a skeleton wrapped in skin, made attractive with clothes.”
- The Ratthapala Sutta, MN 82
Society is fixed, biology is mutable. This is perhaps the most regressive thing I believe. I remember a time when I did not believe this as strongly: when I was less obsessed with the physical features that made my transness visible, when I told my first therapist and gatekeeper that I was not fazed by the suffering I might face in enacting my genderqueerness, when I saw my transition towards androgyny and illegibility as a catalyst for social change.
And perhaps it was. I do not regret living proudly and visibly as a non-binary trans-feminine person, nor the hope it may have offered to my closeted and sometimes suicidal friends. But if I have changed society, it has undoubtedly also changed me. When I began to transition, I envisioned a future of authenticity, and playfulness, and joy. “How fun it would be,” I used to think, “if people were confused by my gender.” Buoyed by that naivety, I anticipated — and almost looked forward to — the misunderstanding and aversion I would soon face from others. What I did not anticipate is how much I would end up internalizing society’s gaze, and come to hate myself.
Society is fixed, biology is mutable. I began to feel this keenly during my year in Singapore post-college, when I temporarily detransitioned. It was a year spent fixating on everything that marked me as different from the women around me: my height, my voice, my chest, and above all, the shape of my skull. It didn’t help that, even in spaces where I was out, people routinely misgendered me as male. I tried to get them to change, reminded them repeatedly that I used they/them pronouns. But they were slow, and inconsistent, and it hurt too much. At some point, I gave up. My self-hatred won over my politics. If others wouldn’t change, I would have to change myself. There are two ways, after all, to change how others perceive you: You can change the perceivers, or you can change that which is perceived.
Facial feminization surgery (FFS): A set of procedures intended to reshape a person’s face and skull to exhibit more stereotypically feminine contours. For two years of waiting, this prospect recurred daily in my thoughts, a hallowed, almost mythic, cure for all the features of my skull that I had come to perceive as deformities. Reduction of the jawline, smoothing of the brow ridge, advancement of the hairline, shaving of the tracheal cartilage. These were the specific procedures I ended up having. All in all, my surgeon must have removed just millimeters of bone — and with them a lifetime of misgendering. In the four months since my surgery, I have been getting used to the fact that I am no longer visibly trans. If I don’t mention otherwise, people seem to take me for a cis woman. It feels strange at times, erasing at others. But above all, it is an incredible relief.
Society is fixed, biology is mutable. I owe this phrase to Scott Alexander, who uses it in contrast to the default assumption: that biology is fixed, and that it is society, if anything, that is mutable. As Alexander points out, this is an assumption shared by liberals and conservatives alike (broadly construed). “Inequality is a social ill,” a liberal might argue, “and can be eradicated by social means.” “Wishful thinking,” a conservative might retort, “Inequality is in our very genes, and to go against nature is either delusion or hubris.” “But what about the possibility,” Alexander interjects, “that lead exposure increases violent crime? We got rid of lead, and crime rates dropped. We gave multivitamins to nutrition-deprived kids, and their IQ increased. Biology isn’t really that fixed, and it’s often much easier to change than society.”
Of course, there are many ways in which Alexander’s analysis isn’t sharp enough. For one, liberals and conservatives are just as often on opposite sides of the biology/society divide: think “gay genes” vs. “gay lifestyle”, or “addiction is a disease” vs. “addiction is a moral failing”. For another, neither coalition is uniformly opposed to biological interventions: think contra-ceptives, or conversion therapy. On this more nuanced view, disagreements between liberals and conservatives are partly about where the society/biology distinction lies, and partly about when social vs. biological interventions are apt. It is unsurprising then, that “biology is mutable” evokes suspicion in liberal quarters too. No modern liberal wants to endorse conversion therapy, or worse, eugenics. And that leaves me in an uneasy place vis a vis biology. I don’t want eugenics either — I don’t want my transness identified before birth and purged from the gene pool. But what is easier to change? The gender ideology of every person I will ever meet? Or a few millimeters of bone?
