There’s a widespread fallacy. Let’s say there’s a social pressure to be a certain way. Let’s also say that there are some people who aren’t that way — they don’t see themselves as being that way, and the rest of society doesn’t see them as being that way either.
The fallacy is the notion that their variant identity can’t have any social cause. That since they aren’t in compliance with the major social pressure, it must mean that they are inherently this other identity, this variant identity.
Why is that a fallacy? Why isn’t that a completely accurate understanding?
Because the same society that exerts the social pressure to be the first way — to have the primary, accepted kind of social identity — also sets up alternative identities. Part of the pressure to be the first way consists of how the alternative identity is constructed as a less desirable, problematic, debased identity. Something that you can be accused of being if your behaviors don’t quite conform to the primary-identity behaviors that are prescribed and expected. Being accused of being “one of those” is precisely how a lot of people get pressured into being mainstream-normative.
Now, we aren’t passive blank slates. We, as individuals, actually do get to play a role in constructing our own identities. Let’s not erase that. That’s why a lot of marginalized identities have redeeming features, desirable qualities: the people occupying those identities manage to attach some good experiences and memories to other folks’ understandings of what it means to be like that.
But it’s a social process. The people occupying marginalized identities are occupying spaces that aren’t just defined by themselves. The all-Christian theocratic societies of the European middle ages had a role for the infidel and the witch and the sinner. You generally did not want to be that person, you generally did not want to be perceived as one of them, but it was sure as hell there, with expectations and understandings attached. And in some cases, some people found it better to negotiate society from within one of those pariah identities than as one of the normative folks.
Similarly, criminal is an identity. Psychiatric patient is an identity. Homeless person is an identity. The range of social options, including the sense of “how do other people stuck in this situation cope with things”, are all components of how those identities are held in the common shared belief system as social constructs.
Activists among the marginalized are centrally involved in trying to reshape how the identities they occupy are perceived — hence how they are constructed, what the shared understandings and expectations are shaped like. Negro and homosexual were identities that have been reshaped and reconfigured substantially from the inside of the experience. That does not mean they aren’t social constructs any more. Gay people and Black people still learn from social cues and depictions and interactions with others occuping those labeled identities how a person such as themselves is to behave and think.
Transgender woman and transgender man are identities with expectations, narratives, assumptions, etc all attached to them. If you don’t speak up and explain your own specific story and your own specific understanding of yourself, and merely say “I’m trans”, you’re accepting that whole bag of beliefs and attitudes. It does let you hold that bag in lieu of having to hold the normative-person bag, which may be a lot farther from who you are and how it is for you, but it’s still a bag, still a stereotyped set of notions, still a social construct that you, personally, had damn little to do with creating. If, on the other hand, you do try to define the ways in which your personal self and experience and understandings thereof aren’t quite what society in general holds to be true of transgender women or men, you get friction. People take exception to what you’ve said. People tell you you’re doing it all wrong. Or they just get puzzled and don’t get it because it contradicts what they’ve been told.
