Trans people tend to be either “realist” or “idealist” about their gender identities: the realists tend to try and ground their identities on an essential, objective substratum (the most popular form being a neuroessentialist reduction of transgender identity to supposed “brain-sex” differences) while the idealists appeal to the socially constructed nature of gender to divorce it from any relation to sex (the most popular form being a quasi-Butlerian idea of gender as a culturally and discursively mediated and articulated performance).
Politically, trans gender identity realists tend to be more exclusionary about who gets to “count” as transgender and what the “proper” protocol for transition entails, while trans gender identity idealists tend to progressively draw out an ever-widening “umbrella” of transness to include disparate identities that were not grouped together previously. Trans gender identity realists appeal to those who are conservatively inclined and wish to preserve some semblance of a fixed and immutable difference between men and woman, while trans gender identity idealists appeal to progressives and radicals who want to undermine or even abolish the notion that there is any real difference between men and women.
On the basis of my own path of self-understanding as a transsexual woman, I find that both the realists and idealists fail to adequately capture my own experience and help me make sense of it, yet I also see that both highlight important aspects of my experience that cannot be ignored and have to be accounted for. I believe there should be rigorous standards of care for gender transition in place, but I do not want to give up my power to transition to professionals who think they know me better than I know myself. I also see the value in broadening our ideas of what it means to be trans, but an excessive focus on being as inclusive as possible often diverts attention away from the actual material and relational care-work involved in tending to the trans condition both individually and collectively. On a more philosophical register I think both the realist and idealist interpretations are basically inconsistent and incoherent when taken alone (which means they are “open/empty”) yet both have to be accounted for as different yet equally important aspects of a more comprehensive perspective (which means the very distinction itself must be “inclusively-transcended”). A more inclusively-transcendent perspective would have greater explanatory power about the nature and reality of gender in general and transgender experience in particular.
Gender identity realism is inconsistent and incoherent because it tries to establish the necessary ontological ground of gender identity on an empirical contingency, performatively undermining the fundamentally qualitative and subjective nature of gender identity.
Gender identity idealism is inconsistent and incoherent because it tries to appeal to discourse and culture in order to ground the non-discursive, pre-cultural, visceral and embodied nature of trans experience, an appeal which risks invalidating or even eliminating the sufficient reason that drives the discourse in the first place (the struggle for bodily autonomy with regards to gender transition).
Both views are initially attractive when apprehended at face value, but when subject o further scrutiny they start to break down, undermining the efficacy of their own presuppositions and motivating intentions. Although gender identity realism tends to undermine its own condition of possibility (transgender experience as first and foremost a qualitative, aesthetic experience) and gender identity idealism risks invalidating its own sufficient reason (transgender experience as a problem primarily concerning embodiment and bodily autonomy, and only secondarily a concern over representation in media and discourse), both point to one aspect of the dipolar nature of trans experience: realism points to and fixates on the physical, embodied pole and idealism points to and fixates on on the mental, conceptual pole. A more comprehensive perspective would account for the dynamic interrelationship and processual unfolding of both poles at once, rather than fixating on one at the exclusion of the other. This more comprehensive perspective would render transgender reality as a dynamic experience that is simultaneously psycho-somatic, mental and physical, real and ideal.
From a process-relational account of gender identity in terms of a “queer realism,” gender can be epigenetically accounted for in the brain as a real effect, but not the cause, of a socially mediated and open-ended process of social co-construction of gender, and this very process itself is asymmetrically dependent upon real differences in modes of relational embodiment, which are capable of being changed and function as the cause for changes in gender. Gender is “real” in that it can be found in the brain and is materially instantiated in the separation of spheres of production yet it is “unreal” because what is found in the brain and in relations of production are plastic adaptations to socially mediated relationships between discursive agents; gender is “both real and unreal” because both biology and sociology are at play, where gender is socio-biological; gender is “neither real nor unreal” because in spite of being equally true the distinction between the real and unreal itself is an abstraction from an more basic concrete continuum that precedes and exceeds those abstractions. Gender is a “real abstraction” based in actual practical differences between forms of relational embodiment, and changes as these practical relations change.
In terms of a process-relational queer realism, gender is paradoxical: undeniably present yet ultimately unfindable. Add the Process Buddhist role of Buddha-nature to this, and we see that gender is nothing but one of many modes of expression of our own innate and relational divinity, our own open/empty and inclusively-transcendent nature, and sex is the way in which this primordially open and creative divinity is temporally incarnated in actual flesh (therefore, sex and gender are actually interdependent, rather than being opposed or completely distinct, and when sex and gender are interdependent and reciprocally intertwined then we are no longer referring to “sexual difference” in the classical binary sense but in a neo- or post-classical sense of differential sex, where sex is a differenciating multiplicity rather than a basic coupling subsumed under the identity of a fixed concept of sex). In queer realism, gender has no foundational ground in spite of (or rather, because of) its being constituted in-as-through its internal relations, relations which are historically, culturally and interpersonally mediated and situated yet are always embodied in actual flesh; gender is not simply real, it is miraculously real.
Holopoiesis 