‘Is’ and ‘ought’: How the American trans rights movement failed, and the tenuous path back to a limited success

I have drafted this essay literally dozens of times. As long drafts in my head, as an op-ed that got a very polite rejection letter, as various stale drafts on this blog, as a Mastodon thread I never posted, as an audio essay I never posted, as a video essay I never made. It started out as a commentary on the Dylan Mulvaney clusterfuck in 2023, built around the idea that trans visibility had been a bad thing. In the two years since, it’s become clear that that then-edgy take was in fact an understatement, that the trans community’s strategy for the past 15 years has been a continuous push in the wrong direction.

This essay will probably make some people mad, and that’s fine, but I do want people to get mad for the right reasons, so I want to stress a few things from the start:

First, the trans rights backslide in the US is primarily the fault of bad actors on the far right. That does not, however, mean that trans rights activists bear no responsibility in it. Pushback is the constant; we are the variable. Firefighters don’t get a free pass for letting a house burn down just because fire is inevitable.

Second, a lot of my analysis rests on my perception of what the median American thinks of trans people. Where possible, I’ve cited hard numbers for this. That is supplemented with my anecdotal observations on how cis people talk about trans people. I gave the least weight to politically self-selected discussions, and the most to conversations where non-ideologues brought up trans issues organically without being aware a trans person was present.¹ I also gathered anecdata by letting various cis people in my life (ranging from center-right to far-left) know that I wouldn’t judge them for expressing their honest opinions on trans issues, and then listening to what they had to say.

Third, I’ll stress a very important distinction: There is the way the world ought to be, and the way the world is. Political advocacy is about trying to bring the world closer to what you believe it ought to be. But the strategy behind that advocacy is based on the way the world is now. Well… or at least it ought to be.

With enough political moxie and enough banging of the table, you can at least briefly build a strategy that treats that ought as the is. You can insist really loudly that the planks of your platform are all basic common sense and that no sane or kind person would ever disagree, and you can make that the controlling dogma in spaces you control, and for a while it will look like you are leagues ahead of the opposition. That platform might be able to support tons upon tons of rhetorical weight. But one day the floor will give out.

---

In some ways I saw this coming, but in a lot of other ways I was as caught in the echo chamber as anyone else. The trans community of c. 2010–present has done a really good job at challenging outside binarist and cisnormative assumptions and normalizing trans-inclusive alternatives. Some things, like getting people to not refer to people with vaginas as women by default, never really caught on even among trans people, as much as people liked to pretend otherwise.² But a lot of things, like the idea that a transfeminine person’s genitals can be meaningfully feminine even if they haven’t had bottom surgery,³ or that you can call yourself a man or a woman even if hormones haven’t brought your body close to the binary expectation of that, have been tremendously effective memes (in the Dawkins sense) within our community. This has been, in a vacuum at least, a good thing. Trans people should feel comfortable in our bodies. We should feel safe to live the lives we want without having to meet cis people’s expectations of gender.

It’s one thing to change how your community sees things. Even in a large subculture it sometimes just takes a few determined advocates to change the collective understanding of something. But it’s not quite as easy with society at large. You can be very effective within your community at normalizing the idea that an AMAB person⁴ who has taken no outward steps toward transition, but has a “she/her” nametag on, is a woman. If your community really believes in that value enough, they will genuinely see her that way without having to put on any pretense.⁵ But no matter how affirming you are, nothing changes the fact that when she walks out the door of your trans safe space, she will be perceived as a man by everybody she meets.

That’s a sentence that will make a lot of trans people uncomfortable. For many of us, “Everyone thinks I’m a <other gender> and is just being nice” is a constant nagging fear. But this is where the is meets the ought. You can really strongly believe that that hypothetical transfem ought to be a considered a woman. That does not change the fact that she is not considered one.

The rotten foundation beneath the trans rights movement’s platform is perhaps best illustrated by the movement’s de facto motto: “Trans women are women and trans men are men.”⁶ Even within the trans community, this is not wholly uncontroversial, but it does have broad acceptance within the portion of the trans community that engages in any degree of gender discourse.

