When 'embodiment goals' outlast trans identity

A poster at r/detrans asks:

can i still consider myself desisted if i get a hysto/mastectomy?

ok i don’t know if i’d get top surgery but i want it. what i for sure hope to get in the future is a hysto. even if i did both those things i’d still consider myself a woman as i don’t believe in gender identity and don’t even feel like identifying as anything else. but if i did those things would i still be considered desisted? what would i even be then? because i’d definitely NOT id as trans

I worry this is going to be a trend, where young women desist from trans identification and yet continue to take hormones and/or pursue serious surgeries—even hysterectomies—in part because these interventions have been so normalized through trans identity.

After all, if mastectomies and hysterectomies are life-saving and identity-affirming for trans-identified people, why would you not do it? Who wants to be a bleeder?

Unsurprisingly, ignorance of women's bodies plays a big role here: both what slamming into menopause means (don't count on your ovaries still working properly after a hysterectomy—it's not a given!) and that the uterus isn't just a 'baby-maker' and nothing else: that even if you never have children, your uterus is an integral part of your body. What we see here is a new iteration of an old mindset: that the female body is a defective male body or—at best—that the female body is a male body with a reproductive extension pack.

In other words, there's no respect for the female body as distinct in every cell from the male body. There’s no respect for the body as a whole organism that's evolved over millennia. There’s no recognition that removing healthy body parts is always asking for trouble.

Once this kind of extreme body modification has been normalized (and it feels like we're almost there), the justifications will fall away. We're already ‘progressing’ from 'this body part causes me such extreme distress that I'll kill myself if you don't cut it out' to 'this body part doesn't fit my identity.' Next up: I just don't want it. It’s my meatsuit. I get to customize it as I see fit.

In the case of young women who’ve desisted from trans identities but cling to their ‘embodiment goals,’ this sounds a lot like: “I can reconcile with being female as long as I can cut these things off first.”

Detrans communities are full of young women mourning the loss of their unaltered bodies. Yet others who haven’t (yet) gone so far down the road to medical transition still hope the impossible promises such surgeries make will be kept. They think they're being realistic about the limits of what surgery can accomplish: I know it won't make me a man to get my breasts cut off or my uterus cut out but I still want it. The why is thornier.

Forty-six years ago, Adrienne Rich observed that "the body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit."

Rich was talking about a disembodied mindset, a disidentification with what it means to be a woman and a disconnection from our female bodies. Think sleepwalking.

Now it’s possible to take Rich’s metaphor much more literally.

Our bodies too often feel like traps set for us, all hassle and risk and pain. What young woman wouldn't want to travel through life more lightly?

But there’s a failure of imagination here and everything reinforces this failure: fear and vanity, ideas about identity that accuse the body of speaking out of turn, just for existing in an unaltered state. But we're only ever our bodies. We won't ever be so clever as to outwit our bodies, much less outlast them.