Even the Forge Changes Over Time

Musings on Self and the Process of Definition

Let us consider that the made self is not inherited; rather, it is constructed over time. It is violent in nature inasmuch as it refuses to accept the boundary of expectation (a function of society). Personality is not genetic; it is nurture. Sartre once argued that we are condemned to be free—an adage describing the plight of choice and the pain of result. But freedom is not the absence of constraint. Constraint is a function of denial—and in the transgender woman’s experience, this is daily life. She is made to believe she cannot; she is made to believe that she should not.

But transgender women do not walk this path.

Nietzsche understood that the making of self is not easy. The process of defining oneself is forged through the struggle, and that the struggle bears marks. Nietzsche does not suggest that the process may also leave marks on others—a fact all too familiar to the transgender woman. While cisgender individuals must bear the marks of their own struggles, the transgender woman must bear the marks of her own and those of the others that believe in such constraints. Who deny that the self is made over time.

The inheritance model promises not only completion; it promises compliance. Male. Female. And with it comes rules. Patterns. Behavior guidelines. If this is true, then we must believe that at birth, we are programmed with all we will ever be—or could be. The made self rejects this, as does the transgender woman. She cannot, because becoming is not an event—it is a practice that continues. To stop making oneself is to accept inheritance, which is to accept the diminishment of one’s own agency.

This is not narcissism, though it is often mistaken as such. It is closer to recognition, to acceptance of constant change to the definition of the self. The irony, perhaps, is that this makes the self simultaneously most fragile and most resilient. A woman made, rather than inherited, can always be unmade—can always choose differently tomorrow. But she can also never be unmade by anyone else. She is, in the deepest sense, self-sovereign.