The movement has been very effective at evangelizing for this axiom. It underlies many government agencies and private entities’ policies on gender and sex. It has led to many online spaces considering it hate speech to call a trans woman a man or a trans man a woman. People get fired for disagreeing with trans women being women and trans men being men. In many circles, the taboo of that disagreement is entrenched alongside that of saying the N-word.⁷

And so, what percentage of Americans do you think agree that trans women are women and trans men are men? Better yet, what percentage of Americans do you think agree that at least some trans women aren’t men, and at least some trans men aren’t women?

Well, Pew Research has asked asked Americans three times whether a person can change their gender. The percentage who said yes was 44% in 2017, 41% in 2021, and 38% in 2022. Again, that’s not just agreement that trans women are women and trans men are men; that’s agreement with gender being even the slightest bit mutable. In the 2022 numbers, even among 18-to-29-year-olds it was only 50%. There was only one cohort that cracked 50%, that of Democrats and lean-Democrats. Their 61% may appear to be some solace, or evidence that this is all just the result of political polarization, but 3-in-5 is a remarkably low percentage of left-of-center people to agree with a view seen as non-negotiable in most progressive spaces.⁸

That is the floor. This is the sound of it falling.

We built ourselves safe spaces. We built ourselves a world where a woman was anyone who said she was a woman, a man anyone who said he was a man. Where someone who looked like a man to outsiders and only dated the same could call herself a lesbian and that was celebrated. We did all of that, and it was our right as a community. And then we told the rest of the country that they had to agree. And we told their bosses and the people who moderate their content that they had to agree. And they said “Bull. Fucking. Shit.”

Not just the diehard gender conservatives; also all the moderates and the silent majority who are politically indifferent—even the teenage girls I overheard at a Dunkin’ Donuts this winter chatting about how a former classmate was “actually a boy”. Teenage girls are rarely subtle about snark, and I heard none in their voices. They didn’t seem to have any problem with her having been born male. But once that was ascertained, there was no question about the right word for such a person: a boy. That’s your median American right there.

The trans community’s is was not the rest of America’s is. And to some, us foisting an ought on them just confirmed what they suspected: that we are an ideological movement.

Which we are.

---

While criticisms of “gender ideology” are rarely made in good faith, objections that there is no gender ideology are just as absurd. “Trans women are women and trans men are men” is an ideological statement. So is “misgendering is bad”. So is “gender exists as something distinct from sex”. Being ideological statements doesn’t mean that these are wrong or bad. But they are all ideological.

The trans rights movement was the most successful LGBTQ rights sub-movement in the U.S. until it was overtaken by the gay rights movement in the early 2010s. Starting with M.T. v. J.T. in 1976, the American trans rights movement had over 40 years of continuous progress in courts, in state legislatures, and with executive officials, before progress began to slow in 2016 and then to reverse in 2023. This approach was built on not advocating any one overarching ideology surrounding gender. Yes, it was centered on the transmedicalist argument that trans people were women trapped in men’s bodies or men trapped in women’s, but the considerable degree of associated medical gatekeeping kept that from being a general argument for trans validity, and it did not dwell too much on how much trans people were actually, ontologically, women and men, rather than people who were close enough to that that it was best to let them live as such.

In an impressive rhetorical feat, this played well both with more liberal views about gender liberation and more conservative views about traditional gender roles.⁹ There is a reason that since 2016, it’s been states trying to take away the existing right of trans people to use the restrooms of our choosing—a right that existed in every state in the country before then. The infamously antigay commentator Pat Robertson affirmed this “wrong body” approach to trans validity, even as he condemned trans rights activism in schools.

I was arguing with someone a while ago about the merits of the ideology-driven pivot in the movement’s strategy. They said that of course we need to convince people that trans women are women and trans men are men, because how else are people going to support our rights?

Well, we can look at that same Pew study. Despite the strong resistance to gender being even a little mutable, an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose deadnaming someone who has recently transitioned; misgendering is almost as unpopular.¹⁰ Mathematically, those majorities have to include almost half of the people who said that no, gender cannot change. Even in that cohort, no more than a two-sevenths minority actively support misgendering.

