  In considering the metaphysics of sex/gender transition (i.e. transition from man to woman or woman to man), Christine Overall (2009), critiques two accounts of it. Both accounts agree that, in a way, there is no change of sex/gender at all. One remains the sex/gender one always was. She calls both of these “masquerade hypotheses” (12). In the first version, adopted usually by (some) nontrans people, the trans person who transitions from one sex/gender to another is merely donning a mask or engaging in a pretense that effectively hides what they always really were (the “true person”). In such a view, the trans person is represented as either deceptive or deluded. In the second version, adopted usually by (some) trans people, the trans person who transitions is merely becoming what they always already were, through pulling off a kind of bodily mask which fails to express what they are “on the inside” (the “true person”). In both accounts, sex/gender is invariant. Rather than changing sex/gender, one either moves into the state of masquerade or out of it. Overall argues that both the delusion and deception are implausibly applied to the diverse lives of all trans people and, indeed, belied by the lives of many trans people (13-14). She rejects the second masquerade account on the grounds that it relies on a suspect metaphysics (14-18).