Part 1: A Sad State of Affairs
A decade ago, the average American was only just beginning to encounter the ideas of transgenderism. Even as a highschooler in the liberal bastion of Massachusetts, I could not have told you what the “T” in LGBT stood for, and this is in spite of the fact we had openly trans students at our school. The story, or more accurately gossip mill, about Caitlyn Jenner’s transition is what alerted the majority of people to our existence. A lot seems to have changed over those 10 short years. Not only have I gone through a gender transition myself: nearly 3 years of Hormone therapy, around $25,000 of cosmetic procedures, and a LOT of self work; but the “liberal” position on transgender rights has dramatically shifted. It is no longer acceptable to simply tolerate trans people in public, use their correct names and pronouns when speaking to them, or agree that they should have access to medical care. Instead, if you dare stray from the progressive lockstep with even mild criticism or concern, you are labeled a hateful bigot who wants to personally murder all trans people. While that may be a little hyperbolic, this phenomena is clearly true when reading the opinions of those punished for the grave sin of wrongthink.
Jesse Singal is a freelance journalist who has written several well researched and thoughtful pieces about transgender issues, research and medicine. However, this is not the depiction of Jesse and his work you will find by doing a casual search of his name on Google or social media. He has been slandered as a hateful transphobe, hellbent on destroying transgender research, who openly belittles transgender people. What could have earned him such scorn? Did he advocate for conversion therapy? Did he try to deny the existence of transgender people? Did he advocate for policies that would impose substantial harms onto us? The answer to all these questions is a resounding no. Jesse Singal’s real crime was telling uncomfortable truths, the core duty of a journalist. There is no conclusive scientific evidence supporting puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth and these treatments do have irreversible side effects. There are minors who do undergo gender affirming surgeries. There is an athletic difference between biological males and females. None of this is wrong, nor should it be controversial.
However, progressive activists and commentators have decided that it is ok to lie as long as it is in the name of protecting marginalized groups. It doesn’t matter if you are factually correct or not, you cannot give any semblance of cover for the views of conservatives and reactionaries. This is not a sustainable method of advocacy. To any average, non-politically obsessed American, i.e. the average voter, openly defending falsehoods and hand waving away things that are so clearly true, makes you look like a partisan hack. I know many kind, caring, politically independent people who continue to vote for the GOP because “despite its faults they are not as bad as the corrupt, lying Democrats”. While this may seem ridiculous to many terminally online leftists, Trump after all is a prolific liar who is facing a plethora of criminal charges related to his lying, when you egregiously lie in order to advance your political agenda, you aren’t going to win any persuadable voters, you’re just another untrustworthy charlatan.
As difficult as it may seem in the current environment, you have to own the uncomfortable truths of the world, and then explain how progressivism would change that for the better. When confronted with a dog whistle statement or conspiracy theory you have to engage it like you would any other political idea. Just because you may find an idea unrealistic or crazy, that doesn’t mean there aren’t countless people who hold those beliefs with true conviction. For example, in a conversation about race, a reactionary person may say the following phrase “Black people are only 13% of the population yet commit 52% of violent crime”. While the numbers might not be entirely accurate, the sentiment is definitely true: Black Americans commit crime on a higher per capita basis than members of other races. A cursory look at the FBI’s own statistics backs this up. Is this data itself inherently racist? Of course not. It is the explanation for these specific facts where racism enters the fray. While both myself and a white supremacist may agree with the sentiment of the prior statement, Our explanations are vastly different. My belief, and that of the progressive orthodoxy, is that crime is generally driven by poverty, with poor people committing a disproportionate amount of crime. Due to Slavery, historic legal discrimination, and systemic biases, among other things, black people are much more likely to be poor, and thus commit more crime than people of other races on a per capita basis. By eliminating or reducing poverty through federal welfare initiatives, we could in turn lower the rates of crime. If I explain this when confronted by the reactionary, they have two options to respond with. They can either accept my framing of the issue, and thus be swayed leftward on race, or they can offer their own reactionary explanation for the statistic “black people commit more crime because they are genetically predisposed to be criminals”. If I were to just dismiss them as racist just for saying the dog whistle, they aren’t forced to “expose” their true beliefs, they can continue hiding behind the dog whistle, and those who are sympathetic to that rhetoric will be none the wiser.