Americans don’t think you can change gender. Americans dislike misgendering trans people. Americans really dislike deadnaming trans people. Should this maybe suggest we’ve been doing something wrong?

---

America is an individualist country. You don’t really appreciate that till you move to a country that isn’t, and see just how much deference Americans give to people’s desires to do whatever they want. Collectivist arguments usually fall flat; this is why even basic vaccine compliance proves so difficult.

The old argument for trans rights harnessed that individualist energy, and harnessed the paradox that, for all of this country’s institutional hatred of the other, its people like the chance to help someone in need. Government officials backed quiet trans rights victories because it was the right thing to do and was compatible with their own gender worldview. But after the LGB rights movement’s victory in Obergefell—securing LGB Americans a right to marriage that most trans Americans had already had for decades—a floodgate opened of Democratic donor money, here to liberate a people who had been making steady, if slow, progress all on our own.

Almost overnight, trans rights was political. And the face of that political cause célèbre was a bunch of kids from Tumblr and Twitter—myself included—with a lot of radical ought thoughts about how to build a movement and not a lot of exposure to the is of anywhere other than our own spaces.

We put forth an ideology: Gender isn’t sex. Trans women are women and trans men are men. If you disagree with this you’re a bigot. Any distinctions between trans and cis people of the same gender are offensive.¹¹ Any obstacles in the way of transition, under any circumstances, at any age, are violence.

And shockingly, for whatever reason, the Democratic party leaders who ignored our generation’s voices on just about everything else not just listened to us but parroted us.

I say this in the past tense because that iteration of the trans rights movement is dead. Association with partisan politics was the death blow for an already unpopular ideology. We had a chance, maybe, if we’d realized that “We don’t have to earn civil rights” is a nice idea in theory, but not one that is actually true in a democracy. We had a chance, maybe, if we had walked away from the “reach” goals like trans women in women’s sports, something that was always more an interest of cis people than trans people to begin with. We had a chance, maybe, if we’d realized that between mass media’s portrayal of trans women as prostitutes and deviants, and the transfeminine Internet’s portrayal of trans women as sex addicts and deviants, when we said “let kids transition”, what the median American voter heard was “turn children into whores”, which may be the only instance of a major political movement forcefully grabbing the highest-voltage third rail in American politics—children’s sexuality—with both hands and refusing to let go.

But instead we doubled down, tripled down, demanded nothing less than total ideological conformity, cancelled people—even our own people, often our own people—who departed from the orthodoxy in the most trivial of ways, or even kept the company of those who did.¹²

And so those moderates left. They found a separate peace apart from the trans rights movement, apart from the mainstream trans community, faded into the cis world much like the stealth transsexuals of the 1970s. And maybe that they is becoming a we. As the rump trans rights movement flails and gasps for relevance in a country that is closer to “Why don’t we kill them all?” than to “Let’s give them more rights”, I find it harder and harder to be in those spaces. It’s an almost messianic level of misplaced optimism—surely if we yell loud enough, informed-consent puberty-blockers will still happen.

Within years or maybe even months, there will be no trans women in American women’s sports. There will be no pediatric transition, or it will be heavily gatekept to the degree of a rounding error. Legal acceptance of trans women as women and trans men as men will continue to deteriorate. Some of this will hit less hard in blue states, but I’m not too confident about that.¹³

This is our starting point for plotting a way forward. These are the things we must accept we will not get in the best-case scenario, not in this political generation. Consider that the LGBTQ grooming conspiracy theory kicked off in 2022, about 30 years after the peak of America’s last obsession with non-existent widespread child abuse, the Satanic Panic. If that’s about the interval at which our society forgets its own culture-war history, we can anticipate the mid-2050s as the time at which more radically pro-trans ideas will again have a fighting chance.

---

So what, we give up? Detransition? Flee the country?

No.¹⁴ I think there’s a way forward. There are two arguments—still ideological, but much more ecumenically so—that seem to have reasonably broad pan-ideological appeal in the U.S.

