We were at the sinks in the ladies room, the stranger and I, washing our hands, when a trans woman came out of a stall, looked in the mirror and sighed. After she left, the stranger turned to me and said: “Can you believe that? A man, in here!” She shook her head disapprovingly.

This was 20 years ago, but I’ve never forgotten that stranger’s disdain. It has stayed with me, because the moment called for me to respond to her with courage. What I delivered instead was cowardice.

“I don’t think she’s doing anybody any harm,” I said, quietly, and then rushed out.

What I didn’t say was, “I’m trans, too.” I didn’t tell her that I knew firsthand what it was like, in the early stages of transition, to face the constant threat of judgment, and cruelty, even violence. Or, that I knew all too well how much difference a touch of kindness could make during that very hard time.

I’ve thought back to that exchange as the issue of trans rights, and trans identity, has joined — if not displaced — abortion as one of the go-to issues riling up the conservative base. When I came out, in 2000, Republicans barely registered trans identity, let alone attacked it. Now, more than two decades later, we have become the right’s favorite boogeymen. And boogeywomen. So effective has the orchestrated blowback become that Florida — the state where I once joyfully vacationed with my family — has become a place I am afraid now even to visit. I would no sooner retire there than I would consider retiring to North Korea.

To some degree, we’ve arrived at this moment because abortion and trans rights are, in some ways, two sides of the same coin — issues that go to the core of what we mean by bodily autonomy, and what kinds of choices individuals get to make about our private, physical selves.

We’ve also arrived at this moment because the same tactics that succeeded in marginalizing, demonizing and even criminalizing abortion have been trained upon us. As Irin Carmon reported for New York magazine in April on the melding of these two movements, “we’ve reached the point of cross-pollination.” Now that anti-abortion efforts following the Dobbs decision aren’t proving to be the political win Republicans had hoped, many are doubling down on the belief that demonizing the 0.6 percent of Americans over the age of 12 who identify as trans, and the 1.2 million adults in America who identify as nonbinary, is a surefire ticket to electoral success.

What are those tactics? Well, for one, conservative political strategists and G.O.P. presidential hopefuls alike have taken to describing the more controversial aspects of trans experience as the defining issues, just as they have long exaggerated the frequency of exceedingly rare abortions performed later in pregnancy, pretending that they are routine. (For the back of the house: Abortions occurring at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy represented less than 1 percent of all legal abortions performed in the United States in 2020.)

This same group of conservatives has also exploited Americans’ impatience with nuance to define extremely complex issues in the most simplistic of terms. And finally, they have taken advantage of the fact that many Americans think they don’t know a transgender person, at least in part because, just like me in that bathroom, so many of us choose to be invisible, out of weariness, and out of fear — just as so many American women never share that the decision to terminate a pregnancy is one they’ve had to make themselves.

It’s not just dangerous rhetoric. In 2023 alone, some 20 states banned or limited gender-affirming care for minors; similar legislation is being debated in a number of others. Conservatives began by claiming they were protecting children — despite protests from the American Academy of Pediatrics that trans children should “have access to comprehensive, gender-affirming, and developmentally appropriate health care that is provided in a safe and inclusive clinical space.” But they’re now even attempting to restrict care for adults. In 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida stripped trans people of their Medicaid access to gender-affirming health care. That action was struck down by a federal judge, but similar bans are in the works nationwide.

If you only listened to the Republican debate last month or to conservative news, you might be forgiven for thinking that the most important issue for transgender women in this country is the right to play on a female sports team. Or that we believe that every 6-year-old who expresses uncertainty about their gender ought to be immediately taken to a clinic and administered puberty blockers. Or that every predator serving time in prison deserves immediate and unfettered access to the showers in the women’s prison. (This — even though a 2015 survey found that trans people are 10 times as likely to be sexually assaulted by their fellow inmates, and five times as likely to be sexually assaulted by prison staff members.) You might even believe that de-transitioning, and transition regret, are commonplace, instead of rare (widely believed to be about 1 percent).

All these stories leave out the happy and successful trans folks I’ve met over the course of my life — doctors, airplane pilots, a small-town manager, a fire captain, even an astrophysicist — whose primary desire has always been to simply get on with their lives, and to spend their days in peace.

I have often said that the most important thing needed to understand trans people is what has been termed a “moral imagination,” the ability to understand what the experience of being human is like for people who are different from ourselves. But how can strangers learn about us if they don’t know us?

Conservatives have succeeded in demonizing trans people in part because so many Americans have said they’d never known anyone who is trans. In part this is because our numbers are small, but it’s also, in part, because many trans people, post-transition, are not immediately “readable” as trans. It’s important to note that lots of us don’t “pass,” and aren’t particularly interested in passing. But for many — especially the older members of the cohort — blending in with the rest of society has been at least an occasional goal. In part this is because we’ve found our peace; but it’s also because anonymity can protect us from violence.

