Cis- en transgender: Performativiteit als lichamelijke en sociale gewoonte

In this article, I argue that habit formation provides a good starting point
to understand gender identity. Judith Butler’s concept of ‘performativity’
indicates that gender identity comes about through a process of social and
linguistic repetition of normative representations of gender. The phenomenological notion of ‘habitual identity’ that Maren Wehrle (2021) suggests, complements this notion of performativity, but should be complemented with a psychic aspect to attain a completer notion of performativity.
Understanding performativity in terms of habit formation seemingly also
has a downside: does it not lead to repetition of the same in an environment
of predominantly cis and binary gender identities? What does this mean
now that more and more people identify as trans or non-binary? I argue
that performativity does not necessarily involve the reproduction of cis
and binary gender identities, because it includes the possibility of variation
from the norm. While cis implies that body, identity and social ascriptions
coincide, in the case of trans there are discontinuities between these three.
Rather than considering cis and trans as opposites, performativity means
understanding both as variations, of which the discontinuities between
body, self and social ascriptions are more difficult to live.