In Search of Secrets

It’s a bumper sticker I see now and then. Funny, right? Ha ha, let’s all laugh at the idea that your “identity” can change what’s under the hood.

Only…what if what’s under the hood actually was a Prius engine? Would it be such a stretch then to say your truck ought to be treated like one? That you should be entitled to the same tax breaks and emissions exemptions and parking privileges as any other hybrid?

You might be thinking, “Sure, but people aren’t cars–you can’t just swap parts between them the way you could an engine or suspension!” And it’s true, people aren’t cars: men and women are much more similar to each other than trucks and cars. Unlike them, we aren’t designed and built from the top-down, we’re grown from the bottom-up. We all start from the same two cells, and we all spend the first few days and weeks of our lives looking pretty much the same. Even our genitals are all identical at first! In fact, there are a number of ways male and female “parts” can get mixed up at all stages of development.

Some “mix-ups” are so small as to be barely noticeable: a woman with unusually high testosterone levels or muscle tone, or a man with wider-than-average hips. Others are harder or impossible to ignore: a woman with facial hair, a man with breasts.

Even the venerated “sex chromosomes” are not definitive: there are XY people who can conceive and give birth, and XX people with penises and functional sperm. Not to mention all the other possible karyotypes such as XXY, Xo, XYY, and more.

Given everything that can get “mixed-up” and all the different ways in which a person might not fit the “male” or “female” archetypes, is it really that much of a stretch to suppose that a person might be born with a typically male body, but a female mind? (Or vice versa?)

There is one other important way that cars and people are different: if you claimed that your truck had a Prius engine, we could open the hood and check. But, for better and worse, we can’t simply pop open the hood of someone’s mind and see what’s in there. With rare and limited exceptions, when someone makes a claim about their own mind, we have no ethical choice but to take their word for it.

Identity is complex. Not all of it is determined by biology; there are parts of your identity that you can choose. But being trans, like being gay, doesn’t seem to be one of them. Without exception, every trans person I’ve heard talk about it has described realizing they were trans as a discovery, not a decision: looking back on their past and seeing that they had, in fact, been trans the whole time.

If you’d owned a truck for years that was underpowered but strangely quiet and fuel-efficient, and one day you opened the hood for the first time and discovered it had a hybrid engine… Well, maybe that bumper sticker wouldn’t seem like such a joke anymore.