un-labelling (4)

The gaps in our knowledge about the specific links between gender and desire raise a broader and even more perplexing question: If you are someone who responds to the person and not his or her gender, then where does your gender fit in? In other words, does fluidity in sexual desire extend to fluidity in gender identity?

Gender identity is defined as an individual's internal psychological experience of being male or female, regardless of how masculine or feminine he or she might appear to other people. The association between sexual orientation and gender identity is a complex and controversial one. [...] Individuals whose gender identities are discordant with their biological sex - that is, women who feel that they are really male, or men who feel that they are really female - are transexuals, not homosexuals. In recent years, the broader term "transgender" has been increasingly used to denote the total spectrum of individuals who experience their gender identity as somewhat fluid, or who experience various degrees of discordance between their gender identities and their physical bodies. [...]

[Fluidity - with respect to both gender and sexuality - raises a dilemma] for all people, female, male, and otherwise. Namely, how do you live a noncategorical life in a rigidly categorical world? [...] No matter how much you might resist putting your identity and your desires into neat and tidy boxes, society still wants you to do so. It is more acceptable to be a man trapped in the body of a woman [or vice-versa!] than to be neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight. [...] [People] who challenge those categories every time they step outside the front door, pay a dear price for their insistence on a different path and a different truth. But they would have it no other way.

Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008), pp. 193; 201. [my emphases]