Society is fixed, biology is mutable. Which is to say, on the loss landscape that is my suffering, the gradient with respect to my anatomy and physiology is steeper than any direction I could push society in. Thinking marginally then, I should descend, descend, descend, until I have reached the local minimum that is gender conformity, until I have capitulated to every demand of cis-normative society, until I have abandoned all my trans siblings who do not pass, leaving the world with one less freak to feel kinship with. And people will celebrate it, and I will celebrate it, and indeed, I will feel happy. But at what expense?
This is the Nash equilibrium we are stuck in. By the wonders of modern bio-cosmetology, we have made it easier than ever to refashion our bodies to reflect gendered ideals of beauty. So much easier, in fact, that it is often less costly to buy your way to that ideal, than to oppose its inequities. And why not, when you might earn more and be happier for it? Moloch wants you to be beautiful. Feminism, in contrast, does not. No wonder then, that some feminists have long viewed trans people as the agents of Patriarchy himself, entrenching gender norms by seeking relief through biological rather than sociological means. And they’re not entirely wrong. Regulated and inter-pellated by gender essentialist medicine, many trans people can and do choose to capitulate to cisnormative ideals: I am one of them. Should the blame lie with us though, when far more cis people undergo plastic surgery (or for that matter, hit the gym), just to feel beautiful? As I see it, we’re all trapped in this prisoner’s dilemma together.
Society is fixed, biology is mutable. What a false dichotomy. I’ve read my Judith Butler. I’ve read my Donna Haraway. I know very well that “gender is not to culture as sex is to nature”, that gender is precisely the “cultural means by which ‘a natural sex’ is established as prior to culture.” I know just as well that “the dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically.” When we intervene upon biology, we intervene upon society — and vice versa: just ask every child in Flint suffering from lead poisoning, or every person who’s died from the utter mismanagement of this pandemic. This then, is another way that Alexander’s analysis falls short. Society and biology are not separate spheres, but different lenses through which we perceive and act upon the same world.
With that insight, let me recast all I’ve said in a different mold: Society is fixed, society is mutable. It will be decades or centuries before most humans move beyond a dichotomous understanding of gender. Yet, due to the unflagging advocacy of trans activists, it has become possible, in some locales, to access gender affirmative surgical care at subsidized rates. Or yet another mold: We know too little about the neuroscience of gender perception to rewire everyone’s brains, even if they volunteered for it. Of course, I could bank on the brain’s regular plasticity (slow, inconsistent, unless you’re an infant). Or, I could turn to those areas of medicine in which we have far more mastery: physiology and anatomy. Biology is fixed, biology is mutable. By shifting perspectives, it becomes clear that the choice isn’t between biology and society after all. Rather, it is between the local and global, the palliative and the transformative, the incremental and the revolutionary.
But allow me to speak approximately for now, if only to keep my leitmotif: Society is fixed, biology is mutable. Mutable, that is, if you’re rich. Had my surgery not been insured, I would have had to pay between twenty to sixty thousand US dollars for a decent surgeon. (Instead, due to the broken pricing of US health insurance, my co-pay was just $25 out of an absurd $200,000 bill.) Very few people have access to that kind of money, or that kind of insurance. Apparently, I am one of just 7% of trans women who’ve had gender confirming facial surgery, even though 43% of us want the procedure. These figures raise questions about the political character of FFS: As a bio-technological advance, does it primarily benefit the privileged or the dispossessed? Does it tend to ossify hierarchy, or dissolve it? Naively applying these criteria, one might conclude that facial feminization is a regressive development, not very different from the bourgeois capture of transhumanist technologies like cryogenics and gene therapy. And indeed, if FFS remains trapped within the confines of neoliberal capitalism, beauty culture, and privatized healthcare, it may well live up to that characterization.
