The Right’s Profoundly Insulting Assault on Trans Women and Girls
As the Transgender Day of Visibility approaches, the far right is reminding us why this day is still so necessary. Over the past few months, they have launched a coordinated, nationwide assault on trans youth that would criminalize supportive health care and prohibit trans girls from competing in sports in school. There is everything wrong with this campaign. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent stupid, nasty stunt notwithstanding, it ignores science. It dismisses the expertise of health care providers and the wishes of many parents. More importantly, it invalidates the lived experience of members of one of the nation’s most vulnerable communities, and seeks instead to erase us. All for the purpose of scoring cheap political points with a vocal but shrinking minority of the country, and imposing on the rest of the nation a narrow, bigoted iteration of a religion at least nominally committed to spreading the good news about a loving and forgiving God.
The gross misinformation being used to effect this assault, and the cynicism, cruelty, and hatefulness driving it, is being met with broad and forceful pushback. But beyond the necessary work of refutation, there’s another thing that needs to be said about it: for those of us who have been in its cross-hairs, this years-long attack is profoundly insulting.
All the toxic features of the right’s ongoing scorched-earth misinformation campaign were on full display in Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Equality Act. This landmark and desperately needed piece of legislation would extend civil rights at the federal level to all members of the LGBTQ+ community. It has been passed by the House for a second straight year, and thanks to the outcomes of the Georgia runoffs in January, it’s finally being considered in the so-called “world’s greatest deliberative body.” Though led by ranking member Chuck Grassley, the GOP presentation was made primarily by (cisgender, straight, white) women: Senators Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Cindy Hyde-Smith (Mississippi), Rep. Vicky Hartzler (Missouri), conservative Catholic think tank pundit Mary Rice Hasson, and independent journalist Abigail Shrier. One needn’t look far to discover the reason Hasson’s input was solicited. Besides being a Notre Dame law school grad and former practicing attorney, she directs the Catholic Women’s Forum, and lists among her areas of expertise “gender ideology,” by which she justifies pronouncements like the following:
Concerning Pres. Biden’s recent executive order, “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation:” “The text of the order is ‘based on a lie…that “gender identity” enables a male person to “be” a woman’.”
Concerning administering hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to teens, this bizarre claim:
(No Mary, it doesn’t, HRT redirects their puberty — but Pfft, “science” — and the scare quotes are typographical sneers.)
Shrier, also a law school grad (Yale), was chosen on the basis of her bestselling 2020 anti-trans polemic, Irreversible Damage.
The gender balance of the presenters — Oklahoma Senator James Lankford was the only other man besides Grassley — pretty clearly tipped from the get-go the minority party’s approach to the hearings: to beat the ban-trans-girls-from-sports and ban-trans-women-from-the-public-sphere drums often and hard. And beat them they did. Over the course of the three-plus hour hearing, we heard the same toxic lies about our existence parroted repeatedly. The most foundational, and thus most oft-beaten, were the following:
(1) We were referred to over and over as “male-bodied,” “biological men,” or simply “men.”
(2) “Gender identity” was dismissed as “a vague and open-ended term” that “can mean almost anything” (Sen. Hyde-Smith), that is something a person can decide on “suddenly” (Shrier), “anywhere, for any reason” (Rep. Hartzler), as if it were an impulse online purchase and not a core, and often hard-fought-for part of our sense of who we are.
To call trans women and girls “biological men” erases us, pure and simple. If we’re “men,” then what does being trans mean? Is it a fashionable whim or “craze” (as Shrier suggests in her recent book)? A fetish? A pretense for predation on “real” (cisgender) women in women-only spaces (a zombie fiction that more than one of the GOP speakers raised)? Or is it nothing more than a word, that is to say, nothing at all?
The dismissal of gender identity not only flies in the face of the growing body of medical literature about trans folks (Pfft, “science”), it also ignores our testimonials about how this categorical distinction literally makes sense of our profound lived experience. I did not embrace my gender identity until my late 40s. My core sense of myself as female persisted through decades of deep, socially conditioned self-loathing until I finally acknowledged that the only alternative to embracing who I’d known myself to be in my heart all those years, was suicide. Needless to say, it was not a decision that I came to lightly. Nor is my story unique. Indeed, there are many, many stories similar to it, and a lot of them are readily available in print and other media to anyone who cares to look for them — even to these GOP congresswomen and right-wing trolls if they gave a fuck about us as anything other than political footballs.
