'What Makes You Different From Someone Who Thinks He's Napoleon?'
We can recognize the question as unanswerable — but that doesn't mean there's no possible retort.
About 20 years ago, a fellow trans man and I noted that sometimes people ask: “What makes you, a transsexual, different from someone who believes he's Napoleon?”
The tone and agenda of this question are often aggressively anti-trans, but that isn't what my friend and I were talking about. We were wondering — assuming the question were to be asked in any sort of real way — if we could provide any sort of real answer. Or, alternatively, if we could at least give a conversational reply that would make this question flutter away.
About the question, he confided, “I never know what to say to that,” and I couldn't offer a pat answer either.
Leaving this particular question unanswered didn’t undermine our lives. Asking whether our lives as trans men resembled deluded people's self-perceptions "as Napoleon" felt irrelevant to us. It felt like the wrong question. But we couldn't explain why.
After many years, I think I've finally got the right framing.
Maybe all of life is a dream
Here's an ancient philosophical question that's been asked all over the world: "How can you be sure that everything you perceive, feel, and think isn't a delusion?" Taking this broad unanswerable philosophical question and plugging in the example of "trans people" doesn't make the question's overall nature specific to trans people. Nor should the burden of answering it fall disproportionately on trans people. The burden falls, perhaps, on the person who wants to know, and that person really ought to start by coming up with reality-assessment standards for their own perceptions, feelings, and thoughts before they bother anyone else with a reality-check. This is a question that could be asked equally of everyone, and anyone who's worried about it is free to try to answer it.
(It doesn't really have an answer. No matter what reality-check you come up with, someone can always say: "And how do you know that isn't imaginary?")
Just a bit more specific is the question: "How do you know that you, as a 'self,' are distinct from everything else?" This is a common question in Buddhism. Alan Watts, who popularized Zen in the West, pointed out in What is Zen? that "the hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests."
After all, we're part of our surroundings, depending on the angle from which you look. Exactly what do we mean when we say we are ourselves and not someone (or something) else? Again, this question applies equally to everyone.
When a human seeks expertise and authority
The “Napoleon” challenge is an artifact of a society that has historically labeled transgender identity as a mental disorder and has required trans people to seek out supposed experts who are authorized to grant or deny us permission to live in our genders. When someone asks a trans person, "What makes you different from someone who believes he's Napoleon?," they're asking how they can position themselves as experts in the pathologization of trans people and as authorities within the permission structure. They're asking: "How do I recognize if your transness is genuine, and why should I allow you to live in your gender?"
The question erupts from the sudden recognition that the concept of trans implies the concept of cis. Trans and cis are complementary; those ideas stick to each other.
When people become aware of this dyad, they often want to pick a side. The questioner might be anxious at considering the possibility that they could be trans and be eager to assure themselves that they're cis.
Beyond that — once they've accepted their cisness, even if not the word "cis" — the questioner is likely anxious about how, in their encounter with a trans person, they're going to perform their role as a cis person. They want to extract some knowledge from the trans person and wield it against other trans people by pretending to judge who's "really" trans and treating them accordingly. This is the underlying anxiety: If the cis person can't be dominant over trans people, what, then, is a cis person's role? What is cisness, if not evaluating transness and approving or rejecting it?
Answer that question with another question
Our philosophical questions become oppressive when we forget that we ourselves are nothing: no-thing. We shouldn't dare to reduce someone else to a no-thing without first doing the same for ourselves. I mean that the only real place for such a question is a meditation class in which we seriously do our own meditation before opening our mouths to declare that no one is anything. Humility too easily converts to its opposite: the more we virtue-signal our humility, the more arrogant we appear.
That said: If someone else poses such a question to you, I guess you're allowed to reply with a question.
If the question is “What makes you different from someone who believes he's Napoleon?”, we can recognize it as unanswerable in a deep sense — but that doesn't mean there's no possible retort.
Taking a tip from Zen, the best reply may be: "Who is the person who is asking?"
