Happy International Transgender Day of Visibility!
During his first two weeks President Trump issued four executive orders targeting transgender children and adults, in keeping with his campaign promises and his inaugural address. The through-line is that, “there are only two genders: male and female” and that a person’s gender is equivalent to their biological sex at birth. And if that’s correct, the argument goes, to claim otherwise must be dishonest. And so trans men and women should not be allowed to serve in the military because “A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.” As for children who identify as trans, he blames doctors: “Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.” Other times he claims it’s all a left-wing conspiracy: “No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender—a concept that was never heard of in all of human history—nobody’s ever heard of this, what’s happening today. It was all when the radical left invented it just a few years ago.”
In reality the idea that “there are only two genders” and they always match one’s birth sex is simply not true. The words sex and gender used to be synonymous, but the definitions of both have shifted over the past century. Nowadays sex means your biological sex, and gender identity (or just gender) is your internal sense of being male, female, neither or somewhere in between. Usually the two are in agreement, but for the 0.5% to 1.6% of the population who are transgender or non-binary they differ. So on one level saying “there are only two genders and they are assigned at birth” is just ignoring the modern meaning of the words to cause confusion. But just below the surface, the real meaning is “I reject your sense of who you are and refuse to even acknowledge it.” This is why the slogan is often followed by angry dead-naming, use of the wrong pronouns, and claims that trans people are “lying” or “only claiming to be trans to get attention.” Or if you’re president, literally erasing every mention of transgender across the entire federal government — up to and including removing any mention of trans on the Stonewall National Monument website.
People tend to be put off by this kind of wholesale villainization, and at least for now it appears to be a minority view. That said, recent polls show there are three issues — gender-affirming care for minors, trans girls playing on girl’s sports teams, and bathroom access — that resonate with a broader audience, and anti-trans activists have used these issues as the tip of their spear to push their more abhorrent ideas into the mainstream. That concerns me, especially since feckless politicians are much less likely to spend political capital on something that doesn’t poll well regardless of whether it’s right (just ask Gavon Newsom). I personally think all three arguments are wrong, and while I don’t expect I’ll ever convince true haters I would like to hone my arguments to the point where I can convince folks who haven’t given the subject much thought but are willing to learn more. This might get a little long, so I plan to break this up across the next few blog posts.