One might think that since the prevalent scholarly view in trans and queer studies is thoroughly grounded in a sophisticated social constructivism, and since voluntarism implicitly relies on the concept of a self-grounding will (contra constructivism), we could simply look beneath surface rhetoric to discover what people actually mean when they say something like “each person has the right to express their gender in any way that feels most comfortable.” However, I believe that it is not mere literalism to theoretically assess some of the politically strategic language we use to argue for more expansive freedoms. While arguing for individual rights to expansive expressions of gender and sexuality is politically effective, our rhetoric carries other political (side) effects. Among other things, arguments from individual liberties leave us open to anti-trans screeds that charge trans people and their allies with being interested only in individual liberties and not with collective liberation. Worse, since how we think about things in some ways determines our practices, we might begin to practice harmful voluntarism. A core danger here would be attending more to individual access to the tools of liberation than to the collective transformation; this is dangerous not because people shouldn’t have tools for liberation, including hormones, clothing, and surgeries, but because of the distribution of access under social relations of oppression. Since possessive individualism comes freighted with histories of capitalist exploitation, imperialism, and racism, we ought to be particularly careful about invoking it for liberatory ends.

Liberalism will not save us.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 180)