This same phenomenon can be applied to trans people. Transgender research is a relatively new field and the science is far from “settled” as many Trans activists claim. Not only have activists mislead the public about the state of scientific research, but they actively demonize any research, and by extension the researchers themselves, that reach conclusions that are unfavorable to the activist narrative. Take for example the infamous Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria study conducted by Lisa Littman in 2018. If you only heard about her research through activist personalities and their mainstream media puppets, you probably think Littman is a reactionary figure giving conservatives the ammunition they need to criminalize transgender existence. If, however, you read the study and its conclusion that states “More research that includes data collection from [adolescents and young adults], parents, clinicians and third party informants is needed to further explore the roles of social influence, maladaptive coping mechanisms, parental approaches, and family dynamics in the development and duration of gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults”, you would have a more nuanced opinion about Littman and her research. What Littman says should be uncontroversial: The demographics of young people identifying as trans are vastly different than the populations we have previously researched, and that we need to study this phenomenon more in order to avoid misdiagnosing young people with other mental health issues as transgender. “Although, by 2013, there was research documenting that a significant number of natal males experienced gender dysphoria that began during or after puberty, there was little information about this type of presentation for natal females. Starting in the mid-2000s there has been a substantial change in demographics of patients presenting for care with… an inversion of the sex ratio from one favoring natal males to one favoring natal females” She also brings up the concept of social contagion and how this has been documented to occur in youth with other mental health conditions. “There are examples in the eating disorder and anorexia nervosa literature of how both internalizing symptoms and behaviors have been shared and spread… Peer influence is intensified in inpatient and outpatient treatment settings for patients with anorexia and counter-therapeutic subcultures that actively promote the beliefs and behaviors of anorexia nervosa have been observed…Online environments provide ample opportunity for excessive reassurance seeking, co-rumination, positive and negative feedback, and deviancy training from peers who subscribe to unhealthy, self-harming behaviors… So too , may friendship cliques set a level of preoccupation with one’s body, body image, gender, and the techniques to transition”. Littman offers multiple hypotheses for the concept of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Peer Influence, Parental Conflict, and Maladaptive Coping.
Littman is not naive enough to believe that social media is causing children to become trans, nor that there is an effort among trans advocates to “turn” kids trans. Rather she believes the dynamics of adolescent peer groups and the desire to fit in may be pushing young people towards thinking they too may be gender non-conforming. “It is plausible that the following can be initiated, magnified, spread, and maintained via the mechanisms of social and peer contagion: (1) the belief that non-specific symptoms…should be perceived as gender dysphoria and their presence as proof of being transgender; 2) the belief that the only path to happiness is transition; and 3) the belief that anyone who disagrees with the self-assessment of being transgender or the plan for transition is transphobic, abusive, and should be cut out of one’s life…In other words, ‘gender dysphoria’ may be used as a catch-all explanation for any kind of distress, psychological pain, and discomfort that an [adolescent] is feeling while transition is being promoted as a cure-all solution”. As somebody who struggled with their gender identity as a young adult, and spent countless hours lurking on transgender support forums, I have seen this social contagion first hand. The subreddits r/transgender and r/asktransgender, among countless others, are hugbox communities with the purpose of affirming to questioning people that they are indeed transgender. There is a common belief among the members of these communities that even questioning your gender is firm evidence in and of itself that a person is gender non-conforming. This stems from the core belief held by a substantial portion of the broader trans community of Self-ID, the belief that you are your gender only because you identify as such. If gender is merely a matter of personal identification, then of course by questioning the biological default, you would fall under the trans umbrella. These communities are hostile to the idea of medical gatekeeping and offer advice on how to navigate the process by “saying the right things” to therapists and other medical professionals. Because they believe in Self-ID, medical gatekeeping is unnecessary, trans people do not need others to affirm what they know internally to be true.
Littman’s second hypothesis is that parents may not have been able to accurately gauge prior signs their child may have been questioning their gender before coming out seemingly “out of the blue”. “ Parent-child conflict could arise from disagreement over the child’s self-assessment of being transgender. It is also possible that some parents might have had difficulty coping or could have been coping poorly or maladaptively with their child’s disclosure…Although most parents reported an absence of childhood indicators for gender dysphoria, it is possible that these indicators might have existed for some of the [adolescents and young adults] and that some parents… failed to notice or ignored these indicators when they occurred…Parental approaches to their child’s gender dysphoria might contribute to specific outcomes”. Does this sound like the work of an ardent transphobe who elevates the concerns of parents over the first hand experience of transgender people? Littman even states that more people should be included in studies of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, in order to gather better data on the tansgender youth and their symptoms before disclosure. “Because the readily observable indicators could also have been observed by other people in the child’s life, future studies should include input from parents, [adolescents] and from third party informants such as teachers, pediatricians, mental health professionals, babysitters, and other family members to verify the presence or absence of readily observable behaviors and preferences during childhood”. She has gone out of her way, above and beyond the expectations set for researchers in other fields, to show good faith, and that she is simply trying to explore the shift in young populations identifying as trans. It should not be controversial for academic researchers to ask and explore difficult questions, especially on issues at the heart of the current political debate where good data is essential.
Her final hypothesis is that young people may be using a transgender identity in an effort to escape the consequences of other mental health diagnoses. Many of the parents she surveyed reported that their child had been diagnosed with another mental health issue before coming out as transgender. Anxiety, depression, autism spectrum disorders are common in those who identify as transgender, and academics would not be doing their jobs if they did not investigate the overlap of these conditions. The reason being, as pointed out by Littman, that these other disorders may be impacting a person’s ability to truly identify their discomfort about their body as gender dysphoria. “A maladaptive coping mechanism is a response to a stressor that might relieve the symptoms temporarily but does not address the cause of the problem and may cause additional negative outcomes… Findings that may support a maladaptive coping mechanism hypothesis include that the most likely description of [adolescents] ability to use negative emotions productively was poor/extremely poor…the high frequency of parents reporting [adolescent] expectations that transition would solve their problems coupled with the sizable minority who reported [adolescents] unwillingness to work on basic mental health issues before seeking treatment support the concept that the drive to transition might be used to avoid dealing with mental health issues and aversive emotions”.
