I am not a doctor but I do play one in my imagination and in my imagination people are just people, rather than being assigned a gender at birth. People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual. You may choose to tell me who you're dating now, but why tell me what type of person you are committed to dating the rest of your life? It's not that your orientation will or should change, but who you may sleep with ten years from now is not relevant ("Will you go out with me?" Yes because I'm a man or no because I'm not tall enough?).
I'm not advocating bisexuality. You can still like who you like - only woman, only men - but don't need to identify with that as a campaign, a cause, a flag to fight under. I am a man married to a woman, but that is a description of my current life, it needn't be turned into an ism.
Being circumcised (male or female) to fit into your cultural box is bad enough, but having yourself surgically and chemically altered to fit into the cultural box of 'womanhood' or 'manhood' is a lot to go through. Why can't a person have a penis and just be a person with a penis - not 'male' or 'female'? Why require surgery to be one thing or another, when we can let anyone dress, date, or be treated as they wish, out of the respect accorded all humans. Perhaps rather than changing a body to fit our social conception, we could change society's categorizing of male and female into just people, with their own selves and interests and ways of living. Maybe a penis is a differently shaped clitoris.
I know that evolution, which undergirds everything, requires we be split into groups of with-penises and with-vaginas and that that ends the discussion, but there will always be reproduction - that's not going away. What, though, if I had to get to know some people before I could tell if they had a vagina or not? Would I find myself liking someone who turned out to have a penis? Would I be waylaid into gay sex?
How would society function if we couldn't automatically tell who had a penis and who didn't? It couldn't, so this is not a serious suggestion. For all I know someone who identifies as a woman (itself a social construct) while living in a 'male' body very much wants a clitoris. But if we could take the socially constructed elements out of people's identities - gender, sexuality, race - could we ever just see a person as a person who has a body, is dating a person, who dresses a way.
What if we just had people, without short-hand categories of gender or sexuality or marketing, and let people sort everything else out one on one? I know - it'd be inefficient, and nothing is worse than inefficiency, not even suffering - but a man can have sex with only women without identifying as heterosexual, but just sexual. No matter what you may think, and no matter who you are sleeping with now, you don't know who you'll be attracted to ten years from now, if the situation and the options are different (prison?).
If you're in a good relationship now, be glad that you are, and if you are not, be hopeful that you will be soon. If you have in mind the kind of person you want to be with, that's fine. But do we need to categorize gender more emphatically than we may someone having a job, or height, or age limits, or the kind of accent you find sexy? All of which are also preferences. Is someone in Toronto who is only interested in someone who lives in the same city, a Toronto-sexual? Why then with gender? Why must you must be a gender not just have sex. You must be a man in a man's body or a woman in a man's body - those are your options. Yes or no. Up or down. In or out. On or off. No continuum. No recognition that your state is 'at the moment' - you just choose a forever side and go though massive reconstruction and trauma should you choose to switch.
Think of Caitlyn Jenner. If a 65 year old man thinks she'd be happier as a 35 year old woman, who am I to disagree? But the point is she switched sides. You still have to be one or the other - the idea of the surgery is to be all one or all the other. Race, nationality, gender, sexuality or caste - it's never enough to be a person, we need to know what type of person you are.
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