Maybe trans people not caring about respectability politics was a bad idea

Human rights are not something we grant to one another. They exist inherently, created either by G‑d or by the invisible mesh that ties all humans to one another. The best and worst among us are equally entitled to them, and the most someone should ever have to do in order to exercise them is ask.

This is a nice idea. It is, at least in the moral philosophy I subscribe to, true. It is also completely irrelevant to how human rights actually work, a process in which oppressed groups have to find some way to convince privileged groups that they deserve those rights, sometimes with great difficulty and only through making painful concessions.

I’m from Washington, D.C., a city where it sometimes feels like more things are named after Malcolm X than after any president, and also a city where the incomplete success of the civil rights movement is on display mere miles from where Martin Luther King presented his Dream to the world.¹ It was always hard not to wonder, when I was younger, whether the moral of the civil rights movement was that Brother Malcolm’s strategy should have won out, not Dr. King’s.

As a queer teenage boy in the early ’10s, the rhetoric around gay marriage always annoyed me for how much it was tailored toward normativity. Sure, it was good to have the right to marry a guy with a good career, settle down in the suburbs, and adopt two girls from a foreign country… but didn’t I also have the right to get trashed in Vegas and wake up wearing a $100 wedding ring in the bed of a guy whose name I couldn’t remember?

A lot of queer folk from my generation, the kids who grew up with marriage equality in the air and radical Tumblr discourse on our minds, felt the same way. And when we got our chance to take charge of our own movement, the chance for our generation of trans and nonbinary teens and twentysomethings to broaden what our transsexual forebears had started, it was clear whose strategy we were going to follow. We would finally get an answer to the question of what would have happened if Malcolm X had been in charge.

And you know what? It turns out things go really badly.

How we got here

My first inkling something was amiss came before my own transition. I was in AmeriCorps, assigned to a school in a very socially conservative community, the Benning neighborhood of Washington, D.C.² A new corpsmember told the team they were nonbinary, and another member asked their preferred pronouns. Before answering they prefaced, “Well, they’re not preferred pronouns. They’re mandatory.” On another occasion, a supervisor asked how they wound up with their name (a feminine name that is also a common noun, and is not common in that supervisor’s community). They snapped back, “Don’t you know it’s rude to ask a trans person about their name?”³

I understood their frustration. They dealt with transphobia daily in that school. I dealt with a lot of the same, being open as a gay man at the time. But it wasn’t so simple as “conservative community so everyone’s shitty to the queers”. The single most popular teacher in that school, beloved by students and colleagues alike, was a she/he/they nonbinary butch lesbian, who talked frequently about their wife and ran the schools’s LGBTQ club.⁴ I don’t want to dwell too much on this example, to talk about what that teacher did right and that corpsmember did wrong, in large part because I do think the latter was a good person under a lot of stress, and to their credit they were infinitely patient with the students when it came to gender. But still, it illustrated a difference: some trans and nonbinary people were thriving in trans-skeptical communities, and some weren’t.

One day I accidentally described myself as nonbinary to that teacher—saying something I’d casually identified as but never voiced—and after that found I couldn’t unsay it. In January 2019 I decided to transition, and that’s when I began to explore the trans Internet. I learned a lot about what to expect from my transition. I found a community where I could fit in. But I also kept seeing things that bothered me. A girl, early in her transition, wanting to cut ties with her grandmother for accidentally misgendering her, and people encouraging her to. A college student insisting there’d be no problem with switching the whole country to single-gender bathrooms, on the basis that it worked fine in her dorm. So many other comments that seemed utterly disconnected from the realities not just of cis Americans, but—it became clear, as I started my social transition—of most trans Americans.

It started to dawn on me that a lot of the people establishing the orthodoxy of transgender thought were not actually living representative trans lives. They weren’t the teacher I worked with. They weren’t my transfem enby redneck friend who works at a hardware store and makes their own rifle ammo by hand. They weren’t the girl I met from Atlantic City with the most utterly stereotypical Jersey-girl life except for the part where it started as a boy. They were living in their own ivory bubble, and from within it deciding what the rest of us had to do.

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Two great evils came from that reign of naïveté. One was a vicious cancel culture, far beyond the earlier iterations of that concept that had focused on calling out predators, now extending to ending the livelihoods of those who even associated with people who maybe said something less than optimally transphilic. There is far more to say on that than I have space to, so if you have 100 minutes to spare, allow Natalie Wynn to do so:⁵

The other evil was an allergic aversion to “respectability politics”. We don’t need to earn our rights, which really meant we don’t need to convince normies to like us. And we had a convenient way to avoid just that: A cohort of young trans people, coming up through universities and activist circles, were well-positioned to convince the academics, politicians, and Twitterati of the supremacy of their cause. Because to get those human rights that you are theoretically entitled to, you don’t need to convince a majority of your country. You just need to convince a majority of who’s in charge. There’s the populist way to get there, and there’s the elitist way, and we chose the elitist way. Which worked great until it didn’t.

