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We often think of dress as a costume: something that we put on over our internal self, which might reflect or obscure our true identity, but never reshape it. But while the distinction between ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’ is a useful teaching tool, helping to underscore the point that we can’t tell anyone’s gender just from looking at them – I use it myself every time I deliver trans awareness training – the reality of our experience is often more complex. My own dress both reflects and reshapes my gender: sometimes it’s the case that I put on jewellery and a bright, fitted cardigan because I’m feeling less male and more non-binary on that particular morning, but sometimes the reverse is true. Both kinds of gendered experience are equally true for me: my gender isn’t less authentic because a pair of dangly earrings can change how it feels.

— Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam (Page 149)

One key reason that these standards of realness aren’t useful for looking outside our immediate cultural and historical context is because of the way they rely on asserting our deep, internal sense of gender. In order to prove our realness, we emphasise how strongly we feel ourselves to be male, female or non-binary on the inside. We draw a clear distinction between this internal gender identity and external factors like gender expression or gender roles. This internal/external distinction is essential to representing how we understand ourselves, and it’s essential to combating arguments like those of Stuart Waiton, which see trans people as motivated by a desire to conform to gender stereotypes in our external appearance and behaviour. But the problem is that this internal/external distinction doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, not everyone (in the past or in the present) understands themselves as having a core, stable internal self that remains the same at all times: there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that this understanding of selfhood is culturally specific and, in Western Europe and the USA, dates back only to the late eighteenth century.58 For another, people can have multiple motivations at once: a person in the past who was assigned female at birth and presented as male for a term in the army might well have been motivated both by a desire to overcome patriarchal assumptions about women’s roles and by the affirmation they drew from being seen as male, and might well have struggled to separate the two (I’d challenge anyone today to separate out the internal and external motivations for the way they present themselves). For another, external gender expression can impact or reshape the way we feel inside, whether temporarily or permanently. And for another, even if someone’s motivations for disrupting gender are completely external, their history still demonstrates the viability of moving – whether for an hour or a lifetime – away from the gender we were assigned at birth, providing a powerfully liberating precedent for all of us.

— Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam (Page 46)