Littman further drew the ire of activists when she refused to be silenced and conducted another study on Detransitioners, another taboo subject of transgender social policy. Detransitioners, also called desistors in some contexts, are people who decide to end or reverse medical transition. This can take the form of ceasing to take exogenous hormones, or at the most extreme end reversing gender affirming surgical procedures, if possible. Littman conducted these studies to see why a ‘trans person” would detransition, as the popular activist narrative is that people tend to stop transitioning due to social stigmas and pressures against being trans. Through conducting the survey, Littman found that “The most frequently endorsed reason for detransitioning was that the respondent’s personal definition of male and female changed and they became comfortable identifying with their natal sex (60.0%) Most participants (58.0%) expressed the gender dysphoria was caused by trauma or a mental health condition…More than half of the participants (51.2%) responded that they believe that the process of transitioning delayed or prevented them from dealing with or being treated for trauma or a mental health condition”
Another concern Littman brings up is improper medical screening. As she indicated in her previous study, many gender clinicians are not doing thorough analysis with their patients for them to know if they are truly trans, or if underlying conditions were behind the dysphoric feelings. “The majority (56.7%) of participants felt that the evaluation they received by a doctor or mental health professional prior to transition was not adequate and 65.3% reported that their clinicians did not evaluate whether their desire to transition was secondary to trauma or a mental health condition”. I find this data to be compelling personally, due to my own experience with gender clinics. When I first started researching how to transition when I was 19, you could not get hormones without first having a therapist recommendation. The clinic I looked at specifically preferred the recommendation of their in house mental health staff as opposed to outside counselors they did not have working relationships with. Fast forward to when I came out a second time, and the “informed consent” model now dominates. I set up a telehealth appointment with my local Planned Parenthood and after a sub 1 hour meeting, I was given a prescription for estrogen and testosterone blockers. Informed consent is the new normal for transgender care. Don’t get me wrong, informed consent helped me greatly, as the medical gatekeeping was one of the greatest barriers keeping me from transitioning when I was much younger. I was at a stage in my life where I refused to go to a therapist, and I did not want to have to “prove” myself to anybody for what I knew that I needed. But I got lucky, my self-diagnosis was accurate, but for many others that is not the case. As much as I think that adults should be allowed to put whatever substances in their body they choose to, consequences be damned, there aren’t other medical conditions we want people to doctor and pill shop for. I also have anxiety, but I couldn’t show up to a doctor’s office and tell them “I have anxiety, you need to give me a prescription for that sweet, sweet Zoloft”. While they certainly take self reporting into account, good doctors are going to want to do some testing to make sure that they are certain a diagnosis is correct. As much as I personally benefited from informed consent, it may not be the best thing for transgender people as a whole. Now that I have found a good therapist, I was able to probe my underlying thoughts, and desires, deeply examine my convictions, and discuss the pros and cons of surgery. Therefore it may be better to resume having some sort of therapist recommendation before HRT is prescribed. We must listen to the stories of detransitioners with care and respect, or else we will just push them into the arms of reactionaries, as they will be the only ones willing to hear the stories detransitioners wish to share.
Since I am supportive of Littman, and am presenting her arguments in a positive light, it is only fair to bring up criticisms of her work. Dr. Arjee Restar penned a critique of Littmas 2018 Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria study two years after its publication. Restar is a researcher at the University of Washington who according to her bio “ applies epidemiologic methods to behavioral, social, structural, and health services research… She is expanding transgender health as a field by building research environments that produce high-quality evidence that speaks to the myriad of health priorities of transgender and nonbinary communities at-large… This work includes advocating for institutional policies and practices that dismantle systems of oppression, inequality, and inequity”. In other words she is an “activist-researcher” similar to Jack Turban. A cursory look at her twitter profile shows her advocating for trans women’s inclusion in sports via her own competitions. To be clear there is nothing explicitly wrong with being part activist and part researcher, but it does harm one’s credibility if you have well-known, pre-existing positions you are advocating for that just so happens to align with the results of your research. Restar’s critiques of Littman are entirely methodological. Firstly Restar believes that Littmans framing of ROGD, and the subsequent questions she asked are hostile and could have both biased parents taking the survey and unnecessarily stigmatize transgender status. Secondly she believes the way Littman conducted the survey did not produce a truly randomized sample of participants. She writes “the majority of methodological and design issues stem from the use of a pathologizing framework and language of pathology to conceive, describe, and theorize the phenomenon as tantamount to both an infectious disease.. and a disorder (e.g., ‘eating disorders and anorexia nervosa’)” and that “The article continues to pathologize gender dysphoria and affirmation of trans identification through social network peers and online environments as an example of ‘deviancy training’”. This is entirely subjective. I myself as a trans person do not find the language Littman used to be stigmatizing and offensive. In fact I found the comparisons to be quite meaningful and helpful, as she compares gender dysphoria to other more thoroughly studied mental health conditions. Littman is not trying to stigmatize anything when she makes the comparison, merely showing social contagion has been proven for conditions like anorexia, and any negative connotations are added solely by outside observers such as Restar. I’m sure that as a trans person, she has felt pathologized by medical professionals before, but to insert this into her critique of Littman is unjustified, as Littman has gone out of her way to show her support for the community. I do not believe, as Restar claims, that Littman has an “a priori bias that is manifested in the construction of measurements and methodologies deliberately chosen to investigate this phenomenon”.