It’s worth pointing out that these lies are insulting, and hurtful, not only to trans folks. The focus on “biology” simultaneously reduces cisgender women to those creatures who have periods and go through menopause — baby making machines — as Hasson asserted in attempting to differentiate them categorically from trans women. Cue The Handmaid’s Tale theme. Moreover, Hasson’s dismissal of gender identity, and “self-definition” more broadly, as an “ideological belief,” and her countering assertion that “no one can self-define into or out of biological reality,” effectively reduces all human life to a function of one’s endocrinology and secondary sex characteristics — our hormones and genitals — a strikingly unspiritual, even inhuman assertion coming from a professed Catholic.
There’s another aspect of the right’s assault on us that seriously chafes: the smug, patronizing nature of it. To a person, the GOP spokespeople shoveled out platitudes about how “God loves every one of us” (Sen. Hyde-Smith), how “all people should be treated with dignity and respect, and should be treated equally” (Sen. Blackburn), right before or after minutes-long screeds against our existence. God loves us only if we hate ourselves? All people should be treated with dignity and respect…except us, because we’re not “people”?
Ultimately, that’s the argument they’re pushing: that we aren’t people. When issues were brought down to the individual level, the presenters’ focus was consistently on the purported victims of our struggles to have our basic rights recognized and protected, and yes, to be treated with dignity and respect. We were consistently cast as Other: not as classmates, not as neighbors, not as fellow citizens, but as a sort of pestilent invasive species that must be held in check. When asked late in the hearing to elaborate on her prior allusion to a “nuanced solution” to accommodating us, Shrier began by asserting that girls’ sports should be preserved for “biological girls,” then served up the following containment strategies: trans girls can either participate in “an open category for anyone who chooses,” or “the boys’ teams” can be “force[d]…to get more accommodating and welcoming to those with male bodies who identify as transgender.” Trans identity is again erased: trans girls aren’t girls, they only think they are (“identify as”) girls, and if the (rest of the) boys can’t be persuaded to play nice with them, well, they can have their own “open” category, a de facto stigmatizing “other” designation equivalent to the unisex bathrooms that are often proposed as a way of quarantining our basic biological needs. At best, as when Shrier began her response by graciously acknowledging that the trans community is actually “not a violent population,” we were cast as weird, exotic animals that might safely be permitted to nest at the edge of the backyard.
I can’t tell you how demeaning this patronization is. I have a doctorate in English and almost two full decades of experience teaching at the college level, am a published scholar, poet, and essayist, a subscriber to my city’s symphony and opera, a member of my community’s Indivisible group — a passionate amateur photographer and musicologist, walker (pun not intended) and swimmer — a loved daughter, sister, aunt, niece, friend — a valued neighbor and fellow citizen. But regardless of our education level, accomplishments, passions, or personal networks, we are all your neighbors and fellow citizens, and should be valued as such. It both enrages and saddens me that it’s necessary to assert this still, but the trans community is a small but not negligible borough in the human community. Trans folks are human. Trans lives matter.
Washington teen Stella Keating began her opening statement in the Senate hearing by introducing herself. She talked about her many passions (politics, history, hiking, chess, playing the ukulele) and her dream of becoming a civil rights attorney, introduced her parents and described their shared values (hard work, service), and didn’t get around to identifying herself as trans until two minutes into her statement when she poignantly reintroduced herself. That balance seems perfect to me. Her passions, dreams, and values are the things that attract her friends, the things her classmates and she can be in dialogue about. Her gender, female, is also an important part of her identity; her being a young trans woman is, or should be, incidental — in most contexts, irrelevant — unless she chooses otherwise. She and the rest of us have (mostly) the bigots on the right to thank for forcing us to reckon with this aspect of our identity as a social and political issue, one that is far too often deadly.
The Equality Act would lay the legal groundwork for young folks like Stella not to have to endure the many years of self-exile, even self-obliteration, that I and so many trans and other LGBQ+ folks my age did — the ones among us who survived, at least.
