"my personal narrative splits from that of the American gay and lesbian movement. The latter was based on choicelessness. A choice may have to be defended—certainly, one has to be prepared to defend one's right to make a choice—while arguing that you were born this way appeals to people's sympathy or at least a sense of decency. It also serves to quell one's own doubts and to foreclose future options. We are, mostly, comfortable with less choice—much as I would have felt safer if my parents had not set out [from the Soviet Union] on their great emigration adventure." . . .
"Also, some of the women I had known had become men. That's not the way most transgender people phrase it; the default language is one of choicelessness: people say they have always been men or women and now their authentic selves are emerging. This is the same 'born this way' approach that the gay and lesbian movement had put to such good political use in the time that I'd been gone [in Russia]: it had gotten queer people access to such institutions as the military and marriage.
"The standard story goes something like this: as a child I always felt like a boy, or never felt like a girl, and then I tried to be a lesbian, but the issue wasn't sexual orientation—it was gender, specifically, 'true gender,' which could now be claimed through transitioning. I found myself feeling resentful at hearing these stories. I too had always felt like a boy! It had taken some work for me to enjoy being a woman (whatever that means)—I'd succeeded. I had learned how to be one. But still: here I was, faced with the possibility that in the parallel life that my left-behind self was leading in the United States while I was in Russia, I would have transitioned. True gender (whatever that means) didn't have much to do with it, but choice did. Somehow, I'd missed the fact that it was there." . . .
. . . In short, "I had failed, miserably, at seeing my [transgender] choices, made as they were under some duress, as an opportunity for adventure. I had failed to think about inhabiting a different body the way one would think about inhabiting a different country. How do I invent the person I am now?" . . .
". . . I lay no claim to someone I 'really am.' That someone is a sequence of choices, and the question is: Will my next choice be conscious, and will my ability to make it be unfettered?" . . .
Masha Gessen on "the choicefulness of life," "the freedom to invent one's future, the freedom to choose," no matter the hand dealt. "To be, or not to be," The New York review of books 65, no. 2 (February 8, 2018): 4-5.