The failure of the elitist approach is the subject of my previous essay:

This essay is about the flipside: the way trans people interacted with cis people beyond the elite. Over the years, I’ve talked about trans issues with a lot of cis people, ranging from conservative to far-left. I’ve always tried to make them feel safe to say whatever they wanted. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Few if any agree with the entirety of orthodox gender ideology, even the ones who publicly say they do.⁶
2. Most were worried about upsetting trans people. I don’t think I’ve talked to a single person who was actively dismissive of that concern, even the one time (out of dozens) that I had a conversation go somewhat badly.⁷ This is consistent with the data discussed in the previous essay showing strong nationwide opposition to deadnaming and misgendering.
3. Many were worried about getting in trouble—either from trans people, our allies, or people in positions of power over them—for saying the wrong thing about trans people.
4. At least in broad strokes, most were sympathetic to libertarian arguments for trans rights, of the “A person should be allowed to live their life the way they want” variety.
5. Many wanted to share all of their ideas about the singular they, but really this was just a proxy for point #​3, being afraid of getting in trouble for getting pronouns wrong; their actual opinions on pronouns are largely academic.
6. Often a person who was generally supportive would have one or two bones the pick, although in many cases they they were disagreeing with a straw man. Rather than take to TERF Twitter or suchlike, the average person just bottles this up, left resentful that they haven’t been given any space to voice those thoughts. Many people want to have productive discourse on things like how to tackle trans policy issues, but don’t feel they have can speak freely.

This is all pretty good news. If there is any good news for trans people in America right now, it is that most cis people are more angry about how society asks them to treat trans people than they are about trans people’s existence.

That could change in a worse direction. All of the necessary dehumanization has already been done to set the stage for a mounting erosion of liberties and the eventual criminalization of being trans. Trans people screaming at cis people for getting pronouns wrong is not the main driver of that, but it sure doesn’t help.

Or it could change in a better direction. We could prioritize winning over cis hearts and minds, not because we morally have to in order to secure rights, but because we practically have to. As a bonus, we get to feel liked by our peers and more secure in our trans-ness, which, I can say from having had a lot of conversations like this, is a pretty nice feeling.

So without further ado, here is…

How to be likable as a trans person in America

The elephant in the room here is that a lot of trans people are autistic, or close to it.⁸ As someone who’s on the “close to it” side, it’s easy for me to say “Just be more likable”, because I’m reasonably good at gauging what other people will like.⁹ So I’ve tried to go into some detail above about the why of these tactics. Still, I’m sure my outlined strategy will be insufficient for some. All I can say is I hope that, if more people take this approach, some will be able to model the behavior for others, the same way our community has previously modeled poor behavior.

This is openly a strategy of appeasement. But it is not a strategy to appease everyone.

• About 20%¹⁰ of cis people actively want to hurt you. Don’t try to fix them, don’t try to reason with them, and don’t try to appease them. Keep them out of your life. Make no concessions except for the sake of needs you consider more basic.
• About 35% of cis people really want to be good to you. Cherish them.
• The other 45% don’t hate you and don’t love you. Connect with them.

Part 1: Pronouns and names.

This will probably be the most controversial thing I say here, but: The best way to not get misgendered is to present the way you want to be seen. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a conversation along these lines:

Transfem friend: “People keep misgendering me even though I’ve been on HRT for a year!”

Me: “What do you look like?”

Transfem friend: Sends picture of a fairly feminine body wearing jeans, a graphic T-shirt, and no bra, with short hair, no make-up, and no nail polish.

Me: “Have you considered presenting more feminine?”

Transfem friend: “I don’t want to look like a man in a dress!”

