Suppose performing a gender other than that which you were assigned at birth is what it means to be “true to yourself”. Suppose also that travelling is the thing that brings you the greatest joy in life: you work tirelessly to save up the funds to travel, you’ve declined otherwise amazing jobs specifically because they don’t allow for remote work, etc. Now suppose you want to travel to a place where anyone not conforming to cisgender, heterosexual norms is not only considered weird, but unwelcome — or even a criminal. What, here, is the right answer?

My view is that there is none. From my perspective, performance of gender is not so different to performance of anything else: this all boils down to an Expected Value calculation. The obvious options are either to stop performing your preferred gender for the duration of the trip, or simply accept that you will not be able to visit that part of the world safely. This is little different to people from countries that practice free speech going to places that practice heavy-handed censorship: you just have to mind what you say for a few weeks.

Further ramblings

Suppose you decide to travel.

Now, within the context of gender, one thing adds an additional layer of complication: Hormone Replacement Therapy. Things like clothes, jewelry, and speech patterns are rarely permanent (tattoos aside, one might argue). On HRT, however, this is not the case, and some changes are irreversible: the voice changing upon taking testosterone, or breasts growing due to taking estrogen.

Now, one may argue that, if gender is performative, then hormones (i.e. the biological aspect) should be irrelevant. But Butler’s theory of gender performativity, as so many social concepts (including language itself), goes both ways: you may say you are performing a gender, and this may be true in your reality, but for it to be true in the collective social reality society must also say it to be true. That is, society (or the majority of its participants) must agree to label you the gender you claim to be performing; in effect producing a performative utterance: “This an X.”

So let’s say you spent the first 18 years of your life as a boy, and your society reciprocated this; you also went through a testosterone-dominant puberty. That is, you say you’re a boy, you “perform as a boy” (i.e. wear clothes stereotypically associated with boys, do associated activities, wear certain scents…); and society as a whole calls you a boy, and those in charge raise you as a boy (in effect reinforcing your performance as a boy). Having reached the age of 18, you decide to stop performing as a boy: you begin a course of estrogen-oriented HRT with a view to performing as a girl immediately.

Naturally, then, your performance changes immediately, and your utterances also change immediately: instead of saying “I am a boy” you say “I am a girl”. What of society and the law, then?

Socially, it’s common to speak of “passing”; legally, concepts like gender recognition certificates and other procedures to change one’s legal gender exist.

The concept of passing is an interesting one because here the goalposts can move quite drastically depending on the context. Most obviously, there are fewer hurdles to passing when fully dressed on the street than when being intimate with a partner.

In many instances, it is possible to perform as one’s new social gender indefinitely, even if one’s legal gender has not yet been changed: most jurisdictions don’t allow normal civilians to demand to see your identity documents.

Problems may arise, then, when identity documents do come into play: what if the person in charge of renewing some document for you looks at you and doesn’t believe that you’re the gender that your document states? Might you be accused of using a stolen identity? Even if the accusation is later dropped, this still represents considerable time, and possibly money, spent fighting the matter.

Suppose you travel somewhere that exclusively has very narrow definitions of gender: the classical, biologically-motivated categories of “male” and “female”. If you pass socially, but your social presentation is incongruous with your legal presentation, you may be questioned at the border: is this really you? Awfully large breasts for a male. Now you’re in potentially unfamiliar territory and perhaps without your usual social network to support you. (Even worse if you’re in a straight relationship, according to your social presentation of gender, travelling with your partner to a jurisdiction where homosexuality is illegal: even if you and your partner choose to present this as a straight relationship, every other party involved might not.)

Suppose you pass both socially and legally, but not — under the classical, biologically-motivated binary definition — anatomically. You step into an X-ray machine for a full-body scan (e.g. airport security) and, all of a sudden, your destination society declines to agree with what you claim is your gender. Does trouble await?

It seems the only way to maximise your chances of success globally, if you choose to transition in a binary model, is by going all-in: self-directed presentation, social presentation, legal presentation, and anatomical presentation.

And all that just for a binary model of gender.

Indeed, the world is small for some people, and not necessarily in the way Disney had in mind.