Wanting the Impossible

05 December 2025 · 3501 words

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Womanhood sneaks up on you when you least expect it. I became one without asking for it, anticipating it, or even wanting it to happen. The process was inexorable. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be a woman, and nobody asked how I felt about it. Though most of my social life is spent in spaces where non-binary people outnumber the binary, and most of us have a “they” in our stack of preferred pronouns somewhere, nearly everyone I know has lapsed into calling me “she.” This leads to difficult and socially awkward situations when I inevitably give “they/them” as my pronouns yet again.

These folks are well intentioned, of course. All that they mean when they say “she” is “that woman over there,” and of course this refers to me accurately. They recognize the fact of my womanhood, its objective reality; indeed they are in some sense responsible for creating it. Everybody “knows” that I’m a woman, and so I came to know it as well.

To live a genderqueer life under these conditions is alternately perplexing and amusing. One faces the persistent temptation to lean into an identity. Someone who called me “she” recently apologized for “misgendering” me, and of course there is a specific sense in which this is exactly what happened. We are accustomed to a discourse in which a gender in the strict sense is an internal and innate self-understanding, one that is frequently belied by the habitus. This gender is produced in speech acts that are said to reveal those internal feelings that constitute it. I state my pronouns, for example, and in doing so my gender becomes a manifest thing in the world. To refer to me as “she” misgenders me, then, not because I am a person for whom “she” does not apply as a point of grammar, but because gender conceived in such internalized terms can only be touched by others through these overt tokens. To use my requested pronouns signifies acceptance of my identity, in much the same way that shaking hands with a stranger communicates that one’s intentions are friendly.

We adopt new language to make these exchanges possible. “What are your pronouns?” someone asks me, as if a pronoun could ever really be mine. New social norms are martialed: she asks for my pronouns, I tell her, she uses them. In so doing, she denotes merely “that person,” but what she connotes is “I respect the validity of their gender identity, whatever it is, no matter how complex and individualized it might be.” In my turn, I feel my gender identity to be respected, which falls short of understanding, something we can’t really demand and might not be possible anyway.

To have a gender identity of this sort is a form of game playing. That’s not to say that it is unimportant, or that the feelings about gender that the game reveals do not matter. They do. But the friend calling me “she” is gendering me, not (simply) misgendering me, and the game’s ability to affect how one gets gendered in this sense is quite limited. What one would really like to be able to do is to select at will how one is perceived by others, and failing at that, we adopt a social pact by which we give verbal recognition to our desire to be perceived in a particular way. This falls short not because it’s wrong to have feelings about one’s gender or to want to be seen in one way rather than another, but because the power of this discourse to transform even ourselves is too limited. Every day I try in myriad ways, mostly unconscious, to be read as a woman and to act appropriately for one. The gender identity game is not just too weak to reliably elicit the correct pronouns from my friends, it’s not even sufficient to aid me in directing my own actions. If I had the ability to manipulate the minds of people around me, I would probably try to get them to see me as more of a woman, rather than as less of one. So I can’t even seem to want what I want to want.

In her essay On Liking Women, Andrea Long Chu evinces skepticism toward the whole game, stating that “what makes women like me transsexual is not identity but desire.”¹ Being trans, on this sort of view, is understood to be a particular kind of wanting something, where the desire one feels refuses being cashed out into one or another internalist theory of gender. Chu writes elsewhere that

A trans person is not a person whose gender does not “match” their sex; a trans person is quite simply a person who transitions. It is a thing one does, not a thing one is. This means that while trans identity has no cause, trans people will always have their reasons.²

While these reasons can be communicated and shared, they are not universals. My reasons for transitioning might well be different than Andrea Long Chu’s reasons, even if we desire the same thing. We’re in dangerous territory here, though, in that it’s tempting to think that desiring particular things is constitutive of varying trans identities. While we might assert nominatively that the desire to transition makes one trans, clearly the object of desire is more concrete than that for most of us. Chu, for example, describes the desire to become a woman, which she correctly takes to sit uncomfortably aside identitarian positions on gender. Most of the desires we associate with a trans identity exist somewhere downstream of this one; for instance, “transsexual women want bottom surgery because most women have vaginas.”³

Chu herself, after her own bottom surgery, explains her desire for it as stemming from the hope that it “would make [her] feel more like a woman.”⁴ This, it turns out, is the one thing the operation is unable to give her:

That night, in bed at my apartment, I wept. I wailed, actually, the way mothers do in ancient manuscripts. My voice, which I have over several years trained myself to lift and smooth, grew raw; at a certain point, it broke, like a woman’s water, and something low and hoarse and full of legs crawled up my throat and out of my mouth. The truth was, I didn’t feel any more like a woman. I felt exactly the same.⁵

The problem with wanting something that you can’t have is that that fact doesn’t stop you from wanting it. Chu’s issue is not that trans women are not women, that they lack some universal feature of female lives and bodies that cis women possess, but that no one, not even among cis women, has such a feature. The feminists among them are gratingly savvy about it:

They tell me that there is no universal experience of being a woman, except that no woman actually feels like a woman; they tell me that in fact, being a woman feels like nothing at all.⁶

Chu experiences this “nothing” as insecurity because her femaleness is perpetually in question. Cis women are women (even though no one is “really” a woman), but the status of trans women is always subject to challenge (even though no one is “really” not a woman). If women had some universally shared feature or experience, she might have it (or be able to get it), and thereby solidify in her own head, and for others, a female identity.