But that analysis, I think, neglects the social position of most trans people, the actual diversity of their desires, and hence the radical potential of facial reconstruction surgery. As Florence Ashley and Carolyn Ells put it, “affirm-ative empowerment and self-actualization for marginalized groups are a form of distributive justice.” Trans people are marginalized, even if our fortunes are shaped greatly by race and class. Furthermore, many of us are actively fighting for surgery to be safe and accessible for all, even when it does not reproduce conventional ideals. Yes, some of us want to look like Korean pop idols — why not some adulation, after years of ridicule? But many of us also want to look like Frida Kahlo or Harnaam Kaur or Dorian Electra. If anything, we are society’s best hope for escaping Nash’s beauty blender (homogenizer, equilibriator). In that future, gender affirming surgeries will join a line of feminist technologies inching us towards “not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself”: hormone pills, the intra-uterine device, the neonatal incubator, the DivaCup.
Lest I mislead anyone though, I want to be clear: My own reasons for surgery were nowhere near that radical. I did not want to transform society. I merely wanted to assimilate.
Society is fixed, biology is mutable, and psychology is a finicky bitch. Thus far, I have avoided what might seem like the obvious third option in response to dysphoria. Maybe, instead of changing others, or my body, I could have tried to change my mind. Why, after all, could I not have just learned to love myself? Why could I not have just ignored how everyone else perceived me? Why did I instead let their perceptions become my own? As my mother put it when I told her I was getting surgery: “You’re a Buddhist aren’t you? So why do you care so much about your appearance?” Surely I should know, more than most people, that form is not self.
Well, believe me, I tried. I tried for a long time. And there were days I managed to love myself, when I managed to see beauty in my own face, or at least stop caring about it. But what is one mind’s vigilance, against the careless assaults of many others? Mental formations too, are not self. They worm their way from one psychic continuum to another. And so, there came a time when I stopped trying, when I stopped wanting to try. That’s when I knew I had no other choice but surgery: when my body hatred became so entrenched that even though I knew it was causing me suffering, I had no wish, even if it were possible, to “meditate it away”. To do that would have been to give up my dream of normative womanhood — to give up a core part of who I had become. It is deeply saddening to recognize that one’s identity might, at least in part, be a trauma response. But such, I suppose, are the workings of karma.
Society is fixed, biology is mutable. Form, a Buddhist might say, is impermanent. For that reason, it is taught that one should not cling to the body, for that way lies suffering. This is as much a lesson for cis people as it is for someone like me. As the monastic 独目金刚 (One-Eyed Vajra) wrote in the Ming dynasty:
男女何须辩假真
观音出现果何人Male or female:
Why should one distinguish false or true?
In what shape will Guanyin finally take form?
Guanyin is a transgender bodhisattva, who is said to manifest as either a woman or a man to better alleviate the suffering of others. Marsha P. Johnson has been compared to her. And since early in my transition, I’ve identified with her, looked to her as an aspirational figure. But that leaves me again in an uneasy place. Guanyin manifests as a woman out of compassion. It would be dishonest to paint my transition in a similar light, when so much of it was driven by self-hatred.
It is in recognition of this fact that Andrea Long Chu characterizes transness as not about liberation, but desire — desire that she believes will never be completely fulfilled. That experience certainly resonates. But for me, it is ultimately untenable. There has to be something more to life than wanting the things I can never have. My bodhisattva vows are predicated on it. So how then, to make sense of my transition?
Only shortly before my surgery did I come to a satisfying answer: Psychology is fixed, psychology is mutable. In every person, there is both a sentient being and a bodhisattva — the former, suffering and deluded, the latter, loving and awakened. Seeing the former suffer, knowing that, without surgery, she will never stop hating herself, what should the latter do? Save her from her suffering, of course, just as a bodhisattva would for any other person. So then, I manifested as a woman, out of compassion for myself.
After all, if I can’t save myself, how the hell am I going to save anybody else?
