THE FUTURE IS TRANS…

Last month, I attended a large queer women’s meetup at a local bar. I’d arranged to hook up with a friend there, and she came with another friend of hers whom I’d met at Pride the previous summer. The size of the meetup took me by surprise — dozens of folks attended. I hadn’t been to any social events of that size since before the pandemic, and found it overwhelming, so I clung to my friends and left after 90 minutes with a stress headache. The one time I strayed from them was to go to the bathroom, and while I was there, I was struck by a bit of graffiti in the stall: “The future is trans.”

The statement was bold, and puzzling. My initial thought was that it was hard to square with the present state of affairs. The far right was waging an unprecedented assault on us whose endgame was nothing less than our erasure from the public sphere, and in their fever-dreams at least, our expunging from the Book of Life. How was a trans-centered future possible when our very existence seemed to be hanging in the balance? Then I began unpacking the statement, and wondered just what sort of future the writer had in mind. They surely weren’t saying that every pre-teen would one day be on puberty blockers, an undesirable outcome in any case if our species were to continue propagating itself. Was it prophetic, or simply aspirational? And what was it prophesying or aspiring to?

As so often lately, these initial responses were a reflexive response borne from the toxic chaos of the present moment. With time and some deep breaths, I was able to look at the thing more expansively, and came to a different understanding of the statement. The future is trans: aspirational, yes, but prophetic as well, and because of the latter, an existential threat to the forces that are currently threatening our existence.

It doubtless sounds odd to assign a small, besieged minority like mine this kind of power. But given the extremity of the measures the far right is pushing against us, measures that many community members (myself included) have compared to genocide, it’s clear that something about us is triggering this response. Hysterical claims on the right about the threat of some “transgender agenda” notwithstanding, that “something” is obviously not conventional political influence. If we had that, our lot wouldn’t be so desperate. The extreme measures against us are in some measure cynical political calculations, and the way they continue to escalate is partly a function of the nihilistic death spiral a political agenda built on nothing but widening divisions and generating outrage has necessarily fallen into. But some very real animus is also driving these assaults, and that hatred is triggered not by what we’re doing or might do, but by who we are, or rather, by the implications of who we are. The far right’s assault on the trans community is a “culture war” in a precise sense, since what our existence threatens is a narrow, nominally Christian ideal of western civilization.

How do we threaten this ideal simply by existing?

Let’s start with the word “trans.” In contemporary parlance, it refers to transgender folks like me, and more generally to an assemblage of gender identities that have in common not being cisgender. This broader sense of the word derives from the word’s etymology: the Latin prefix trans-, meaning “across,” “through,” or “on the other side of,” as in “transport” (to carry across/to the other side) or “transatlantic” (across the Atlantic). Transgender folks, that is, are those whose gender identity is on the other side of or not congruent with the gender they were assigned at birth. The opposing Latin prefix is cis-, “on this side of.” The word cisgender, then, means to have a gender identity that is on the same side as or congruent with one’s assigned gender. Thus explained, this distinction sounds musty and academic, but the quiet but radical work the word cisgender is doing is to de-normalize gender congruence. The coining of this word was a declaration that while identifying with the gender you’re assigned at birth is statistically far more common than not identifying with your assigned gender, that doesn’t make people who are born gender congruent “normal” in any absolute valuational sense, nor does it make people who aren’t born that way abnormal (sinful, mentally ill, etc.). Put another way, the cis/trans distinction that the word “cisgender” creates makes these two broad types of gender identities variations of the same thing rather than categorically different things. And an important implication of that semantic shift is that no one can take this part of their identity for granted. Even if you embrace the gender the ob/gyn assigned you when they peaked between your newborn legs, you have a gender identity just like those of us who don’t embrace our assigned gender do; and with your sense of congruence come substantial privileges that you should be aware of and manage.

This questioning of an age-old set of unexamined privileges is one implication of our existence that obviously triggers the far right. To the extent that the politics of grievance driving the MAGA movement cohere, they’re fueled by a revanchist desire to once again exercise the privileges associated with race (whiteness), gender (patriarchy), sexual orientation (heterosexism), religion (Christianity), etc., with unthinking impunity, as if these privileges were simply in the way of things — to party like it’s 1849. “Woke,” if it means anything in particular, is MAGA’s playground-bully pushback against any cultural critique that shines a light on the historically entrenched economic, political, and social power structures underlying these privileges. Such critiques are threatening, of course, because they reveal that these power structures and their associated privileges are not hardwired into the motherboard of the universe, and thus can be revised or even rejected in toto. To be “woke” is to be willing to examine the things these critiques have brought to light. MAGA wants America to turn off the lights and go back to bed.

Menacing a cherished set of privileges is not the only threat that the existence of trans folks poses to the far right, however. Accepting that we exist, and that gender identity is thus not a given, not only undermines patriarchal ideas about gender roles based on assigned gender, it also opens up an inquiry into the very nature of gender. The destabilizing effects of such an inquiry collide head-on with MAGA revanchism with a force that’s arguably greater than other culture war targets. MAGA’s absurdist assaults on CRT and abortion are primarily political in nature, i.e., they’re about what sorts of rights people of color and (predominantly) cis women should or shouldn’t have. (NB: Abortion rights are a concern for trans men as well.) At first glance, MAGA’s crowing about a “transgender agenda” and a broader “gender ideology,” and their attempts to ban our access to public facilities and our participation in gender appropriate groups in schools, appear to frame their attacks on us as similarly political. However, what they’re casting as ideological isn’t support merely for our rights, but more basically for the fact that we exist. Indeed, banning us from accessing basic areas of civic life has as its endgame making it difficult to impossible for us to exist in the world as ourselves, while the increasingly frequent and otherwise gratuitous, cruel attempts to ban our access to gender affirming healthcare are more direct efforts to erase our ability simply to be who we are.

