"Tobi Hill-Meyer has proposed what I think is the only really plausible and useful definition of transness which presumes that trans people are as real and authentic as cis, which is: a trans person is someone whose sex/gender is not universally recognised as valid. Other definitions premised on a transition 'from' one sex to another unwittingly reify cis sexes as static and homogenous sets of physical and emotional characteristics and behaviours. This premise of binary sexes is both inaccurate -- point to almost any characteristic and there's exceptions which are not considered trans -- and arbitrary, repressing the diversity of human sex and gender morphologies, histories and behaviours.
"That it exists in the first place is, I think, an effect of the ideological power of cis narratives to construct 'truth' in its own image (and of trans relative powerlessness). [...]"
-- Queen Emily, 2011-08-04 [internal link to Hill-Meyer's definition added]
Note: Today is the annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance, a memorial service to remember the hundreds[1] of transgender people who have been murdered for being trans. Erased because their existence didn't fit somebody else's idea of how the world is supposed to be, in many cases. Or because someone thought they'd be a convenient victim because their life had less value than a cis person's ... or because a cis person freaked out over what it meant to be attracted to a trans person and decided the object of his attraction had to pay the price for that confusion even if she had been basically a bystander otherwise. Whatever the narrow reasons, the broad result was murder.
[1] Not just a figure of speech: 221 known in the past twelve months, 179 the year before, 162 the year before that.
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