‘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.
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