Restar does bring up some good points on how recruitment for these studies occurred in biased spaces, i.e. web-support forums for parents struggling to accept their child’s trans status, and that through her survey instructions Littman may have further biased these parents with her explanation of ROGD. However Restar’s critique does not meaningfully engage with the underlying data Littman uncovers, she only attempts to discredit the data itself. This is not surprising as Restar was opposed to this study from its inception while she was a doctoral student at Brown, the institution Littman worked for. In a BuzzFeed article from the time, It discusses Restar’s opposition to the release of the article and the approval the university gave to Littman’s study. “Restar, along with the few other openly trans graduate students in the School of Public Health, attempted to meet with Brown administrators soon after Littman’s article was published to convey what they thought was the institutional promotion of shoddy — and harmful — anti-trans science. Those meetings ‘did not go well,’ Wesley King, one of the students, told BuzzFeed News”. That same BuzzFeed article provides us with the perspective of another, albeit controversial, gender researcher, Dr. Kenneth Zucker. Zucker was the long time head of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto before he was publicly slandered by activist and unjustly fired from his position, the Centre layered settled with Zucker for over half a million dollars and removed its report on the closure of the center hostile to him after Zucker had filed a lawsuit against them for wrongful termination. Dr. Zucker is now the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior journal where Restar’s critique was published. He is supportive of both researchers perspectives stating that “You need data to decide what’s best, but all these approaches are designed to reduce dysphoria…I think the choice of therapy is going to depend a lot on what parents want…It’s their kid”
I cannot speak about controversial figures in transgender research without briefly mentioning Dr Ray Blanchard. Blanchard is infamous for his Transsexual Typology and Autogynephilia theories he developed in the late 1980’s. Blanchard broadly categorized trangender people into two categories: Homosexual Transsexuals, and Heterosexual, or more accurately non-homosexual, Trassexuals. He believes they are distinct groups due their differences among many factors such as onset of dysphoria, fetishistic cross-dressing prior to transition, and gendered expression in childhood. “[heterosexual transexual] groups were significantly older at initial presentation than the homosexual transexuals…[during childhood these] groups reported significantly less feminine identification than did the homosexual group…heterosexual transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic arousal in association with cross-dressing, whereas only a small minority homosexual subjects did”. Blanchard defines Autogynephilia as “a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female” and that this is an underlying condition in the heterosexual transexual groups.
While Blanchard was once viewed as a pioneer in the field of transgender research, having been at the forefront of the field for decades, his work is now viewed with scorn. Part of this stems from Blanchard reluctance to step away from, or update his theories that are now slightly outdated by current research. This is not surprising, when people are used to being a subject expert they will be resistant to changing the views they hold to get them to be acknowledged as such. It’s not hard to imagine a researcher such as Blanchard not updating his theories when the field has dramatically changed in the last decade. What animates his critics primarily are the, now outdated, terms contained in his theories, and his linking of sexuality and gender identity. Terms like transvestite and transexual are now out of vogue slurs, despite being popular and medically accurate in the past. It is very easy for a contemporary reader to read Blanchards work and say “Wow this guy is a reactionary hatemonger calling trans people transvestites and saying they are in love with themselves”. However this is a simplistic narrow view of his work, that discards the nuance of his observations, namely the differences between trans women among themselves and between MTF and FTM trans people more broadly.
Why do people like Singal, Littman, Blanchard, and Zucker who despite making statements emphasizing their support for trans people, keep being painted as reactionary bigots? This is because there is a substantial difference in opinion on “what it means to be trans” among members of the trans community. There are two major schools of thought on the subject, Self-ID and Transmedicalism, with the former being the more popular position among trans activists, progressives and other online leftists. While Self-ID focuses on personal identification to determine trans status, Transmedicalism views having gender dysphoria as a necessary requirement to being transgender. The distress of being in a body that does not conform to one’s internal sense of gender is the reason trans people struggle, and in the worst cases want to, or successfully kill themselves. It’s not due to societal and familial rejection, or a political climate that is hostile to us, but the visceral disgust of living in our own flesh that makes being transgender truly miserable. These other impediments surely do not help the lives of transgender people, in fact it compounds upon the despair already present, but they are not fundamental to the trans experience. Not every one of us gets disowned by their family, or cut off by friends, or find themselves without any form of support network; but every one of us experiences dysphoria. The feelings of Dysphoria can vary wildly, but that doesn’t make it any less real. For me it is an intense pressure, a wave of anxiousness crushing upon my chest. I am hyper aware of my body, and all of its inglorious parts. My small chest, disproportionate to the large masculine frame of my body. My lingering facial hairs, stubbornly clinging to life despite enduring painful blasts of lasers for 2 years. And worst of all my male appendage, the one that constantly mocks me, for it provides me with the bittersweet feelings of ecstasy and despair. When it hits me I writhe, squirm, and shuffle into contortionist positions trying not to feel the sensation fabric upon certain parts of my body. If a person does not have this discomfort, and are comfortable living as their birth sex, why would they even transition? What do they hope to gain, or accomplish? The unfortunate answer is that “transgender” has become a powerful identity that allows people with not much going on in their lives to instantly be “interesting” and “special”. It allows otherwise privileged people to claim the mantle of minority status and the morality of victimhood. They use their identities not as a tool to improve their day to day wellbeing, but as a weapon to fight their enemies. Instead of having to argue against the merits of ideas they disagree with, they can simply hand wave them away as bigoted and transphobic.
