Transphobia As A Wedge

White supremacy gave way to pro-life, and transphobia is the new dogwhistle

I found myself in an interesting if slightly awkward conversation a few days ago, in which I was able to experience how the right has turned to a single visceral issue to rally support. I had not, until that moment, come to appreciate just how much that single issue is galvanising and coalescing the right. The issue? The very existence of transgendered people.

Can a man be a woman, and a woman be a man, one person asked me, boiling down a far more complex question into a soundbite without a correct answer as it misstates the question. I pondered it for a long moment, and simply said “yes.”

Whatever other economic and social concerns they have, a huge portion of the population cannot get their mind around this one, and they resent that liberal society expects them to accept trans people for who they say they are. It is at the very core of the rejection of “wokeism.” They see rainbow coloured sidewalks and feel that their own identity is being somehow attacked.

There is a deep discomfort in society with people who physically change genders that people don’t want to discuss, for fear of being accused of harassment or a hate crime or some other social consequence. So they express it through their votes and couch it through thinly veiled conversations around bathroom access.

In the impromptu discussion I found myself a part of, I was surprised to hear profoundly negative views about transgendered people in schools, about parents’ responsibility to protect their children from transgendering. There was a nearly unanimous feeling in the room that while people supporting trans had free speech, those opposing trans people did not have it. There was pervasive belief in the misleading narrative that schools assist children in going through the process of gender reassignment.

It is an easy one to whip up. The majority of Canadians probably have never met a trans person. According to Statistics Canada, there were fewer than 60,000 trans people in Canada as of the 2021 census. Each one of those 60,000 people have their own reasons for wanting to identify as the opposite gender from the one with which they were identified at birth.

I don’t pretend to understand those motivations, but I have met enough trans people in my life to know that they are valid and their rights worth defending.

There are arguments to be made around biological gender and fertility, and a number of issues surrounding it, but I believe they’re largely moot. Many refer to the reproductive function and ability of the people. If we go by chromosomal gender, there are plenty of people who test opposite from the gender they expect. There are people who are born apparently female whose balls drop at 12 as the testosterone hit that expresses gender happens at puberty instead of in the womb. There are people who aren’t clearly one gender or the other. There are straight cisgendered people who are infertile; should they be labeled as ungendered because they cannot naturally reproduce?

And there are people who simply grew up in a very conservative, gendered environment where girls play with dollhouses and wear dresses while boys build lego and get dirty. In a world where you must play with dollhouses and wear dresses if you are a girl but you are a boy who prefers dollhouses and dresses to sandboxes and lego, could you perhaps question if you are really the boy you appear to be or the girl whose personality and tastes your upbringing tells you you must be?

At the end of the day it does not matter. The principle that increasingly applies is that you are what you believe yourself to be, thus the endless tasteless memes and jokes about “identifying as” ridiculous things to make a mockery of these people.

In a country where less than one fifth of one percent of the population is transgendered, they are an easy target for galvanised discrimination.

Where does this come from? Are we really going to govern our country and our entire social structure based on the possibility that someone born as a man who lives life as a woman will enter a women’s washroom at the shopping centre? Should she enter the man’s bathroom and be discriminated against there, instead? Should a man who was born as a woman be forced to enter a women’s bathroom to the discomfort of all the cisgendered women who may be present? Does it actually matter anywhere outside that shared public bathroom?

What is it that those who are terrified of the trans are actually afraid of? That a person will pretend to be trans in order to abuse or threaten someone of the opposite sex? That a gay man will transition to a woman in order to hit on them, as if he’s her type? That they will treat men the way those men already treat women? Or is it just a really easy dog whistle to blow?

The evolution of widespread transphobia as we are seeing it seems to be a direct descendant of the pro-life movement, which itself seeks to control women’s bodies and force them to carry foetuses to term even if it kills the mother, while offering no support to children once born. The pro-life movement for its part is a direct descendant of segregationist white supremacy, built as a more palatable way of protecting segregated schools in the US — which is a direct descendant of slavery, in which non-white people had to be systematically dehumanised in order to be perceivable as the personal possessions of others.

For that tiny minority of the population who have, for reasons that belong only to themselves, decided to change the gender by which they identify, or to physically convert their bodies to the gender they believe themselves to be, the rise of homophobia as a political wedge issue is putting them in existential physical danger.

In the awkward conversation I found myself in, those present felt that the rights of the transgendered to be something they obviously were not, was seen as such an impingement of their own rights that it trumped nearly any other political consideration for them.