As a preface I would like to state that I support Trans rights and women's rights. I have dipped my toes into the intellectual side of Feminist literature recently, and I have a few vaguely connected thoughts that keep poking at me. This may be a little bit of a ramble.

A core tenet in feminist literature is that genders and the behaviors associated with them are 'social constructs'. While I am a little fuzzy on this term (I think different authors may be using the same term for different concepts), I think it means that gender, both the categories themselves and the behaviors associated with them, are not eternal truths of the universe, but things that a given culture has arbitrarily decided upon. Women use 'she' and wear dresses not because these are somehow derived from the XX chromosomes, but because we teach female children, deliberately or through example, that they should wear dresses, should respond to the pronoun 'she', and that 'Woman' is a real physical thing rather than an idea we made up and decided to roll with. Or, to put another way, gender is a performance, something you do rather than something that you are.

I follow and broadly agree with this, but I am having trouble reconciling it with the Transgender experience as described to me by the Trans authors I have read.

While it is not universal, many Trans authors state that they knew they were their 'real' gender from a very young age, even if they lacked the words to articulate it. Trans forums are replete with stories of AMAB children playing with their older sisters toys and wearing their dresses when no-one was looking. While the phrase itself has fallen out of favor now, the attitude of LGBT people being 'born this way' was and still is very prevalent.

My question is: How does the Trans experience- of their true gender being inborn and fixed- square with the claim that genders and their properties are artificially created and learned?

If genders are socially constructed and not intrinsic, then socializing a child as a given gender should almost always work. But this is not what we see. By definition, a Trans-person is someone who was raised to be one gender but is truly another. For a more specific example, though he is somewhat of a special case, and may or may not 'count' as Trans, consider the tragedy of David Remier. He was an AMAB child who suffered severe genital damage as an infant during a botched circumcision. The parents, under the advice of a psychologist named John Money (fitting name), raised David as a girl, giving him a feminine name, feminine clothes and toys, and (medical ethics then not being what they are now), feminizing surgeries and hormones from infancy onward. Later, he realized his true nature, and transitioned back and lived his later teen-aged and adult life as a man, though the mental and physical trauma of his childhood would leave him severely depressed for the remainder of his life, a life he ultimately took himself.

So I am left with a contradiction. Per most Trans voices on the topic, their gender is intrinsic, inborn, in opposition to their socialization. But if peoples gender identity is inherit, and not socialized, doesn't this logically require that the genders themselves be more fundamental, and that the categories of 'Man' and 'Woman'* are 'out there' in some metaphysical sense beyond just cultural convention?

To use a gravely simplified example if young Transwomen general gravitate towards makeup and dresses, in spite of what they were externally taught, doesn't this imply that these things are connected in some more fundamental way, that dresses and make-up are indeed properties of womanhood, rather than things we randomly grouped and called 'womanliness'? Furthermore, wouldn't this imply that those who use make-up and dresses per this example, be they Cis or Trans, are performing femininity 'well,' while those who do not are performing it 'poorly'? This has a host of troubling implications, particularly from a feminist perspective.

It seems that I have inadvertently stumbled upon a paradox, where a persons gender is an inherit and crucial element of most their personality, and, simultaneously, a society-wide shared hallucination that we have all agreed to just not bring attention to. This is, to put it mildly, existentially horrifying.

Am I making any sense at all? Is there some solution to this paradox that is obvious to everyone but me? Or have I just not read as much as I think I have? Always a possibility.

*Non-binary and fluid identities are real and valid, but I would prefer to discuss them another time, so as to keep this thread focused.