These attacks have been highly successful, with even scientific and medical organizations kowtowing to the demands of these activists. Besides a few brave researchers and journalists, most media coverage uncritically amplifies the claims made by trans activists and their allies. Take for example an article published by Scientific American in May of 2023, and the subsequent critique written by Jesse Singal. Scientific American bills itself as a publication that “covers the most important and exciting research, ideas and knowledge in science, health, technology, the environment and society. It is committed to sharing trustworthy knowledge, enhancing our understanding of the world, and advancing social justice”. It seems that they have emphasized the social justice aspect of their work at the expense of their other stated values. In their piece Scientific American claims that “[GnRHa’s] are well studied and have been used safely since the late 1980s to pause puberty in adolescents with gender dysphoria”. This is simply incorrect, transgender medicine is a very new field, and much of the research that has been conducted focused on adults as opposed to adolescents. As Singal points out “‘Since the late 1980s’ is technically, narrowly true since the very first gender dysphoric youth had their puberty blocked ‘around 1987’…but this is quite misleading since the widespread use of blockers for this purpose didn’t catch on until much later, and to this day, we have close to zero studies that have tracked gender dysphoric kids who went on blockers over significant lengths of time”. The scientific evidence we have for puberty blocking drugs comes from children who experience an early “precocious” puberty. Transgender children are very different from this population. When trans children start a medical transition, they are already at the age where puberty is underway. Their bodies expect to have elevated sex hormone levels. We already have some evidence that delaying puberty for a prolonged period of time can cause bone density issues, among other health complications. These concerns are serious, and these conditions can have lasting health impacts for the youth receiving gender affirming care. Singal asks “Can cross-sex hormones provide an equivalent-enough form of development, without any negative consequences to the teenager’s physical or cognitive development? The answer is simply that we don’t know yet, because we have hardly any medium-term data and no long-term data following young people who have gone through this protocol”. In essence transgender people are guinea pigs for these new medical procedures, and while the benefits of transition can be immensely positive, we need to fully understand the risks at play, especially when children are involved.
Why bring up these individuals? They are well off academics, they have “survived” their cancellations and continue to publish works critical of the current approach to trans medicine. Their voices have not been silenced, but the voices of countless others who share their opinions have been. In liberal-democracy, the hardest skill to practice is protecting the speech of those we disagree with. This skill is sorely lacking in the current discourse of American politics. We are no longer fellow countrymen with policy disagreements, but enemies from opposing factions battling over morality. How can we even begin to have political discussion if we believe those who oppose us are evil? As liberals we must do our best to embody the values of political pluralism. Leftists and conservatives are authoritarian in nature and fundamentally oppose democratic values. They engage in social and physical violence to shut down opposing views. They don’t care about debate, nor synthesizing compromise from a varied source of opinions, but imposing their view upon others.
Part 2: The Current Dialogue
There should be no room in the progressive movement for Illiberalism, it is a cancer that must be removed, discarded into oblivion. If our political project is to succeed, we cannot be bogged down by ineffective dead weight, therefore the illiberal faction of leftists must be ejected from our ranks to ensure we can implement practical policy solutions. For the transgender debate, we must jettison the idea of Self-ID and embrace Transmedicalism. We must specifically define what it means to be trans in order to fight for our rights. It cannot remain an ephemeral category whose membership varies by the whims of its claimants. You cannot be trans without dysphoria, full stop. This is no different than saying you have to have melanated skin to be black, or that you have to be a woman who exclusively likes women if you’re a lesbian There is no such thing as a caucasian black person or a male lesbian, so why the hell do we let people without dysphoria claim trans status? People without dysphoria need to find a new label and start their own advocacy for their own issues, the LGBT is a big tent movement after all we have plenty of room for other groups besides the core four. Piggybacking onto an established cause has only damaged the movement for transgender equality. When the general public hears the term trans, they do not hold distinctions between legitimate dysphoric trans-people and those hoping on the latest band-wagon. They will lump together both the struggles facing trans Americans with the demands of neo-pronoun using otherkin. These activists make trans people look ridiculous in the eyes of outsiders. Optics and respectability politics are very real, and pretending otherwise harms our efforts to make progress. You cannot expect people to drastically change their worldview and expectations for society overnight. Gender is highly personal, deeply ingrained into our consciousness, and the concept will not disappear because Twitter users say it’s just a social construct. Until a few years ago, gender and sex were viewed as synonymous with large swaths of the population, and for good reason, gender and sex are highly correlated. 99 times out of 100 you will be able to identify a person’s sex via their gender expression. This is not strange. We do this all the time in our regular lives. We see how a person presents and assume their gender, their pronouns, and 99% of the time we are correct.
