It’s easy to see why some explanations of trans people’s choices persist. The dominant narrative in society currently is that genders are a naturally occurring result of innate biological differences. It is assumed these probably came about through evolution, as sexist scientists retrospectively impose our current gender stereotypes on the past, in a Flintstones-style view of history, and conclude that male and female brains developed out of the “natural” roles that our reproductive organs are assumed to have landed us with. In fact gender is a far more recent human invention, but the oppression of women seemingly has to be justified somehow, whether by reference to God, science, or something else. This pop neuroscience can be used to give trans people legitimacy. If men and women really have man-brains and woman-brains, then it’s plausible we could have landed the wrong brain to go with our genitals somehow (or the wrong genitals to go with our brains, depending on your perspective). It seems easier to get a society already invested in gender essentialism to accept that we’ve just been put in the wrong box, than to get people to question everything they thought they knew about men and women. Arguing that the entire system is bullshit and needs to be torn down is a massive task and not going to get us any joy any time soon. It’s easy to see why some trans people prefer a narrative less threatening to the status quo, but this is not inherently part of being trans.
Still many ordinary trans people will talk about their transition in terms that recognise that gender is a role, not an innate quality, for example by talking about the time when they used to be a man or a woman. Exploring gender in the way that we do as trans people can often make its socially constructed nature more apparent to us, at the same time as living life as a trans person demonstrates the practical need to provide cis people with explanations for our choices which will get them off our backs.
A few parallels can be drawn to the gay rights movement. The claims to be “born this way” benefited the fight against homophobia within the existing narrative. Homosexuality was seen as a sin, which implicitly assumed a choice. Arguing that gay people can’t help being gay, and reinforcing this with the claim that it is strictly nature, not nurture, is a simpler step towards tolerance than trying to remove the negative associations with homosexuality. If being gay and trans are afflictions that can’t be helped, then it’s easier to argue that society has a responsibility to accommodate us. Of course without the existence of homophobia, choosing to be gay wouldn’t be a problem. It’s only in such a homophobic society that we so strongly associate the claim that it’s a choice with the view that it’s the wrong choice. Similarly arguing that trans people are born trans appears to be a more manageable path to acceptance, at the cost of supporting gender essentialist ideas...
But feminists have long been aware of the “double bind” that women face, otherwise known as “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. It’s the trap that patriarchy sets for women. We are punished for stepping outside of our allocated role, but also punished for conforming to it. If women conform to societies expectations of what a woman should be like we are considered to have invited the misogyny, yet we provoke anger when we dare to exhibit qualities considered masculine.
As trans people we experience specific forms of this, as well as the usual classic examples. Trans women (as well as other transfeminine people) are considered to be “asking for” women’s oppression by lowering themselves to women’s status (as she loses the status of “man” whether or not misogynists have the decency to recognise she’s a woman) and people assigned female at birth (afab) who don’t identify as women are considered to deserve it as their birthright (often taking the form of being “put back in their place” for having the cheek to seemingly try to escape women’s status, and in the case of trans men dare claim the status of men). Under cissexist patriarchy only cis men are really men, the rest of us fall short of being considered fully human. We gain the biggest advantage when we are able to pass ourselves off as them. And if we can’t then if we’re lucky we can gain some lesser conditional advantages if, for example, we can display the right masculine qualities at the right time, or fit neatly into the role we’ve been assigned, or somehow demonstrate how unthreatening we are to the patriarchal status quo.
