A good deal of it isn't social though. Male and female faces, for example, look different and it's not just because of makeup.
People who go through a medical transition take hormones to help be more comfortable looking at themselves in a mirror. This is because some differences are biological. Like the innate biological drive most of us have to gravitate towards things normally considered male or female.
I was responding specifically to the question of why someone would feel the need to medically transition
if gender is a social construct. I'm explaining how
a social construct can influence people's decisions about their physical appearance. Like I said, I'm speaking broadly and sociologically, so I can't really account for every individual instance of why a certain person desires to look a certain way - I can only say that there are
sociological factors that
can influence these things to a degree.
The aim should never be to assume "so and so person has made themselves look this way because of social pressure", but to alleviate the social pressure enough that "so and so looks this way because it's the way they want themselves to look". This is why I'm a gender abolitionist. I want people to
not be influenced by social factors, or feel that they HAVE to appear a particular way, in order to be accepted for who they are.
To use the unfortunate analogy that has been used elsewhere in this thread, I want people to be able to accept that sometimes a man in a dress is just a man in a dress, not necessarily a trans woman. Of course, as long as we live in a society in which these ideas of codes and standards are endemic, it's extremely difficult to extricate "wears dresses and makeup" from signifying "being feminine" or "a woman", but I would hope it's not impossible.
