To orient ourselves a little more in the labyrinth of the choice of sex in TRANS, we will stop at what is played in a Transsexual and a Transgender because, although both denounce their disagreement with the gender that was given to them from their sex, their conclusions are quite different.  The Transsexual recognizes the sexual difference and interprets it with phallic criteria, reaching the conclusion that to solve the problem, the sex has to be changed. The transgender admits other interpretations and accepts his/her body, reinventing it without having to undergo surgery.

Some even opt for a kind of limbo, allowing them to focus on an indeterminacy of gender. The most radical transgender they questions the functioning of the binary gender as such. Judit Butler, in her Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “sex”, delves into these issues and considers that both sex and gender are determined by culture.

There is no “natural nature”, nor is there a destination that guides identity from the outset. Reducing the question of surgery to this, the transsexual turns the problem of sexual identification into a "natural problem" using science that promises access to the desired identity, while the transgender turns the gender problem into a cultural issue.

Queer theorists reinvented gender studies using the concept of transgender or, if you will, the "third sex" to continue affirming that it is culture that determines sex and gender, being then, ultimately, culture that would dictate the identifications.  In popular discourse, culture would be that inherited part of the identity that cannot and should not be disturbed while the natural can be manipulated and, therefore, free of choice and, like all choice, one must be responsible for what is chosen.

Lacan, in the XX seminar "Encore", dismantled the male/female binary because, after all, the "sexual difference" does not imply that one knows what this difference consists of. Because people are born with a predetermined sex does not imply that a person born with female or male sex organs should be identified with imaginary female or male values.

The opposition between nature and culture, then, does not seem to be the best framework to escape the sex/gender crossroads. What really matters is what the subject does with the choice of sex. There is no universal possibility (neither with science nor with culture) other than the forced and unconscious choice of jouissance, which consequently makes said choice a particular mode of jouissance.

New discourses, different types of inclinations and sexual identities, to what extent would they be flexible, changeable and dependent on the choice of the subject? Leaving aside the partition of the sexes, it can be enjoyed in many ways. Without imposed normality, it becomes difficult to order the anarchy of the imaginary forms in which instinctual jouissance is manifested.

But the question of sexual identification is not really about orders and hierarchies, because it is about jouissance, a primary jouissance determined by the choice of the object on which the subject will build their own scenarios. It would then be necessary to think about the question from the logic of sexuation in order to shed more light on what questioning gender implies, not wanting to know about sexual difference.

Helena Valldeperes