Is Transsexualism Chronic?

Chronic:

1. Of or relating to time; chronological. Obsolete.

2. a. Of diseases, etc.: Lasting a long time, long-continued, lingering, inveterate; opposed to acute.

b. So with invalid, and the like.

3. transf. Continuous, constant. Used colloquially as a vague expression of disapproval: bad, intense, severe, objectionable; also something chronic adverbial phrase, severely, badly.

—Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition¹

Problem List: Noted–Resolved Transsexualism Female to male (Chronic) 11/28/2011–Present

—Author’s medical diagnosis, University of Michigan Health System

in 2011, i was diagnosed with chronic transsexualism.

The doctor did not actually term it ”chronic transsexualism.” It was a diagnosis of ”transsexualism” with a duration marked as ”chronic.” Such a diagnosis sounded dated even at that time. The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (dsm-iv), which was current then, used ”gender identity disorder” as the recommended phrasing for the psychological diagnosis.² But I, an angry and recalcitrant transsexual, had demanded to go directly to a hormone-prescribing physician rather than follow the therapeutic steps recommended by the university’s ”comprehensive” gender clinic. So, instead, a doctor gave me a medical diagnosis.³ As such, the language in my chart is not from the dsm but from the doctor’s handbook, the tenth edition of the International Classification of Diseases (icd-10), in which ”transsexualism” was then, and was until 2022, classified as a disease.⁴

My case of ”chronic” transsexualism eventually cleared up. In 2015, the mention of ”transsexualism, chronic” was dropped from my electronic medical records and replaced by the updated dsm-v diagnosis ”gender dysphoria in adult.”⁵ Yet, I still take pleasure in identifying as a chronic transsexual. I like the colloquial use of ”chronic” to imply intensity as well as duration, a usage that dates back to the nineteenth century but was later popularized by stoners and surfers like those who populated my teenage landscape. As in, ”this case of transsexualism is chronic, man.” And, like many trans people, I have adopted the term transsexual as a source of perverse pleasure, a disruptive label to use among friends.⁶ In this essay, therefore, I sometimes use transsexual as a synonym for trans. This pokes fun at those who wrongly see transsexual as some definitive and superior form of gender variance; it also acknowledges the extent to which transsexual, as a hegemonic framing of transness, undergirds the rhetoric of trans life in the United States. The word transsexual shocks cis people, who are just coming around to the language of transgender and may worry about saying the wrong thing. Finally, the phrase ”chronic transsexualism” feels comical, indexing the fantasy of a transness that stretches cleanly across one’s lifespan like a single, straightened thread.

What, then, do we do with the fact that many trans people, myself included, experience transness as having multiple temporalities, more like a tangle of knots than a continuous line? My own diagnostic history is simply one instance in a long history of trouble with trans genders and their temporality. Both in critical theory and in popular culture, the evocation of before-and-after, of abrupt somatic change, lashes trans subjects to the fate of representing something essential about time. Jack Halberstam, for instance, points out that the transgender body has been invoked to represent ”futurity itself,” positioned as an object of postmodern fascination and consumer transgression.⁷ Yet, to assert that transness is a form of futurity assumes a fundamentally Western conception of modernity, one indistinguishable from colonial temporality. For example, writer b. binaohan asserts a bakla identity that is neither located in a static precolonial past nor mappable onto a Western notion of ”trans” womanhood. ”What bakla are now and what we once were,” binaohan writes, ”are so wildly divergent that even though I know my own heritage, it still requires considerable effort to access the actual history of my gender, rather than the white lies.”⁸ White trans discourse’s attempts to write bakla into a hypothetical ”trans” temporality — either as the ”past” of modern transness or as one expression of its contemporary transnationality — ignores the extent to which bakla...