One is the bogeyman of the modern trans movement for the past decade: transmedicalism, the idea that some women are trapped in men’s bodies and some men are trapped in women’s bodies, as can be determined by medical professionals.

Let’s be clear, I am everything transmedicalists dread. I don’t consider myself a woman, except in the broadest sense of “someone who is generally perceived as a woman”. I went on HRT at 23, through an informed consent clinic where I readily told the doctor I didn’t think I was a woman. I am indifferent about pronoun use, and while I can get somewhat gender dysphoric if put in a very masculine role, the same is true to some degree if put in a very feminine role. For me, transition is a decision about how I present, not who I am inside.

In the ought world, we would build trans rights around people like me as the lowest common denominator, with everyone else conveniently included. But in the is world, I think transmedicalists have the only winning argument to actually be considered the gender they identify as in any formal context in this country, in this decade. Because whether or not their argument ought to be any better than any other, it is, according to the people whose opinions matter.

The other argument with some traction is the idea that trans people are a third gender. This isn’t the same as being nonbinary: People who oppose trans rights tend to oppose nonbinary rights even more.¹⁵ And yet, anecdotally I’ve found they’re often fairly open to the idea that a trans woman, while she might not be a woman, isn’t a man either. Because, let’s be clear, here we’re talking about who should be formally considered a man or a woman, but when it comes to who’s socially considered a man or a woman, society has already decided: a man is someone who looks like a man, and a woman is someone who looks like a woman. And unless someone is a hardcore ideologue, it’s hard for them to look at someone who looks like a woman and internalize that that person is a man: This is why it’s hard for non-outwardly-transitioning people to be accepted outside trans spaces, as discussed before, but it’s also why people like Ben Shapiro sometimes forget to misgender passable trans women. So, appealing to this sensibility—saying that someone born male who looks like a woman may or may not be a woman, but she sure isn’t a man—I think has some legs. At the very least, it has a better chance of convincing anyone than insisting she’s a woman as a matter of dogma.

Combine this with the fact that Americans have a soft spot for individual self-determination (at least for adults) and like keeping the government out of private life, and you have a second, broader tranche to the transmedicalist argument that people like Jo Ellis are trying to bring back into the mainstream.¹⁶

And so the narrative I think would best serve us for the foreseeable future is this:

• Essentially Ellis’s argument: There are some people who can be described as women born in men’s bodies or men born in women’s bodies (whether or not one agrees they are literally women and men respectively), essentially a kind of “intersex of the mind”. This can be diagnosed by a doctor based on persistent and serious gender dysphoria. In most cases it makes sense to treat them as the gender their brains want to be, although exceptions do arise.
• But with this addendum: Some other people want to live as a gender that doesn’t match their sex at birth. Some are nonbinary; some are binary but don’t experience that same kind of dysphoria. It’s a free country and adults should be allowed to do what we want, including being allowed to get medical care without politicians meddling. In cases where it’s necessary to record someone’s gender, treat these people as a third category, like “T” for “trans”. In cases where a binary choice is needed, individual entities should decide whether it makes more sense to consider presentation, sex at birth, current genital sex, or some combination. When those are private entities, it shouldn’t be the government’s place to tell them which to pick.¹⁷

There are some obvious objections to this, such as that it creates a two-tiered system to trans validity (where even the higher tier still lacks full validity), that it openly invites bureaucratic misgendering, and that it all but completely abandons trans youth.

I know. Believe me I know. I haven’t written 3,700 words on this because this is what I want. I’ve written this because I think it’s the best we can do. There’s no outcome where we win the battles I’m saying we should forfeit. None. The U.S. is currently choosing between whether it wants to be a stable-ish hard-right flawed democracy or an unstable far-right autocracy. Neither of those outcomes will get us back what we lost. And there will be no revolution. Not by the same American left that would rather eat its own for forgetting a trigger warning than throw a brick through a single window.

All we have left is finding an argument for our existence that fits in with a centrist-to-conservative worldview. That might not be the ought. But it’s the is.