When we look like crazies with out of left field social policy, that is how broader society will treat us. It has been frustrating to watch hard won progress for the trans community rapidly evaporate as the result of toxic messengers pushing away the public with their extremist rhetoric. Words like Tranny or Trap went from being in the common lexicon, to becoming unutterable slurs. Trans people themselves have gone from being invisible even in plain sight, to the forefront of the latest push for civil rights. We are no longer just the object of desire for a peculiar fetish, but people with rights. These gains are now crumbling before our eyes. Let me be clear, the lion’s share of the blame goes to reactionaries actively promoting anti-trans legislation. But if the conservatives are the pyromasters who set the blaze, trans activists are the bellows men fanning the flames of moral outrage. Would reactionary attacks against trans-educators stick as well if there weren’t unhinged teachers broadcasting their antics on Tik Tok? Or people advocating for eliminating gendered categories in sports? Or people on Twitter saying that trans women get periods too? The public overwhelmingly supports our struggle, according to Pew “Roughly eight-in-ten U.S. adults say there is at least some discrimination against transgender people in our society, and a majority favor laws that would protect transgender individuals from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces”. Where they struggle to get behind us falls mainly into two categories: trans women in competitive sports and youth gender transition.
Through their survey, Pew also found that “Roughly six-in-ten adults (58%) favor proposals that would require transgender athletes to compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth …Six-in-ten U.S. adults say that whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by their sex assigned at birth”. Birth sex highly impacts athletic performance, and capabilities. Look at any world record, for any sport, and compare male and female results. Men are inherently faster, stronger, and more primed for athletic success than women. In Track and Field the men’s 100m WR is 0.91 seconds faster than the women’s (Usain Bolt 9.58s vs Florence Griffith-Joyner 10.49s). In the 400M the difference is 4.57s in favor of men (Wayde Van Niekerk 40.04s vs Martia Koch 47.6s). At one mile the top man was 29.2 seconds faster than the top woman (Hicham El Guerrouj 3:43.13 vs Sifan Hassan 4:12.33). At 5 Kilometers the men’s WR is 1:29.64 faster (Joshua Cheptegei 12:35.36 vs Faith Kipyegon 14:05.2). In a marathon the fastest man is 13:29 faster than the best woman (Kelvin Kiptum 2:00:35 vs Brigid Kosgei 2:14:04) In field competitions, the best man jumps 1.43 meters farther and 0.36 meters higher than the best woman (Mike Powell 8.95m vs Galina Christyakova 7.52m and Javier Sotomayor 2.45m vs Stefka Kostadinova 2.09). Throwing events are more difficult to directly compare as men and women use differently weighted implements. A men’s shot weighs 7.26kg, discus 2kg, hammer 7.26kg, and Javelin 800g compared to 4kg, 1kg, 4kg, and 600g respectively for women. So while the WR men’s discus throw is 1.72m shorter than the women’s (Jürgen Schult 74.08m vs Gabriele Reinsch 76.80m), the men had to throw an implement double the weight. This advantage even carries down to the youth level. At the 2022 Massachusetts High School XC State Championship the fastest boy finished the 5k race in 15:02, while the fastest girl came through with a time of 18:12, a difference of over 3 minutes. Highschool boys can also beat professional women in competition, with the fastest boy at the 2023 Massachusetts Track and Field Meet of Champions running the 100m 10.4s, nearly a tenth of a second faster than the women’s world record set all the way back in 1959. A time that even the greatest contemporary female athletes have not been able to achieve in 60 years is routinely run by male children. Or take the example of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team losing a scrimmage against U15 Boys team 5-2. This information leads us to what should be an obvious conclusion: that males have a significant athletic advantage over females due to the underlying physiological differences gained during puberty. Transwomen, who overwhelmingly have already undergone an initial male puberty, therefore also retain this advantage when they transition to the opposite gender. No amount of exogenous estrogen, nor testosterone inhibitors, nor surgery eliminates this advantage. With both public opinion, and the body of scientific evidence against the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports, what is the best position to advocate for?
