Trans Historian Susan Stryker's Erasure of Gender Nonconformity

Philosophical confusion abounds in Stryker's influential book Transgender History

In her influential book Transgender History, now in its second edition, Susan Stryker defines "transgender" as "people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who crossover, trans, the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain that gender."

What's wrong with this? Everything! Definitions like this provide the intellectual and philosophical ammo for a deeply regressive gender identity ideology that obliterates the historical foundation and conceptual coherency of gender nonconformity in men and women.

The problem is that the "boundaries constructed by culture to define and contain gender" are often about things like social scripts, clothing, expression, gender stereotypes, and other superficial matters.

In other words, Stryker's definition is so broad as to include all instances of gender nonconformity, essentially erasing the conceptual category of a GNC person and replacing it with "transgender” as the sole super-narrative to account for all “gender diversity.”

Stryker will deny this, of course, and insist there's still a distinction between GNC and trans in terms like “crossdresser,” but I challenge anyone to clearly demarcate the difference between GNC and “transgender” without excluding non-medicalized 'nonbinary' people from the "GNC" category and vice versa. The distinction becomes absolutely meaningless except insofar as the concept gets cashed out into pure subjective identity claims with no real-world entailments, a 21st century indulgence that functions primarily as an aesthetic and alternative lifestyle subculture.

Clearly, the trans activist movement has a strong incentive to broaden the trans umbrella to make GNC under the trans umbrella rather than trans being under the GNC umbrella, the latter option of course being the only philosophically coherent position to take.

Precisely because GNC as a concept doesn't require absurd beliefs that feminized males are ontologically women, it's far more parsimonious to simply say there are men and women, as biological categories, and infinite wiggle room within those biological categories to express yourself in atypical ways, to "cross boundaries," without thereby giving up your belonging to your natal sex category, which is the only solid philosophical ground for an identity based on “gender.” Trans women are GNC men and trans men are GNC women.

Everything else, including nonbinary, is simply a variation on that theme.