---

Whew. That was intense. If you need to wind down your feelings right now, for a Slumdog Millionaire–style up-tempo palate cleanser I recommend “Instant Crush” by Daft Punk ft. Julian Casablancas.

Anyways, if you agreed with this, even if only kinda with a bunch of caveats, please do share this. The first step toward course correction is spreading the idea. And to anyone, agree or disagree, comments welcome. This is a Fediverse-enabled blog, which means that in addition to being able to comment below, you can search for this post in your Fedi client and reply/boost/favorite.

---

Next post in series: “Maybe trans people not caring about respectability politics was a bad idea“.

1. I consider myself trans in the sense that I have transitioned. I don’t consider myself transgender, and disagree with the notion that being nonbinary, or even nonbinary with a cross-gender presentation, inherently makes one trans or transgender. ↩︎
2. Yes, dear trans reader, I am sure that you never ever say anything like “HRT will make your skin more like a woman’s”, before catching yourself and saying “cis woman’s”, or “Men can use urinals but women can’t” and then try to figure out where to put the “usually”s to make that sentence acceptable. I, however, do do that, and I have no shame in it because I’ve seen basically all of my trans friends, from the most woke to least, make these assumptions. The assumption that man = XY = penis and woman = XX = vagina has proven incredibly difficult to shake, even for those of us who are ourselves exceptions. ↩︎
3. See: Bellwether, Mira (October 2010). Fucking Trans Women #0 (zine). ↩︎
4. Person assigned male at birth, for any less trans-literate readers. ↩︎
5. In my experience, similar to in footnote 1, even very woke trans people are usually not great at gendering someone the way they want if they make no effort toward changing their presentation. But I’m sure there exists some trans social groups out there where everyone really does follow this norm intuitively. ↩︎
6. Again for the cheap seats: Trans woman = male-to-female. Trans man = female-to-male. ↩︎
7. Unlike many things that people aspirationally say are similar to saying the N-word. See: Mulaney, John (2012). “The Worse Word“. “New in Town”. ↩︎
8. The 2024 Democratic platform says a number of things in support of trans people but avoids commenting on who exactly is a woman or a man. ↩︎
9. This process of slotting trans people’s existence into established gender structures was mirrored by the early trans rights movement’s legal strategy, which centered not on establishing any new rights for trans people, but rather on the right to be considered a gender other than that assigned at birth, and then receive the rights associated with that gender—for instance, to use a particular set of restrooms or marry the opposite binary gender. ↩︎
10. The exact hypothetical that was posed was to consider “a person who transitions to a gender that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth”. So this isn’t just people saying that they wouldn’t deadname or misgender John from work who they found out used to be Jane. ↩︎
11. Except for some subtle ones that we know are okay because we’re the trans community, but you don’t, so you wind up thinking that we think it’s a problem to not want to have sex with a woman with a penis, even though basically no trans people believe that, because it seems like a logical consequence of our ideology, and our ideology isn’t actually written down anywhere because it’s not an ideology. ↩︎
12. See generally: Wynn, Natalie (2020). “Cancelling” (video essay). ↩︎
13. Both for reasons of changing political priorities for the Democrats—who, self-interest aside, absolutely should be prioritizing working-class issues over identity politics—and because of the increasing power of the federal government. See: Dowd, Maureen (2024). “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics” (column). The New York Times. ↩︎
14. Well maybe yes on that last one, if you can manage it, but that’s a more general concern about America right now. ↩︎
15. At least I assume? I couldn’t find good data on this. The 2022 Pew survey’s only relevant finding was that a slight majority of Americans knew only a little about nonbinary people’s existence, while a fifth knew nothing at all. ↩︎
16. I don’t agree with everything Ellis says, but voices like hers are important and need a seat at the table right now as part of a pragmatic coälition to save trans rights in America. ↩︎
17. If this ever gets quoted out of context, or you’ve skipped just to the proposal here and not read the rest, there is one thing I want to be really really clear about, and it is that I am in this second group. ↩︎