Is it too much to ask to be left alone?

Trans people have known what we’ve needed for 90 years. For just as long, cis people have told us they know better.

Katelyn Burns
7 min readMar 20, 2021
Photo Credit: Zackary Drucker, The Gender Spectrum Collection

(This post originally appeared on Katelyn’s Substack on 5/20/2020 and has been moved here because her Substack no longer exists)

It’s difficult to establish where exactly my sense of self and my gender part ways within my self conception. To me, my being as a woman is as intertwined with my self conception as anything else; being tall, the scar on my left wrist that still aches, the freckles that dot my face and arms.

If that self conception were changed, either by choice or by force, would I even still exist as myself, or would I then be someone else completely?

The first known transfeminine gender reassignment surgery was performed on Lili Elbe in 1930. Given medical treatments available, many modern trans people have sought ways to physically change their bodies to ease their dysphoria, the clinical term for the distress felt because of a mismatch between an individual’s feeling of their own gender and their assigned sex at birth, and have a body that matched their gender identity.

As long as trans people have had the means to change our bodies, people who are not trans have stood in…

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Katelyn Burns

Political journalist. The first openly trans Capitol Hill reporter in US history. Writing about more than just trans issues. Follow her on Twitter @transscribe