The depressing delusion of “LGB minus T”

Smile! You’re being phenotyped.

At least while HIPAA here in the States and common decency exist, no one knows for certain what’s in your pants; it’s all about practical appearances. More accurately, no one knows your genotype — quite likely even yourself, unless you’ve braved the obvious health insurance risks and jumped on the sequencing trend. You simply live with the content assumption that you don’t, in fact, have an extra X chromosome and that your young daughter’s puberty in ten years probably won’t be a fraught and confusing series of events leading up to the big reveal that she’s been XY and wombless the whole time.

And you’re probably right — good for you! Imagine living with any of these conditions and dealing with society’s utter, callous, sledgehammer-esque obsession as of late with presumed chromosomes, all under the guise of a ‘transgender problem’ that only floundering right-wingers running out of ways to explain away corporate greed seem to have a particular need to solve. Or just imagine being a lady naturally built like a linebacker, a tiny man with a soft face, a quite-possibly-already pained and self-conscious person who considers her or himself to be a terrible loser of the genetic lottery thanks to the relentless cruelty of today’s beauty standards and their social media contagion — imagine being any of those not-so-exceedingly-rare things and not even being transgender in the first place.

And now, on top of all that, you’re suddenly just as subject to people’s…