TRANS AND QUEER DIVERSITY: A QUESTION OF IDEOLOGY?
(This is a discussion not dogma. Please read it with that proviso.)
An inherent problem of trans in Western Culture is that it has been conceived as a medicalised existence conforming to an imaginary binary. Trans academics have spoken and written about this (often critically) for several decades now and I have reproduced them in my own work. See, for example, my "five queers of the apocalypse" in part two of my recent book "Black Seeds" (see pinned toot) or Susan Stryker's Transgender Studies Readers. It is, thus, according to some, including myself, a problem that trans is understood as a medicalised existence because that means it is very easy to frustrate. Just ban doctors from helping trans people - as the bigots are catching on to doing now. Then ban people from being able to live publicly as trans. While trans people "just want to fit in" (like the gays who hate to be called queer) it becomes easy to frustrate if you are a bigot with power.
The argument can be made, however, that both queer and trans should NOT aim to fit in nor aim to ideologically buttress this patriarchal, heteronormative society we live in. (Queer as queer theory, in fact, explicitly sets out to oppose it.) This view posits that queer, trans and nonbinary are original and diverse forms of humanity. A black person, who is many and various anyway for all black people are not alike, is not a white person. So a trans person or a queer person is not, and cannot be, a straight or cis person. The challenge here is to acknowledge this and accept that the human species is more broadly defined, and defined with more diversity, than some will allow.
You can never engage that battle whilst shying away from it or "simply wanting to fit in". So perhaps we should NOT believe that trans (which, as "trans" specifically, is an entirely modern Western construction to be differentiated from other historical and cultural cross-gendered formulations as many of those cultures rightly insist) is a medicalised state of existence (for anthropologically-funded reasons) but it seems the case that many trans people have ideologically convinced themselves it is because they only see a binary and the need to pick a side in a very specific ideologically constructed whole - and then conform to it.
Yet a consequence of that ideological capture is that such trans people make themselves hostage to an authoritarian politics and so very easy to control or frustrate. It is not just bigots who need the education here: everybody does. There have been (and still are) cross gender people in evidence for centuries, as some trans historians have detailed, but they weren't all medicalised because the medicalisation was beyond their knowledge and abilities. In other words, thinking of trans in a medicalised way is A CULTURAL ACT. We need to "change the currency" on this and, as a consequence, change trans whilst activating what some would argue is the real, liberatory meaning of "queer".
Thinking of trans medically is to put yourself in a box you don't control. It makes you dependent. Thinking of gender as picking one of two sides does the same thing. The liberation comes in devising a culture that values us, all of us, as we come to be. Let me put that another way as a question: if the West didn't think about human relations as it does (patriarchally, heteronormatively, binarily) could trans be constructed ideologically as it has been in the West? I suggest not and so argue that in changing the culture we would also change trans in a necessary way.
Here we need once again to be reminded that freedom is a work of imagination first and foremost.
CONTENT WARNING 
Just published in @QueerTheoryMag: “Re-centering Huge Milky Tits in Queer Discourse” 
Cite me: 
“HMTQD”: A Post-humanist Feminist Take on Queer Body Politics (2024)
So many great papers with my favs so far including ones on 
