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.”

  • girltwink@lemmy.world
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    The invisibility problem is real and frustrating. People have this image in their head of trans women being caricatures of women because their only exposure to trans women is sensationalized headlines showing unflattering pictures of trans women, or people who are very visible because they’re early in transition, (or in the case of repressed conservative men, trans porn). The ones who just look like cis women are invisible, and so no one knows they exist.

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOP
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      Considering I posted the whole article here, you didn’t actually have to click

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        Click, read- same thing. At the end of the day, there’s your answer: they’re cowards.

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      And lack originality / free thinking.

      They are parrots, no offense to parrots.

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        It’s actually funny…well not funny but interesting. I grew up in a conservative, christian, home-schooled household. I was baptized as an infant, did the whole learning to take communion thing (can’t recall what Lutheran’s call it now), and told to always vote R. My social circle, if you can even call it that, was comprised 100% of other kids in that same situation. When I went to college I um…went a bit crazy. I drank and partied, ended up in the hospital, drove halfway across the country because I could, and all around did all the shit I wasn’t allowed to do before.

        Anyway, that was a lot of backstory to say I was the recipient of said parroting and a parrot myself. It took a lot to get out but I’m glad I did. Looking back though I can easily see how the parroting continues.

        • Clent@lemmy.world
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          Congrats. Sometimes the programming doesn’t stick despite their best efforts. Gives me hope.

        • Cat without eyebrows @lemmy.world
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          I was homeschooled by religious zealots too! All of the crew that grew up in our church together are now militantly liberal atheists. So yeah the brainwashing definitely doesn’t always work, children don’t like being oppressed either. Go figure 🤔

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    Theres this reoccuring pattern every where. People are afraid and are hostile towards what they don’t know. I know have met five different trans people and I know its crazy but they are just people. Thats it. Its the simplest thing ever. To quote the Vampire King, I do not fear the unknown!

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      I have two trans friends. One was out before I knew her, so I can’t say much about her life before she transitioned, but the other was someone I knew in high school who transitioned between then and when we reconnected over social media. When she was still “he,” I always thought of “him” as a quiet, sad person. Now she’s positive and upbeat and constantly developing new skills to an amazing degree.

      If that’s what transitioning can do to help someone who feels the way she did in high school, we should be supporting the people who transition, not being hostile toward them.

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        This person at my work started recently. They were going by their birth name and “she”, but mentioned during a smoke break that they were actually trans and had a different name. I immediately went into the managers office and printed a new nametag and texted the other managers that they needed to start calling them by their correct name and by “he”. I was so proud that everyone on my team immediately switched to the right name. This person went from quiet, acting quite miserable and just sad to really happy and upbeat as soon as we changed to the right name. Then this fucking nasty bitch of a manager came in and pulled one of us aside and said “I’m not calling her correct name and I won’t be calling her a he.” I honestly could have just knocked her the fuck out. You’re telling me whatever bullshit going on in your head is worth trying to take this young person’s happiness and joy away? Fuck you right in the neck you fucking cunt.

    • electrogamerman@lemmy.world
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      I dont think its necessarily wrong to fear the unknown. What I think is wrong is staying ignorant to the unknown and judge it based on nothing.

      Im pretty sure if all these transphobes/queerphobes learn a little bit about lgbtq, most of them would realize how stupid their thoughts are.

      But these ignorant dont even want people to get educated about these topics, they want to stay ignorants and keep others ignorants too.

  • danielton@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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    It’s Christianity. They believe getting an abortion is murder and being gay or trans is a sin. Because conservatives want to live like it’s 1950. It’s bullshit.

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      like it’s 1950 50 CE

      Canonical Christianity simply froze the attitudes of religious conservatives in a very repressed society (relative to the time even) and set them in stone for future generations.

      Gay Marriage? Gender identity?

      In the 60s CE Nero, emperor of Rome, married two men. In the first Nero was the bride, and in the second the other person - castrated before puberty - was the bride.

      Suddenly in Mark, the earliest of the canonical gospels (dated in extant form to after 70 CE), had Jesus making an explicit point about how marriage was only between a man and a woman in a passage that’s been used to justify persecuting homosexual relationships for nearly two millennia since.

      Meanwhile here’s an excerpt from the Gospel of Thomas, a text with parts going back to the 1st century which was declared heretical and buried in a jar for 1600 years because possession meant death during that interim:

      Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, […] and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, […] then you will enter [the kingdom].”

      The young women in Corinth in the mid 1st century depose the bishop of Rome’s appointees such that the bishop writes a letter shaming schisms and praising the silence of women, and then years later 1 Timothy is forged to have Paul declare that women shouldn’t be allowed to teach (tangentially, the tradition which followed the Gospel of Thomas claimed itself to a female teacher).

      How did that impact women’s rights?

      We are just barely out of the dark ages the version of Christianity which survived in the hands of the despots and tyrants of patriarchal monarchy forced the world under.

      And the wild thing is that so many in the modern age are diligently trying to keep the beast that’s reigned for a thousand years in its place. Their blind faith as their only guiding light.

      Luckily I think that commitment is moronic and that the age on whose precipice we sit on is an age of intelligence that will suffer fools lightly.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      They don’t though. They think they do, but they don’t. Because they’d be told to shave that beard, get a haircut, put on a suit, tie and hat and pay their fair share of taxes.

