#uspol

America isn’t politically divided

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

The old man at the café in Bangkok was from New Jersey too. His birthplace in Newark was on the far side of the state from my home in Cape May, but I told him that Newark was still significant to me because it was the last bit of U.S. soil I touched. I told him that we’d fled the U.S. on the day the airport’s ATC went haywire. He hadn’t heard about that. He hadn’t heard about the plane crash in D.C. in January either. He hadn’t heard about a lot of things. But he was happy to listen.

He was 70. He walked with a cane and used the ASL “I love you” sign to say hello and goodbye. For 18 years he’d been living almost as far as possible from home. He was, in his own words, a mystic; he spent hours each day in deep meditation, learning about the outside world only from chance encounters. His main source of information was another American expatriate, who’d often invite him over for dinner and regale him with the day’s news from Fox. He found the stories interesting, but knew they represented but one narrative. He got some news from videos that came across his YouTube feed, but had been burned enough by AI fake news as to not fully trust anything. He’d never heard of Wikipedia.

I invited him to sit down across from me, and we spoke for an hour about the earthly world he’d left behind. He made clear his own perspective: He bore no ill will to anyone and saw a beauty in everyone’s experience of this world in which he merely superficially resided. He was moved but not surprised by my assessment that the U.S. as we knew it was in its final years. But when I tried to explain why, a funny thing happened: I found I couldn’t explain what anyone was fighting about.

A lot of my time every day is spent watching people argue about American politics. Less of it since I left, but my media consumption still skews American, most of my friends and family are still in America, and as a Wikipedia administrator I choose to, for whatever reason, spend a lot of my allotted hobby time intervening in disputes among people with very strong opinions on American politics. But talking to someone with only limited exposure to American politics since the G.W. Bush administration, how was I to explain the political polarization so ever-present that civil war is increasingly seen as likely?1

In much of the world, bitter political divides are about starkly different visions for a country. Capitalist or socialist? Monarchical or republican? Secular or religious law? Aligned with one great power or with another? As I tried to explain American politics to the mystic, I was struck by how little of that kind of division there was. Most Americans believe in a federalist representative republican democracy with an individualist and moderately libertarian attitude toward private life, a capitalist economy, a strong sense of national identity and patriotism, and (even if many wouldn’t describe it this way) culturally Christian values. America has had the same constitutional structure for almost a quarter-millennium, and almost everyone likes it that way. There are, to be sure, those who favor more radical change, and these groups do influence the broader movements they are a part of, but they are nonetheless relatively niche.

The political issues that actually get fought over in Congress and the state legislatures are almost always questions of degree, not kind: The military should be powerful, but how powerful? Drugs should be illegal, but how illegal? Crimes should be punished with draconian prison sentences, but how draconian? The government should provide a moderate amount of social safety nets, but to whom and under what conditions? In a vacuum, none of these debates sound like those of a heavily divided body politic. These sound like implementation details for fairly strong national consensuses.

The exception are what broadly get categorized as “social issues”, especially immigration, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. But when Americans approach these with a political mindset, there’s not as much division as you’d expect. Most Americans think abortion should sometimes be allowed and sometimes not. Most Americans dislike it when illegal immigrants commit crimes but like it when they do cheap labor that citizens wouldn’t want to do. Most Americans generally favor being decent to queer people, while rejecting more ideological aspects of modern queer thought. There is more division on these issues than on, say, drug policy, but still not as much as you’d think from the degree of rancor associated with them.

The catch is that most people do not in fact approach these issues with a political mindset. The labels are what matter. A 2018 Gallup survey showed that people are significantly more likely to support first-trimester abortion than identify as pro-choice, and significantly more likely to oppose second-trimester abortion than identify as pro-life. But those labels matter more than a specific set of opinions on the nuances of abortion policy. They and other social-issue labels represent cultural camps, ones only orthogonal to any particular political views.

Continue readingAmerica isn’t politically divided

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

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

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.

Continue readingMaybe trans people not caring about respectability politics was a bad idea

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

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

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.

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