Identity, non-conformity, and self-conception

I read recently that there is a debate among psychologists as to whether outcomes are better for people who identify as transgender if they can be convinced to identify with their assigned gender. In reflecting on it, I think it is a debate with similarities to the old one about whether it is better, for people with homosexual desires, if they can be convinced to identify with heterosexuality. The arguments on behalf of rejecting transgender identity on the one hand, and homosexual or bisexual identity on the other, all boil down to the notion that it is easier to conform than not conform. But it is more appropriate to identify with your own deepest impulses, as long as identifying with them does not lead to other-regarding violations of moral obligations, than to be seduced by expediency into living a lie. Is it easier, in one’s external life, to live a conformist lie?

Generally, yes, at least in the short-term. But doing so is a source of psychological stress, and that stress can, in the long-run, crack through the façade of your artificial life and shatter it with your genuine impulses in their most defiant and repressed form. Would it be easier, sometimes, if I was not myself- if I was more similar to other people? Yes, at least in my external life. But that is the wrong question. The question is, can I be other than who I am, can I find peace in a life that is not merely an acquiescence to social standards in the ways in which I express myself, but a way of expressing myself that is utterly at odds with my own desires, values, and beliefs? The answer is no.

It is a pernicious form of social control to tell people they would be happier, ‘better-adjusted,’ if they repressed rather than expressed their own recurring desires and self-conceptions, and constructed a personality and conscious self-image based on artificial social constructs of normalcy. People should respond to the pull of their own will to construct themselves and their lives as they feel is most genuine and reflective of how they see themselves, and the sole constraint upon this should be moral obligations, not subjective conceptions of ‘well-adjusted’ lives at the cost of inauthentic selves.