Knowing a person who has had an abortion — just like knowing someone who is trans — can change Americans’ opinions about it. Only ​​50 percent of people who say they don’t know anyone who’s had an abortion think it should be legal in most, or all, cases, but 69 percent of people who say they have an “acquaintance” who’s had an abortion think it should be legal in most, or all cases — and that number increases to 78 percent among those with a “close friend” who’s had one.

These numbers echo attitudes toward trans people, too: Only about 33 percent of Americans who say they’ve never known anyone trans believe that gender can be different from the sex assigned at birth. But among people who do know a trans person, that number jumps to more than half — 54 percent.

So many brave trans people are living out and proud, and so many have faced dire societal consequences for doing so. It can be scary to be out in this political/social environment. But perhaps more of us need to find the courage to do the thing I failed to do in that bathroom long ago, and turn to a stranger and say something stronger than, “I don’t think she’s doing anybody any harm.”

What I should have said was: “That was a human being. That was a person deserving kindness, and protection, and love. That was a person like me.”

  • Chetzemoka
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    111 year ago

    Stop lying. The massive, coordinated effort to outlaw gender affirming medical care is so much more than “a couple people feel squicky about trans ladies using the ladies room.”

    benefits and protections generally reserved for females

    Omfg, please leave right now

    • @[email protected]
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      -21 year ago

      If trans athletics and access to female scholarship were something dropped from the movement, the anti-trans movement would loose like 70% of it’s supporters. Most of the supporters of anti-trans stuff, don’t truly care about trans issues. They care about sports.

      • Chetzemoka
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        1 year ago

        Oh I thought it was just a couple random people getting squicky about trans ladies using the ladies room? So you admit that it’s an organized effort. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone move their goalposts in the wrong direction before lmao

        Outlawing gender affirming medical care has zero impact on sports, you willful liar. No, the truth is that the people behind this movement are targeting trans people because they’re the most convenient vulnerable group to rally hateful bigots around right now. Gay people are acceptable, the dog caught the car on the abortion “debate,” and they need a new boogeyman to leverage to whip votes

        • @[email protected]
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          -11 year ago

          Outlawing gender affirming medical care has zero impact on sports, you willful liar.

          Yes but most of the support for the anti-trans movement comes from people who worry about it’s impact on sports. Remove that support and the movement falls apart.

            • @[email protected]
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              01 year ago

              The polling on trans issues shows it is true. With abortions, there was a group of people that truly believed that an abortion was murder. There was never and never will be a scenario that subsection of the anti-abortion movement will accept anything less than a full, near conception ban.

              With trans issues, like gay ones, that’s not the case. There’s no fundamental argument against trans issues in the same way there was no fundamental argument against gay ones. Opposition to gay rights was always one of “tradition/religion says it’s bad” or some specific implementation of gay rights that brought out the opposition (forced cake baking, forced clergy participation for example). Now that those issues have been logically resolved, opposition to gay rights has largely fallen. There’s a core of zealots that are still opposed, but they’re so small as to not be a legitimate factor in the debate.

              Trans issues are more like gay issues than abortion and they should be fought and litigated in that manner. Approaching trans issues like there can be no common ground is a mistake. People care about protecting female sports, they care about protecting female scholarship, they care about protecting their kids from pedophiles (of which an estimated 5% of the population is compared to 0.1% of trans) and kids from abusive parents (which is also more common than trans estimated 1 in 4 kids).

              So yes, you can push for support for trans F->M in men’s sports. You’ll have a lot of support. You can push for allowing transitioning M in female bathrooms, if assault from those protected positions is punished above and beyond what it normally is. And you can push for non-reversible trans care for minors if you establish strong oversight and drivers license like access limits. And while you’ll have to do some convincing, there’s no fundamental argument against those positions.

              As long as there’s pedophiles taking advantage of bathroom laws, not having the book thrown at them. As long as athletic men can beat the pants off women in sports. As long as there’s abusive parents; the trans movement will suffer if it openly tries to ignore those problems and enable those bad actors. The trans movement can convince their opposition by pushing for strong protections (and in fairness may are). It doesn’t need to try to beat their opposition into silence like they had to do with Abortion.

              TLDR: Fighting the trans rights fight like Abortion will fail. The trans fight should be fought like the Gay rights and/or civil rights movements.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        Are you lying for bigots on purpose or just through sheer gullibility? Keeping trans people off women’s sports teams and out of women’s colleges in the past didn’t make trans people more accepted, trans activism did.

        Doesn’t it confuse you that the vast majority of feminist organizations and women’s sports teams (the people you’re allegedly “protecting” by demanding trans people be removed from full participation in public life) are aggressively trans inclusive? Like, does it not even seem a little funky to you that this is an Evangelical thing and not a feminist thing?

        • @[email protected]
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          01 year ago

          trans activism did

          Actually, that’s sort of what the article is addressing. Familiarity with someone who is trans, has led to trans people being more accepted.