The Democratization of Trans Hate
I live in sunny South Beach, which is about as liberal as you can get, and yet someone has just spray-painted a couple of transphobic slogans on the sidewalk not far from our home.
It’s kind of surprising. Transphobia used to be a personal thing. Some knuckle-dragging mouth-breather would take exception to the fact that I didn’t and didn’t try to pass, and say something rude, point and laugh, confront me, or whatever.
But it was always a purely personal and random interpersonal interaction.
Today attacks by the Christian right and by MAGA Republicans on trans have democratized and institutionalized anti-trans hate.
It’s no longer a personal animus towards a person you see or whom you know — it’s a public hatred towards an entire class of humans based on principle.
The political effect of this is that, you can hardly call yourself a Republican or a conservative anymore if you haven’t introduced your own bill to attack trans people by banning pronouns, sports, name changes, bathroom use, or some aspect of affirming care. In fact you might even be a RINO. The same for the MAGA base — hating on us is membership requirement now.
In retrospect, as a community we were a little too sanguine about the advantages of sheltering under the LGB+T political umbrella in the early 2000s.
We saw all the political up-side, which was real. But we never saw the down-side coming, which was that we were now the weakest link in that movement just as — in the wake of Obergefell and gay marriage — the right was looking for the weakest point of attack.
By 2014, Alliance Defending Freedom was already paying a Christian medical group to develop pseudoscience dirt it could use to attack us.
So goodbye repealing North Carolina’s HB2 and A.G. Lynch’s famous shout out to the trans community, “We see you…” in 2016— and hello 26 states banning affirming medical care in 2024.
Because despite all our early successes, public attitudes about us were still largely unformed and uninformed — particularly about teen transitions — and it was was easy for Christian right to pivot to attacking us. In retrospect too easy.
There has always been a social fear and loathing around gender difference which is as virulent, as deep, and as vast as any around differences in sexuality.
It may even be that ours is the more triggering, since it is often public and hyper-visible and cannot be confined to bars and bedrooms.
Perhaps this this is the price of a certain kind of political success, of getting to a tipping where genderqueerness is finally so front-and-center as a social issue that all the bile comes out. Unfortunately, many people have and will be injured by this.
It will be the task of the next two decades for the trans/gender movement to heal this, change it, defeat it. I’m 72 and I know some of us won’t be around to see that
But that doesn’t mean I doubt for one instant that it WILL happen. Genderqueerness is going to change society and being human in ways that gayness never could or did.
The world doesn’t know it yet, but we are going to burn the binary to the ground.
