I do not follow closely anymore, since there is a limit to how much heartsickness one can bear.

Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.

We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

Not all bodies are born in male or female. There is a continuum of bodies and it seems to me that trying to persuade medical and psychiatrist establishments to deal with the intersex involves critique of the binary gender system. Similarly there continues to be extreme, sometimes very extreme violence against transgender people.

My sense is that we may not need the language of innateness or genetics to understand that we are all ethically bound to recognize another person's declared or enacted sense of sex and/or gender. We do not have to agree upon the "origins" of that sense of self to agree that it is ethically obligatory to support and recognize sexed and gendered modes of being that are crucial to a person's well-being.

There is a rather huge ethical difference between electing surgery and being faced with transphobic condemnation and diagnoses. I would say that the greatest risk of mutilation that trans people have comes directly from transphobia.

All of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions - or norms - that help to form us.