To start out, cis/trans is literally a binary – cisgender means not transgender, and transgender means not cisgender. I mean this in a step removed: whether somebody is (or will be) trans or cis is not set at birth or at any other time in somebody’s life. Instead, it is an interaction of somebody’s inner feelings and how they relate to society.
Before I continue, you should go watch Philosophy Tube’s most recent (edit: well it was when I started writing) video, “I Emailed My Doctor 133 Times: The Crisis In the British Healthcare System“. The whole thing is worth watching, but I’d like to specifically reference “Chapter Nine: You Don’t Have To Be Crazy To Transition But It Helps” (about 1:04:45). My starting point is accepting Abigail’s argument that “gender dysphoria” is a made up diagnosis, and we can infer that its purpose is to uphold and protect the gender binary (and gender roles) by what this diagnosis actually does in the real world.
She argues that “gender dysphoria” is the “sum of [sadness, anxiety, jealousy, yearning, regret, envy, shame, discomfort, grief, dissociation, trauma, love of blahaj], and cis people also feel all those feelings.” She goes on to discuss how cis people can feel those things in ways that we’d recognize as gender dysphoria, although (to summarize in my own words) it’s not in the direction of being transgender.
To think of it in terms of maths (although this isn’t a topic that lends itself to easy to calculate numbers), we can add up all those things and project it onto a spectrum (a non binary spectrum) between “gender assigned at birth” and “any other gender.” If the result is close to a person’s assigned gender, they’d call themselves cis; and if it’s sufficiently close to another gender, they’d likely call themselves trans.
The area in between is what’s interesting.
My whole reason for writing this post is that I think the threshold for “sufficiently close to another gender” depends on all the factors outside one’s control – societal acceptance, legal barriers, availability of healthcare and other resources, family beliefs, and more. In a more accepting society, we’d probably see a lot more people be a little bit happier with their life by identifying as trans; but, in this society and culture, that little bit happier is not worth the challenges and risks.
And I think that coming out and transitioning is also a matter of both learning the magnitude of the sum of dysphoria factors, as well as understanding (and possibly changing) the sum of societal barriers.
This shouldn’t be taken as an argument that some people who are “more trans” are more deserving of rights or acceptance or healthcare or anything. Any person should have access to whatever transition care they want. And nobody is required to take any specific steps to be trans, besides identifying as a gender other than their gender assigned at birth.
I don’t think I have a strong conclusion here. Maybe just that we should make it easier for people to explore the space between trans and cis, so the world can have more happy trans people and fewer sad cis people.