Transgender people know, at the level of the most intimate possible evidence, that the self is not simply what the body announces at birth — that gender is an interior reality that can be entirely at odds with external assignment. This is not a contemporary phenomenon; it is a contemporary framework for an ancient experience. The testimony of trans people is one of the most direct accounts we have of the distinction between the socially constructed and the genuinely felt — and their right to self-definition is a justice question as much as a personal one.
Juana