Trans Sports
The main goal of youth athletics is not to win or break records, but teaching children the skills of hard work, responsibility, sportsmanship, teamwork, leadership, and socialization. To exclude trans children from these learning opportunities would be wrong. Just because the average trans girl may perform better than the average cis girl, we should not exclude them from these important educational opportunities. As a high school coach myself, I can firmly say that I don’t show up to practice everyday hoping to fine tune an elite squad of athletes, but rather I am giving these kids as many opportunities as possible to learn. Whether that is dedication: from following the workouts and seeing the results with faster times, or guiding my team captains to be more effective leaders, or even just being a supportive ear to listen when things in their lives go wrong. No child deserves to be excluded from this, and it frustrates me that there are efforts around the country to ban children from playing sports. Furthermore many youth sports organizations are affiliated either with town recreation departments or public schools, both of which are required to follow federal and state non-discrimination regulations. When explained in this manner, I do not think many people would be opposed to trans participation at the youth level. In professional and olympic athletics, where the goal is solely to win, push the limits of the human body, and reach the pinnacle of human achievement; trans women should not compete due to their unfair athletic advantages.
College sports, on the other hand, are a much trickier situation to navigate. While college sports act in many circumstances as de facto semi-professional feeder leagues, they have the same de jure mission and purpose of their high school counterparts. Many college sports programs were founded to provide students life lessons through the medium of sport, and give them positive extracurricular opportunities to discourage deviant behavior. Furthermore the NCAA itself insists that its athletes not professionals, they went to court after all to fight tooth and nail against paying their athletes a dime while they profit millions. So until the Association, and colleges themselves, abandon the farce that they are regulating amateur student-athletes, and not aspiring professionals, then trans women should be allowed to compete in the women’s category. The problem with trans sports at the college level, therefore, isn’t about the inclusion of trans athletes, but the NCAA running professional sports leagues while claiming to be an amateur promotion. Advocates for trans inclusion see college sports as an extension of their highschool counterparts, i.e. extracurricular activities sponsored by educational institutions to promote personal development, while those opposed see collegiate sports as the 2nd, junior tier of professional sports. It is therefore upon the NCAA to make clarification. Either college sports are about amateurism and trans people should be included, or they are about professionalism and trans people should be excluded.
Adolescent Transition
As with any issue involving children, parents will be very protective of their kids and hesitant for them to make life altering changes. While I do not have children myself, I have worked in childcare and education for over 10 years, and have seen firsthand how protective parents can get over their children. I have also seen the pain, confusion, and anxiety my own parents faced when I came out and began transitioning as a 25-year-old adult. I was questioned if I was really sure about this, after all maybe all the pot I was smoking was giving me weird thoughts. They were uncomfortable with the speed I got on hormones, how fast the process was going, and the idea of an “informed consent” hormone clinic giving me a prescription after a single online visit. Many parents describe their child transitioning as the death of the child they spent many years raising. Our parents, from the time we are born, envision bright futures for us. They imagine us going to school for the first time, throwing off our caps at graduation, seeing us walk down the aisle and join hands with a spouse, and those first pictures of little grandchildren whom they can dote over. A child transitioning destroys the possibility of these fantasies, and their child’s life will be drastically different to what they had first pictured.
I cannot imagine what goes through the mind of a parent. I am a 20-something childless millennial shouting my opinions into the void that is the internet, but I sure as hell know what most people think when they see shit like this (ridiculous twitter lefty trans shit here). Its anger, a deep burning anger. Why are we letting our supposed advocates make us look like a bunch of child-indoctrinating weirdos? The right is attempting to slander us as pedophilic groomers, and we can’t afford to even slightly play into that narrative, because that narrative is unfortunately working. Do we really need to be teaching elementary students lessons about the genderbread man and gender unicorns? Was telling kids some people who are born as girls grow up to be boys really not enough? Do we have to wokescold everyone about the transphobia baked into society? Maybe, just maybe we stop scoring own goals, and start to take optics seriously. Even though Drag Story Hour is harmless in the grand scheme of things, and as a voluntary event that parents sign their kids up for it’s not being shoved down anybody’s throat, do we really need to fight that battle when conservatives use it as exhibit A when trying to legislate against us? Do we really need to be flashing our tits at the White House in “solidarity”?
Part 3: The Path Forward
So how do we improve the advocacy for the transgender movement? Not everyone can, or even needs to, publish video critiques on Youtube. The best step anybody can take is to have real, and honest conversations when we talk with people about trans issues. The people in our lives are much more likely to listen to us, than some random talking head on Fox News, OAN, The Daily Wire, or whatever rightwing propaganda they consume. Many people have reasonable, valid concerns about the push for trans rights, and just treating the opposition as bigots hasn’t done anything but increase the vitriol against us. We have to be honest with them. As I said earlier, we have to own the uncomfortable truths of the world. When people say “trans women are biological men”, we have to agree with them, even if they are trying to imply we are lying, that we aren’t really our preferred gender. I am a biological male, I hate that fact about myself, but it is this self-hatred, this dysphoria, that makes me trans. I’m not going to lie because I’m too fragile to face a reactionary calling me a man. Instead of hiding behind the shield of calling out transphobia, we explain to them that we dont gender people in our daily lives based on their chromosomal makeup or their genitals which we cannot see, but how they act and carry themselves. When somebody on our side tries to claim “trans children do not get gender affirming surgery”, we must call them out as liars. While the numbers are small, there are minors who get double mastectomies or vaginoplasties. That doesn’t mean we have joined the cause to outlaw trans surgeries, but that in these edge cases the decision to have surgery was made by PARENTS and their children upon the advice of trusted medical professionals. Should we really take away the rights of parents to decide the best medical care for their children? If our side tried to push mandatory contraception education at pediatricians visits, reactionaries would throw a kanipshit. It would go against the core values of parental rights. While I’m sympathetic to arguments that gender affirming surgeries for minors is bad optics and probably shouldn’t happen, I do not trust state legislatures, especially GOP controlled ones, to make bans on these procedures as reactionaries would likely push to include things like HRT and puberty blockers, with some of them even trying to ban this care for adults. If we point out the hypocrisy in the GOP rhetoric, we would convince more moderates to support our cause, but by lying we sabotage our own efforts at positive outreach, we become just as hypocritical as them.