I should write an essay on bad passing discourse, but in brief: The only way to know if you pass is to go out looking a certain way and see what assumptions strangers make about your gender. If you are transfem and not passing as a woman while dressed butch, consider dressing more fem. Vice versa for soft-presenting transmascs. If you care about passing, then figure out what scans as a woman/man to the people around you, and do that. I passed on day 1 of my social transition in moderately fem clothes and a lot of make-up. Even if you don’t pass, just signalling that you want to be read as a woman will be enough for a lot of people to treat you as one.¹¹

But you totally don’t have to do any of that! It’s absolutely your right to go out as genderfucky, grungy, butch, or soft as you want. Just don’t expect anyone else to correctly infer what pronouns you want to use. I think that’s really obvious to a lot of trans people who, like me once or twice a week, choose to present that way. The obvious consequence of embracing gender variance is uncertainty in how to gender you. But one of the narratives of the pro-confrontation attitude toward pronouns in the past decade has been that you have an affirmative right to be gendered how you want, even if you haven’t clearly signaled it, and that anyone who gets this wrong must be intentionally trying to hurt you. They aren’t. Gender presentation is a conversation of spoken and unspoken words, same as anything else in society.

That’s not to say you should never correct someone on your pronouns or name. Just as if someone mispronounces misspells your name,¹² whether you correct them really should depend on whether it will avoid future confusion. Correcting a cashier you’ll never see again just adds a negative interaction to their day while getting you nothing. Correcting someone who already knows your preferred pronouns but messes them up because they are elderly,¹³ disabled, from a very different culture, or a less-than-fluent English speaker does nothing to reduce the future incidence. But in those cases where it does serve a legitimate purpose to correct someone, make it clear that it’s just a matter of being nice to you, not that you’re mad at them (even if you are). An off-handed “Oh actually I go by this/that pronouns” is pretty effective.

If someone misgenders or deadnames you and apologizes, they are in the 35% discussed above. Show that you are grateful for the correction and recognition (even if you aren’t). If someone asks your pronouns, likewise. Show that you appreciate them asking (even if you don’t). If you, like me, don’t care that much about these things, either of these is a good time to let them know that. You can decrease someone’s anxiety a lot by making clear you don’t care.

In cases where it’s a recurring issue and they aren’t acknowledging a problem, you have a choice: You can assume good faith that the person really is trying their best, and either not correct them at all, or give an equally friendly reminder. Or you can conclude that they are in the 20%, and act to remove them from your life posthaste.

Part Two: Politics

So, you’re in some context where people know you’re trans, and trans issues have come up. Ideally, you weren’t the one to bring them up. Now you have to show that you’re calm, reasonable, and “one of the good ones”—and ideally, show that “the good ones” are the majority.

Don’t tell people what to think. Statements like “I know I’m a woman because XYZ” are good. Statements like “Trans women are women” are bad. Statements like “Only a bigot would oppose such-and-such policy” are very bad. Make it clear that you’re not going to judge someone for whatever opinions they have on trans issues (even if you are).

Don’t let the discussion become a debate. If you’ve spent a lot of time around trans people, it can be easy to forget that most cis people are neurotypical. Debates don’t convince most neurotypical of anything. As soon as you’re trading rhetorical arguments, you’ve already lost by reënforcing the idea that trans people want to yell at them about trans issues. Instead, make it a matter of teaching and learning. The best approach varies by topic, but here are some common ones. This approach could be summarized as “Listen; validate; explain; appeal to libertarianism”.¹⁴

There are many trans political issues, but these are the seven I see come up most often.

The ones where it’s a straw-man argument

• I just think there’s nothing wrong with not wanting to sleep with a woman with a penis ⇒ “I totally agree. People have a right to whatever preferences they have, and no one has a right to someone else’s consent. I think almost all trans people would agree with you on this. Many of us have preferences ourselves in that regard.”
• Am I the bad guy for thinking it’s wrong to cut children’s penises off? ⇒ “No, that would definitely be unreasonable. But that’s against the guidelines used by trans practitioners, and it should definitely stay that way.” (See below for more complicated pediatric transition stuff.)

The ones about autonomy:

• Listen, I’ll call you whatever, but no disrespect, I’m not gonna say someone’s a lady when they’ve got a penis ⇒ “That’s totally your right to think that. I don’t really care whether people think I’m a woman. All I care is that I’m allowed to live my life the way I choose, without politicians telling me what I can and can’t do.”
• I think it’s great that that’s what you’re doing, if that’s what you want. I just don’t think I should have to pretend it’s okay with my religion. ⇒ “I definitely wouldn’t ask you pretend that. It’s a free country, and you’re free to have your religious views, same as I’m free to transition. What matters to me is that no politicians ever think they can take either of those way from us.”

