the pursuit itself, the transition, that makes me who I am, rather than the joy in having what I already have and the excitement at the prospect of gaining what I don't. My demand is being and rejoicing. I am a man already. I am the authority which makes that determination, and my demand is to have it respected. That is the same demand that people who are neither men nor women, people who are both, people who are some other thing, etc are making. It is the demand for recognition, and for the consequences it entails. And no matter how many times you call that "liberal," it has material reality, because cissexist patriarchy exists and being perceived in one or another gender category has marked consequences. The language, the social structures, the perceptions, the constructs we are moored to, shape the way we interface with the world very directly, and the construct of the binary is very central to that.
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