Part of the problem is liberals and conservatives tend to politically lie in different ways, making the lies of our own side harder to notice. There are, broadly speaking, three ways to tell a lie: by Fabrication, by Omission, or by Distortion. Fabrication lies are the most familiar and intuitive to people. These lies invent false information and spread it as if it were true. Conservatives are constantly guilty of this and Donald Trump is the poster child for these types of lies. The most infamous lie was his claim that he was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite no international election monitors, their domestic counterparts, nor state legislatures claiming there were improprieties. Lies of omission occur when negative information about a topic is intentionally left out of discussion to make something appear better than it actually is. This type of lie is more common in liberal circles, where in the name of fighting the good fight, information is sanitized to make a “noble case” seem without fault and therefore unreasonable to oppose. The claim made by liberals of puberty blockers being long prescribed medication offered to children is a lie of omission. As I mentioned before, while these drugs have been prescribed by doctors since the late 80’s, it was not part of gender affirming care protocols as advocates seem to imply, but a separate population with a different medical condition. Lies of distortion tend to either inflate or deflate the truth to make one’s argument more appealing. Conservatives tend to portray isolated incidents as regular occurrences, such as implying all children who start medical transitions are going to get their dicks chopped off before they turn 18, and liberals tend to downplay relatively frequent occurrences as rare events, such as denying that black americans commit crimes at disproportionately higher rates compared to other races. The liberal movement is often blind to their own lies, focusing on the more blatant Fabrication lies of conservatives while overlooking their own lies of omission and distortion. For the un-affiliated voter, they see everything and have grown frustrated by a situation where both sides tell lies, and both sides are untrustworthy.
There are also fights we need to stop fighting. Trans sports is a losing issue. Do we really need to make sure trans women are at the Olympics, when bills across the country are being passed to eliminate care for transgender people? We need to focus on the things that poll well with the general public. Maybe someday, we can have a nuanced discussion around under what circumstances trans women competing against cis women is fair. But the time for that conversation certainly isn’t now, when the fight over transgender people is at the core of the contemporary culture war, and Republicans are capitalizing on the anxiety of their voter base by pushing legalized discrimination. The same thing goes with teaching about the LGBT community in schools. Until middle school, we should not be initiating conversations with children about sex and sexuality at school. If a student wants to make 2 cards on mothers day because they have two moms and they need to explain that to other kids, that’s one thing. But it is completely different, when we are giving lessons on gender identity to 5 year olds and asking them how they identify and what pronouns they use. Again it would be completely ok if in a class that had a trans student and the teacher explained to them “some girls were born as boys”, to make the trans child feel more accepted. But asking every child what their pronouns are is ridiculous and makes us look like groomers. I don’t understand why we keep giving ammunition to accounts like Libs of Tik Tok. “But they will blow anything out of proportion, Conservatives would lie even if we used perfect messaging” some of you lefties may be asking. I will own this uncomfortable truth, Yes conservatives do lie and blow things out of proportion, and will probably still find objections to our policies no matter what we say. But it’s not conservatives I care about. I know they will lie, in fact I expect them to do it. I care about how moderates view the issue, because when we look kinda crazy, or suspicious, or having ulterior motives, they think that maybe the conservatives are right about this one. Moderates won’t believe conservative propaganda if republicans look like the ones who are exaggerating things and lying. I don’t blame people for thinking both parties are full of liars, when those who claim to fight for us, lie just as much as the reactionaries. It is a problem that people who actually fight for trans liberation have to endlessly reassure the public that the craziness on social media is just a bunch of fringe weirdos when this nonsense goes viral over and over again.
I hope my message doesn’t get lost in translation. I am Trans, I support trans liberation, and want to see policies implemented to increase the access to therapeutic and medical interventions necessary for trans people to live happy, healthy lives. I just do not want to see the efforts, the countless hours spent by thousands of dedicated activists, go to waste because a small, but loud group of people on the internet wants to clout shark their way to the top of the algorithm. These people are dangerous to the overall trans movement and we as Liberals, progressives, trans people or whatever you label yourself, must call out these bad actors and give unsure people the place to explore their feelings on the topic. We cannot shame people into agreeing with us, we have to do the hard work of building bridges, and leveraging our personal relationships with those who are unsure about all this to make real, impactful, lasting changes in their moral and political outlook.
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