The ones that are about balancing equities:

• I just don’t like the idea of someone with a penis being in the restroom with me or my daughters ⇒ There’s no single right answer here. The important thing is showing that you hear the person’s concerns. Listen; acknowledge that worrying about oneself or one’s loved ones being assaulted is a valid thing to worry about; talk about the things you worry about yourself; let the conversation flow. The goal isn’t to convince them; it’s to show them that you’re reasonable and that your needs matter. If they’re the policy-oriented type, talk about ideas that would address whatever concerns they have. Find a compromise, even if it’s not one you’d actually support. You’re building a bond, not passing a law.¹⁵

  Give due consideration to what they’re saying, and avoid treating the orthodox trans view as dogma. They may say “So a man can just say he’s a woman?”. Given that masc-presenting transfems almost never use women’s restrooms, the best answer to this might just be “No” and suggesting an alternate standard, like “people should use the bathroom that matches the gender they live as”.

• I don’t think (people who used to be) men should be out there playing sports with women ⇒ Pragmatically, the best answer on this one is “I agree”. Allowing trans women into women’s sports is a rare political issue able to unite almost all Americans in opposition (66%) or neutrality (19%); the science on the matter is inconclusive; and it only has significant quality-of-life implications for a three-to-four-digit number of people in the entire country. If you’re not willing to agree, just say that that’s a reasonable concern and fall back to “Politicians should stay out of private sports’ leagues policies”. Fortunately you’re talking about sports so it should be easy to change the topic. Find out their favorite sport and ask who the GOAT is. Or just fall back to “Yankees suck”.
• I just don’t think it’s right to make a child trans like that when he might change his mind later. ⇒ This is the really hard one. Based on the same survey cited above, “I agree” is a pretty solid answer here, pragmatically. Allowing minors to transition has as little support as allowing trans women into women’s sports, although with moderately weaker opposition. If you’re going to make the case for pediatric transition, lean hard on “Politicians shouldn’t be making medical decisions for people”.¹⁶ For more nuanced answers, you can talk about the differences between surgical transition, medical transition, and hormone-blockers, and explain why it trans kids are afraid of going through puberty in the wrong body. Beware, though, that it is easy to wind up talking at cross purposes. If their concern is children transitioning who might regret it, the fact that some kids don’t regret it won’t satisfy that. And once you start getting into finding Blackstone’s ratio for detransition, you’re now in debate territory. Remember that the goal is to teach and to listen. That is going to be very hard on this topic, but it can be done with patience, not seeming overly invested, and an acceptance that you are unlikely to change their mind.

Part Three: Sexuality, misbehavior, and self-policing

I think people make somewhat too big a deal out of the role of sexuality in trans respectability politics. Will the median undecided-on-trans-issues person be thrilled if they find a Mastodon instance full of “girldick this, kink that”? Probably not. Is the median undecided-on-trans-issues person going to find that? Also probably not. And while some individual trans people may be overly sexual around peers, or otherwise behave inappropriately, on the local level it doesn’t seem to matter much: Per that 2022 Pew survey, for Americans who cited knowing a trans person as relevant to whether they thought gender can change, 2 out of 3 took the position that it can, a 30-point swing from the overall percentage of people with that opinion.¹⁷

Where it does matter is when it bleeds out from beyond individual interactions. From time to time some trans person behaving poorly winds up viral online or even makes the news. They’re not representative of our community, and it seems like cis people who actually know trans people know that they’re not representative of our community. But for the 60% of Americans who don’t know a trans person personally, this is where we get.

The trans community doesn’t have a great response to this because almost all of our most prominent voices are professional activists. When trans people are better-known for something other than their trans-ness, like Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, an American former sergeant in the Ukrainian Army who happens to be trans, they are often able to play a normalizing role in the community.¹⁸

I don't care what your gender identity is or what day or month it is, respect the office and keep your clothes on at the White House.

— Sarah Ashton-Cirillo (@SarahAshtonLV) June 13, 2023

These sorts of Sister Souljah moments are an important part of how a community shows the rest of the country what its values are. But people like Ashton-Cirillo don’t have nearly the reach of the platforms that amplify isolated incidents of trans misconduct, or take expressions of trans sexuality out of context. The handful of legitimately famous trans people, like Hunter Schafer, meanwhile, are caught between the Scylla of becoming too much known as trans and the Charibdis of being seen as a traitor if they criticize other trans people.

Letting the trans community find a system of self-policing that is distinct from cancel culture, just a way to say “I don’t support XYZ”, is critical if we’re to ever repair our reputation.

That leaves one remaining point on sexuality, which is right-wing panic about sexualizing kids. As I wrote about in the previous essay, this is the ultimate third rail of American politics, and it’s not one you can ignore just by saying that it’s unreasonable. Politically, I think the optimal approach is again the libertarian argument—keep politicians out of art, keep politicians out of parenting decisions. Pragmatically, I think things like drag events¹⁹ oriented explicitly toward children is an own goal, and the trans community should be saying as much.