One begins to wonder at the significance of “feeling like a woman.” Wanting to feel like a woman and wanting to be a woman are distinct feelings, however connected they might be in practice. Which is primary? Is the transsexual woman’s need to feel like a woman the reason that she seeks to attain to universal signifiers of femininity, or is the desire to be a woman responsible for her seeking out the universal experience of feeling like a woman, which possession of certain female traits promises to give her?

I’m not sure I can answer this question on Chu’s behalf, but notice that even if the former answer is the correct one, the most plausible reason to think becoming more like a cis woman would result in one feeling more like a woman comes from the belief that cis women feel like women, and so obtaining a vagina (for example) would tend to make one feel more like one. On the latter interpretation, this connection is even more direct. If bottom surgery has the ability to make one feel like a woman, this is understood to be valuable not merely for its own sake, but because having this feeling would make one more of a woman. On either interpretation, being a woman is associated with the universal or shared experience of feeling like one.

In this we can detect an odd consequence of Andrea Long Chu’s emphasis on desire over and against identity. For Chu, her transness consists of a set of desires, in particular the desire to be a woman. Being a woman, for Chu’s purpose, involves attaining to certain putatively universal features of women’s experience, e.g. having a vagina, or “gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies.”⁷ Furthermore, these things aren’t merely desired for themselves, they’re desired because they’re taken to belong to women as a category. Feeling like a woman, whether desired intrinsically or as one of these possessions, must be understood in sweeping universal terms for the account to cohere. It is a shared trait of women to feel like women, perhaps even the most central such trait. Necessarily, then, we arrive back where we started, “feeling like a woman” being the cliched basis of trans female identification since time immemorial. These identification feelings turn out to be equally important to the story for Chu, they’re just harder to come by.

Consequentially, the naïve transgender woman who says she “feels like a woman” sets out by claiming to possess something that Andrea Long Chu desperately wants — a gender identity, in the sense I use this term above. While Chu’s view of trans experience is paradoxical, in that the desire at its heart cannot be satisfied, this doesn’t endanger it directly; transition is something one does, not something one is, after all, and even if you want the vagina, the lipstick, and so on in order to satisfy a desire that turns out to be impossible to satisfy, you can nonetheless get those things anyway, and enjoy them. But there is something odd about the return to identity after its demotion.

The obvious way to avoid this sort of paradox is to bite the bullet that Chu dodges again and again; it is not merely the case that transsexuals desire bottom surgery because they want to feel more like women, as Chu rather carefully says she does, but because they believe bottom surgery will make them literally be women, or at least more fully women than they were before. Were this transmedicalist view correct, transsexuals would no longer be seeking something impossible, something that circles back to identity. Rather, we would be seeking something possible; you would get your surgery, and the journey would end. Most of us reject this view because it’s exclusionary and bad politics, but that doesn’t inherently make it incorrect. I take Andrea Long Chu’s essays to show us that the view is wrong not from the standpoint of academic feminism, but experientially, in the most deeply personal way someone could take this journey.

Just as clearly, one could resolve the paradox with a transphobic view. There is some universal female quality, but it is one that most or all cis women possess while most or all trans women do not, and cannot. Part of what I find moving about Chu’s take on the trans woman’s condition is that even these features are ruthlessly catalogued and made the potential objects of trans desire. Feminists tell Chu that “teenage girls don’t have the kind of slumber parties they appear to have in films, or when they do, they don’t paint their toenails, and if they did, the polish would stick to the bedsheets.” Yet what many trans women want is a history, a past girlhood that does not and cannot exist.⁸ More explicitly transphobic narratives, centering reproductive biology for example, are perhaps too implausible to take seriously, but are common sites for frustrated desire notwithstanding.

We might take the identitarian perspective not as an alternative to Chu’s own, but as a resolution to the paradox with a fairy tale ending. On this reading, the feeling that one is a woman is such a central feature of women’s shared experience that it is a sufficient condition of being a woman, and since trans women (on this view) are taken to share this feeling, they are women very simply and directly. You get to have your cake, and eat it.

Chu objects to the view that transness is about identity in this way because she takes trans women to want more than to be “valid” in holding female identities. They want to be women, where that requires some universalized notion of what a woman is, and leads us to the paradox of unfulfillable desire as we’ve seen. It’s ironic, then, that feeling oneself to be a woman could be exactly that sort of universal, even on Chu’s view. After all, if trans women felt the way that identitarians say that they do, they would not just have “valid” gender identities, but would literally be women in the robust sense that Chu says they want, because they would share this universal feature of women’s experience. Of course, being a woman could involve wanting other things (in the sense that a cis woman might want a neovagina if she was, hypothetically, born without one), but the fundamental tension at the heart of the trans experience would be resolved.