The fact that the far right is targeting not just our rights, but our very existence, suggests that the threat posed by a fundamental rethinking of gender is more akin to major, intractable “natural” threats like climate change than politics. Climate change is a particularly apt analogue, because it and transness have in common the recent coalescing of a scientific consensus about them. Just as it is now orthodoxy among climate scientists to accept the reality of climate change, medical science has, after a century of trying to exile trans folks to the margins of other queer identities, come around to the idea that being trans is a thing. And just as climate scientists agree that something must be done to combat climate change, though there are different ideas about how best to do so, the science around trans healthcare, if in flux to some extent where treatment protocols are concerned, is settled on the question of whether there’s a need for that treatment in the first place. This general concord among the leading medical associations makes our existence, and its implications for the nature of gender, that much harder to plausibly deny. The scientific consensus is particularly menacing to MAGA’s evangelical wing, for it threatens a core pillar of their fantasy about western civilization, the theocratic political agenda known as dominionism, according to which societies are rightfully organized around the (cis/hetero/Xian) nuclear family.

More generally, the reboot of the category “gender” that an acceptance of transness necessitates cuts to the heart of MAGA authoritarianism. If gender identity is not merely a function of newborn genitalia, but an internal quality, then it’s not for ob/gyns, parents, or the state to tell anyone what their gender identity is — who they are. Each of us has a unique understanding of our gender identity derived from a complex interplay of biology, social and cultural factors, and our own level of self-awareness. In an absolute conceptual sense, then, there are as many gender identities as there are people living. This radical individualist vision of gender that transness opens up is a potent iteration of a pluralistic utopia of mental and bodily autonomy. As such, it’s antithetical to MAGA’s fantasy of a fixed, hierarchical social structure in which the less-thans and freaks stay in their ghettos — or are simply eradicated — and the normals run a Xian kleptocracy from the big house, retro-1849 with gas grills, iPhones, and bigscreens. In practice, of course, few people strive to live into such utopian ideals. As a social species, we tend to embrace group identities, and to be willing to sacrifice some of our individual liberties to do so. As should go without saying (since we are, after all, members of the species), the trans community is no different from any other group in this respect. But since dehumanizing us is the MAGA playbook, the utopian implications of a trans-inclusive conception of gender have been seized on and blown way out of proportion. This process starts with a refusal to accept that being trans could possibly be a thing. In a representative expression of this sentiment, Heritage Foundation op-ed contributor Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., opined a few years ago that gender identity is

entirely arbitrary and self-disclosed. And rather incoherent, as it’s not at all clear what it means to “feel like” a woman, or how I would know if I felt like one, or why my feeling like a woman (whatever that means) would make me a woman.

Translation: I don’t get it, so it’s not real. (NB: “Translation” from Latin trans- + latus, carried or borne over.) If transness isn’t real, then it’s Katy bar the door to the dystopic scenarios that could arise if people are granted autonomy over their identities. A couple of popular scenarios: what’s to stop a boy from claiming to be trans one day so he can unfairly win a girls’ swim meet or — a perennial favorite — waltz into a girl’s locker room and rape your daughter? (Oh I dunno, fellas, maybe the medical community’s diagnostic standard of consistence, insistence, and persistence would be a good place to start…) The only way to prevent western civ from sliding down this Teflon slope into a Boschian orgiastic hellscape, MAGA declares, is to straitjacket gender in a “fixed and immutable” “biological” box.

“The future is trans”: as a prophecy, the statement is a declaration in the face of this right-wing hysteria, cruelty, and cynicism that the rethinking of gender that embracing us ushers in will proceed. It’s a declaration that the future will be trans in the broad sense that we will be afforded greater individual autonomy around gender — that each of us will be increasingly freed from older religious and cultural prescriptions to discover and express our understanding of ourselves as gendered beings. Will this future come to pass? The answer to this question remains very much up in the air. The distinction I raised at the beginning between prophecy and aspiration was a false one, since prophecies when they enter the world are aspirational — part prediction, part wish, the conviction with which they’re delivered meant to spur those who believe in them to fight to bring them to fruition. On the one hand, there is much to recommend this particular prophecy for everyone, and not just the trans community. On the other hand, our species is wired to be not only social, but also wary of change, the more so the bigger the change is; and a fundamental reimagining of something as basic as gender qualifies as a pretty big change. Trans folks have science on our side, and science as a mode of understanding the world has been in the ascendant among the educated classes in the west for a few centuries now. There’s no guarantee that this trend will continue indefinitely, however, and the increasingly large real existential threats that we face as a species, notably climate change, make a more and more widespread, herd-like retreat into the corral of autocracy a real possibility. One thing that can be said with certainty, I think, is that if the future is to be trans in this broad sense, it won’t be so in the utopian sense sketched above. But since we’re a cautious, sociable species at heart, that is, it seems to me, as it should be.