Transgenderism has become a new territory for hot debate and controversy. Whether we are talking about the use of public bathrooms to a new gender ideology being taught in public schools, there is bound to be widespread disagreement about the transgender phenomenon. This will be the last piece within certain fields of science where certain philosophical questions and issues linger. There will be a few questions that are crucial for understanding this issue. This questions will involve the nature of sexuality, gender, rights, and identity among several others.

How should we understand the concern of gender reassignment surgery? For space constraints, I’m not going to delve into the consequences of gender reassignment surgery since that would require an empirical study. I’m primarily interested in the philosophical questions that one might encounter in the field of medicine as it specifically relates to transgenderism.

I will illustrate two competing views about transgenderism. One view says that a person has the right to identify as one gender, another, or no gender at all. One reason in support of this view is because gender is either a social or individual construction or perhaps both. If this view is correct, then technically there’s no objectively correct “gender” because that would imply that a person can fail to make the right identification.

A second way of looking at this, from the view of those who support the transgender view, is a general view of the good life. The “good life” is generally about what makes for a humanly fulfilling life. Does a person discover what the good life is all about or does he define it? If the good life can be defined subjectively, then it can be linked to how a person identifies himself or herself. Basically, it is the view that gender and the good life can be defined by each person for themselves.

To build off the first paragraph, there are two rival metaphysical (having to do with what is real) theories about gender that could be the central mark of where the disagreement ultimately lies. There are constructionism and essentialism. Constructionism states that gender is a construct. It would be constructed by the individual and/or by the society he/she lives. This would imply a separation between one’s biological sex and gender identity. One is a fact of science in the field of biology and one is a fact of the self as it has been defined by the individual.

The second view called essentialism is the view that there are essential characteristics or features that make a certain gender what it is. For example, this view says that there are characteristics of maleness that are exclusively tied to being a man and likewise a woman. These characteristics are not invented or constructed but are discovered.

The outcome of this view is that we can make - to varying degrees - groups of opposite genders based on their natural characteristics. You can roughly call this view "Natural Kinds." It’s the idea that certain biological things can be naturally grouped together and separated based on certain differences and commonalities they have. What this view implies is that a person cannot define his or her gender and thus can be wrong about how they view themselves.

One last issue I would like to discuss briefly is about gender reassignment surgery. Once again, with respect to this issue - and which could apply to the issue of abortion in certain cases - there can be at least two opposite ways of understanding what surgery is. On one hand, surgery is the act of attempting to restore the body to its proper functioning. An alternative view is that surgery is the act of changing certain features of one’s body for certain interests or desires.

A couple of examples can illuminate the first understanding of surgery. Heart surgery, leg amputation, and even brain operations on the fetus in its development are all attempting to fix a certain problem and to enable the body - with outside aid - to function the way it’s supposed to.

The first view also assumes a few things about the nature of the body that could potentially be hotly contested such as: (1) The body has an objective, empirically detectable function that determines its trajectory. We can call this the body’s telos. Second, the body - according to this view - has built-in ways of how it should operate that are not determined by external factors.

Basically in a nutshell, what the body’s purpose and its inherent capacities that set the limits for how it should operate indicate that there is a proper and improper way of how one can use his body. According to the first view on the transgenderism issue as well as the view that one’s gender is based on his biological sex, that implies that one’s psychological ego or self should conform to the reality of one’s sex rather than the other way around.

On the other hand, surgery can involve changing certain features of one’s body for the purpose of fulfilling certain desires or interests. For example, one might choose to undergo plastic surgery which is specifically intended to fulfill certain cosmetic or aesthetic desires. A woman might choose plastic surgery because she’s unhappy with how her face looks. Another example would be abortion. Abortion is an act on the unborn and the woman’s body. Thus, it could count as surgery in a rather loose sense.

However, even though abortion is different from gender reassignment surgery, they both share at least one thing in common. They’re both acts on the woman’s body for the purpose of a potentially fulfilled desire that inherently has nothing to do with how her body is designed to function. For the abortive surgeries, I am not including surgeries that are intended to save her life but one’s that are done because they conflict with her interests about having a career, traveling the world, and so forth. None of these reasons are exclusively health-related reasons but are personal reasons.

As it relates to gender reassignment surgery, the person is seeking to make his or her body align with their gender self identification. Just as they have adopted a constructionist view of gender, one could say they have also adopted one for their genitalia in particular. The purpose for their genitalia lies not in its distinctive/internal capacities and its overall connection to the body as a whole but in the interests of the person. The purpose has become external rather than internal.

As I hope you have seen, one’s view about the nature of the body, truth about gender and its relationship to biological sex, and what surgery actually is can impact how one understands or what one believes about those who seek to have gender reassignment surgery.

This is the last piece on how certain philosophical questions lurk in different fields of science that any scientific major or lover should consider as he or she think about their area of passion.