While Chu never says this directly, the reason not to take this line seems to be simply that it is wrong and the feminist critics are right. The same fact that creates the paradox of trans desire is also, strangely enough, the reason we ought to dismiss the identitarian view. If the only universal experience of womanhood is not feeling like a woman, then identitarian views premised on the notion that trans women feel like women falter at their very first step. Faced with the impossibility of feeling like a woman, Chu reframes the issue: “I don’t want what [cis women] have, I want the way in which [they] don’t have it.” So at the end of the day, we have to face up to the non-reality of “woman” as a universal category.

While perhaps this argument succeeds, I want to offer something different, more along the lines of Chu’s demonstration of bottom surgery’s inadequacy for resolving the paradox of trans desire. The problem with universals is that the reality of much trans experience (certainly mine) is too complex to brook them. In short, if there were a universal category of woman, I would probably not be in it.

This claim is certainly not a problem for Andrea Long Chu’s view. For her, universals are never preconditions: it’s okay to have none of them because being trans is about what you want, not what you have. So one might be a trans “woman” even if there were a category of women and you were not part of it. No problem there. While plausible, I find this claim extraordinarily unhelpful. In practice, the knowledge that something lies eternally out of reach serves as a barrier to one coming to want it, if not an impermeable one.

Furthermore, while Chu explicitly counterposes identity and desire, endorsing the latter as the basis of her transness, the former is perhaps the most widely accepted universal condition of women. “Women” may tell Chu that no one feels like a woman, but the uncomfortable fact remains that many people do believe that women feel themselves to be women. You will be hard pressed to find a trans woman visiting a psychiatrist or endocrinologist for the first time who readily admits that she doesn’t feel like a woman.

This suggests that universals, while intelligible as objects of desire and thus as formative pieces of a trans identity, can also serve as impediments to trans self-identification. I don’t feel like a woman; I don’t know what it means to feel like a woman. I expect I never will. To the extent that, as on identitarian views, attaining to some universal condition of womanhood is taken to be a precondition for identification as a trans woman, my coming to see myself as trans is made incoherent. When I accepted this essentialist view, I couldn’t countenance the idea that I was trans for exactly that reason.

Discovering that no one really feels like a woman, that no one is a woman in any sense that can be universalized, was a necessary step in my becoming a woman myself. It freed my desire from the trap of identity, allowing me to act to get the things I wanted that were within my reach.

I’m skeptical that experiences and bodily attributes have to be understood as universals for the desire for them to take on a trans character. Someone who wants to become a woman in the early 1950s, for example, might aspire to become a homemaker because most women were homemakers (in fact only about a third of women were in the U.S. labor force at that time⁹), but identifying with the lives of women in this way need not imply that one understands homemaking to belong to women as a class, nor does it mean that one is uncritical of the patriarchal impositions that kept many women at home. As Chu points out, a trans woman’s desire to have a vagina goes beyond an aesthetic preference; one wants a vagina because most women have them. Yet a woman can want to become more typical for women without thinking that she will become more of a woman by doing so, even though this inclination (or sometimes obligation) to adhere to a particular norm is inextricably bound up with what it means to be gendered.

What we’re left with, when we abandon essentialist notions of womanhood, is quite a lot. We do not get much say over our genders, but some pathways have recently been opened. Someone who desires to become a woman and decides to transition can achieve a female identity not because she already has the correct gender feelings in her head, or because she obtains the right type of body, but because she performs the dance steps of an intricate choreography through our social space. One might even, in taking these steps, become a woman despite not wanting to be one. Life as a (trans) woman is more than just an identity, it is for now a real possibility, a life you can have and a person you can be. As Chu writes,

On the contrary, if there is any lesson of gender transition—from the simplest request regarding pronouns to the most invasive surgeries—it’s that gender is something other people have to give you. Gender exists, if it is to exist at all, only in the structural generosity of strangers. When people today say that a given gender identity is “valid,” this is true, but only tautologically so. At best it is a moral demand for possibility, but it does not, in itself, constitute the realization of this possibility. The truth is, you are not the central transit hub for meaning about yourself, and you probably don’t even have a right to be. You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance.¹⁰

While Andrea Long Chu and I are both women, and both women as a result of patterns of desire that caused us to choose transition, she began with the desire to be a woman, and that’s something I continue to feel mostly indifferent about. Gender exists not only in the structural kindness of others but in their implacability, confusion, and apathy as well. When, and how, we get to make choices about our genders depends not merely on kindness or cruelty but instead remains the subject of a political struggle.

I became a woman because that was the only thing it seems strangers could give me; there was no other off-ramp for my transition. In that way I, just like Andrea Long Chu, wanted something impossible, and this desire for something I can’t have continues to inform how I understand myself as a gendered being. If our culture had third (or additional) genders, maybe I would live under one of them. A world where I don’t have to feel like a woman is a world where I can be one, and I’m happy that inasmuch as I’m not able to be anything else, I’m at least allowed that.