https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNe3kaovC/

If I see another ad for makeup, I SWEAR…

On this subject, a question: which gendered products would you say are better than their counterparts, and why?

I’ll go first: woman’s shampoo and conditioner. The fact that they’re split allows the application of one and/or the other when you need it, where you need it. Not every hair needs both, and some just need conditioner on the tips, not at the roots. There’s only 2 in 1 (or even 3 in 1, the horror) in the men’s section.

"The diagnosis of gender dysphoria requires that a life takes on a more or less definite shape over time; a gender can only be diagnosed if it meets the test of time. You have to show that you have wanted for a long time to live life as the other gender; it also requires that you prove that you have a practical and livable plan to live life for a long time as the other gender.

The diagnosis, in this way, wants to establish that gender is a relatively permanent phenomenon. It won’t do, for instance, to walk into a clinic and say that it was only after you read a book by Kate Bornstein that you realized what you wanted to do, but that it wasn’t really conscious for you until that time. It can’t be that cultural life changed, that words were written and exchanged, that you went to events and to clubs, and saw that certain ways of living were really possible and desirable, and that something about your own possibilities became clear to you in ways that they had not been before. You would be ill-advised to say that you believe that the norms that govern what is a recognizable and livable life are changeable, and that within your lifetime, new cultural efforts were made to broaden those norms, so that people like yourself might well live within supportive communities as a transsexual, and that it was precisely this shift in the public norms, and the presence of a supportive community, that allowed you to feel that transitioning had become possible and desirable.

In this sense, you cannot explicitly subscribe to a view that changes in gendered experience follow upon changes in social norms, since that would not suffice to satisfy the Harry Benjamin standard rules for the care of gender identity disorder. Indeed, those rules presume, as does the GID diagnosis, that we all more or less 'know' already what the norms for gender—'masculine' and 'feminine'—are and that all we really need to do is figure out whether they are being embodied in this instance or some other.

But what if those terms no longer do the descriptive work that we need them to do? What if they only operate in unwieldy ways to describe the experience of gender that someone has? And if the norms for care and the measures for the diagnosis assume that we are permanently constituted in one way or another, what happens to gender as a mode of becoming? Are we stopped in time, made more regular and coherent than we necessarily want to be, when we submit to the norms in order to achieve the entitlements one needs, and the status one desires?"

• Judith Butler, Undoing Gender