In conclusion

Elie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. A lot of people in this country hate us. A greater number love us, but that won’t matter when a still-greater number are indifferent. We can do something about that.

1. Self-nitpick: I mean, it’s on display everywhere in America, but the areas of D.C. suffering the most from the continuing effects of systemic racism are east of the Anacostia River, which at its closest is about three miles from the Lincoln Memorial as the crow flies. ↩︎
2. If any neighborhood of Washington, D.C., being socially conservative surprises you, you may wish to reässess some assumptions about the world. ↩︎
3. Is it, even? Like, I thought that’s the thing we stereotypically all like talking about! (Tamzin is a feminization of my birth name, a continuing tribute to my grandfather; first-born sons along the patrilineal line in my family have alternated between Thomas and Michael for generations—30, if the lore is to be believed. Hadasa is the birth name of Queen Esther, the original anti-fascist, who with her wits and beauty alike spared the Jews of Persia and secured their right to fight back against their oppressors. It also honors my great-grandfather Harry, using the Jewish first-letter namesake tradition, and my great-aunt Sylvia Esther.) ↩︎
4. I got to be second-in-command! Which was really cool. Essay coming someday on lessons learned teaching queer literacy in a socially conservative area with almost no queer visibility. ↩︎
5. Completely useless proximity-to-greatness claim: A friend of my wife’s now owns that bathtub. ↩︎
6. This is a bit less dramatic when one considers that, in all likelihood, fewer than half of trans people fully agree with it. ↩︎
7. Excludes some online conversations where I intentionally sought out transphobes’ opinions. ↩︎
8. I wrote a half-joking essay years ago arguing that all trans people are autistic, at least in a colloquial sense. ↩︎
9. Hint: It’s not long essays telling them they’re wrong about gender. ↩︎
10. Approximated based on answers to the misgendering question (“TRANSGEND10”) in the 2022 Pew survey. I’ve picked this question, out of several from that and more recent surveys, as most closely representing attitudes toward human dignity. ↩︎
11. One quirk here is that if you live in a more progressive area where overtly nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people are more visible, this may actually be a bit harder. If you want to get a “ma’am” in an absolute no-effort fem-ish look, you might have a better chance out in the sticks. ↩︎
12. Tamsin? Tamsyn? Tamzyn? Tazmin? Taznim? Tanzim? Tanzin? Tanzim? Taznim? Tenzen? Camryn? I have heard or read literally all of these. To see which spellings I consider acceptable variants, see this regex. ↩︎
13. Even though I don’t care at all about pronouns, all my grandparents try their best. And all are imperfect. Last year, my maternal grandmother had a stroke. After two hours of 80mph driving on New Jersey highways to catch a last-minute train out of Philly, I arrived at her bedside in Boston. She was fully conscious, but aphasic, and we the family were anxious to find out how much she retained her cognitive function. We listened to the jumbled speech for clues to what she meant. Often the starts of words were correct but the ends were incorrect. The answer finally came when she looked to her nurse, pointed to me, and said “haa—” and then caught herself: “—shaa“.
    I’ve never felt so happy to be gendered as masculine. ↩︎
14. I’m throwing around the word “libertarian” here. Obviously, not all or even most Americans agree with the Libertarian Party, or the broader libertarian movement either in the American right-leaning sense or the global left-leaning sense. What most Americans do believe in pretty strongly is the importance of individual liberty, which has been the winning line of reasoning in basically every movement for human rights in American history (women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, gay marriage, etc.). ↩︎
15. For insights into bathroom policy, check out: Mars, Roman; Allen, Sandy (2020). “Where Do We Go From Here?” (audio and article). 99% Invisible. KALW. ↩︎
16. Whether you say the decision should be made by the child, the parent, or both depends on how youth-liberationist the person seems. ↩︎
17. Calculated based on the following: 38% of 38% means 14.4% think gender can change because they met a trans person. 11% of 60% means 6.6% who think gender can’t change because they met a trans person. That comes out to 69%, compared to the 38% in the overall population. Based on the 44% overall who know a trans person (different link but same survey), we can see that about 23% were unswayed in either direction, plus or minus a bit due to non-responses and rounding. Annoyingly, Pew doesn’t show how many of the unswayed were already against gender being changeable, versus how many for, but people were able to list multiple reasons for their beliefs, so someone falling in that 23% at least softly indicates that knowing a trans person had no effect in either direction. ↩︎
18. This tweet references the Rose Montoya controversy. ↩︎
19. Most drag queens are cis, but that distinction doesn’t matter to most cis people. ↩︎