      They like the part about black people and women being second class, but the rest isn’t as appealing to them as they think.

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        Yeah we all know it’s just an excuse to trample over other people’s rights while feeling holier than thou. More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason, after all.

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      Christianity actually historically tends to lean towards abortion being acceptable historically as long as the father grants permission or the act was done by skydaddy. Skydaddy aborted a LOT of unborn babies in the old testament and of a woman was harmed in such a way that the baby she was carrying was lost the person who harmed her had to pay the farther reparations as the baby was his property.. This is a key note about how the old testament treats babies in general, as property, and only skydaddy could take that away involuntarily without repayment.

      The new testament barely mentions babies.

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    The tactics they used to fight abortion, worked damn well, in their opinion, so on to the next group of people on the list.

    After they’re done oppressing trans people, they’ll move to the next group on the list.

    There will always be list. That is how they unite their base of backwards brainfarts.

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      For those people all the problems come from beeing different and through that, having to discuss stuff wich should be allready clear. Weirdos make the world complicated and they want their life easy and what is an easy solution? Make the weirdows disappear. And you better stay in line or you are the next.

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    I think it’s largely about control, but on a couple of different levels.

    The people who fund the party, use it as a funnel to regress protections and restrictions so they can concentrate wealth and power and force people into situations that ensure that.

    The people who vote are left in constant fear that they don’t have control over their lives, their futures, and everything is being taken away from them (it’s not true, but it’s easy to manufacture that perspective).

    The politicians leverage this by targeting smaller groups of people, pushing them as a threat, and using it to mobilize votes for nonsensical policies that don’t solve any issues the voters actually face. But it feels like progress. Since 2016, there’s an additional side of this where it’s given some people the audacity to think they can treat people like shit, again because it gives them a sense of being able to control something in their lives, and this is really powerful as a motivator. It doesn’t matter that it works against their entire identity they’ve built up.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      The people who vote are left in constant fear that they don’t have control over their lives, their futures, and everything is being taken away from them (it’s not true, but it’s easy to manufacture that perspective).

      I mean, it is true, but the blame is being misdirected. (That’s probably part of what makes the propaganda so effective.)

  • PostmodernPythia@lemmy.world
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    If people can live free from the idea that biology is destiny, where will the right get its reproductive and domestic labor? That’s why abortion and transgender people get talked about the same way; both challenge the gendered distribution of money and power, both declare that common humanity matters more than differences in sexual/reproductive plumbing.

  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    This is a fine window into the lived experience of being trans at this moment in the United States. Though the guidance to “shout your trans-ness” is going to be met with a bit skepticism. It’s pretty tiring to hear that, once again, it’s the job of the victimized individual to take actions and embrace risks of personal safety to be treated with basic human dignity.

    I’m one of those who are out and unable to hide it. I can’t help but take those risks merely by existing. I acknowledge the tremendous support I would receive if my gender-expansive siblings who are able to make their way in the world as their lived genders were to take this author’s recommendation. But I wouldn’t be so bold as to insist upon in.

    We support each other in the ways we can, and whatever support is offered is enough.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.”


    The original article contains 1,383 words, the summary contains 307 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • mwguy@infosec.pub
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    Have they been fighting it the same way?

    To oppose abortion hundred of millions of dollars, decades of time and manpower went into systemically opposing abortion at every turn.

    Organized opposition to the trans movement has been largely unorganized, opposition to allowing the 1/2 of trans people born male from using female amenities and receiving benefits and protections generally reserved for females.

    • Chetzemoka@kbin.social
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      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

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        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@kbin.social
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          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

          • mwguy@infosec.pub
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            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.

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                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.

        • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          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?

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            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.

    • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      What makes you believe there isn’t a huge amount of money behind the push for recent restrictions made against trans people? Because in just the US in the past few years the spending is in the millions.

      There are adults losing access to medical care right now over the laws that have been passed, if you think this is about sports teams frankly you are misinformed.

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        Huge is relative. Roe v. Wade was heard in the early 70s. And there was 50 years of spending and organizing leading to its overturning. There’s simply not been enough time for anywhere near the same amount of opposition movement to grow.

        Right now the right has a motivation problem. There’s 4 primary wings of it’s party (Neocons, Christian Conservative, Fiscal Hawks and Trump’s wing) and they’ve pissed off every faction. They’re trying to find an issue to solidify around and quite frankly failing at it. Some places have passed laws that they openly expect even the most right wing justices to strike down to “score points.”

        20 years from now if this is still the biggest unifying issue on the right it would begin to approach the level of effort and coordination that Abortion has. Until then it’s another “illegal immigrant crisis”.

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          There are still people losing healthcare right now due to anti-trans laws being passed by Republicans, I’m not really interested in this weird effort to compare abortion rights and trans rights (as though the two have nothing to do with each other or as if trans people do not also need access to abortion) with one being ‘worse off’ than the other.

          And like… no shit the thing with half a century of being a political live wire has more money behind it than the thing Republicans started focusing on after they lost the gay marriage fight? That doesn’t change that millions of dollars are being poured into it currently.