While some cisgender people refuse to take our experiences seriously, the fact of the matter is that transgender people can be found in virtually every culture and throughout history; current estimates suggest that we make up 0.2 – 0.3% of the population [or possibly more]. [...] In other words, we simply exist. —Julia Serano
Every day you're seeing our existence debated. Transgender people are so very real. ~ Elliot Page
For me, it's always important to support other transgender people, to love and support each other. There's enough spotlight, there are enough resources to go around, so for me it's always about loving and supporting my trans siblings. —Laverne Cox
Do we have a theory on why people are gay? No. They just are. The only reason we even feel like we need a theory about trans people is that society is so unaccepting of us that it’s constantly demanding we justify our own reality. —Natalie Wynn
The narrative on trans issues has been controlled by people who have no understanding of them. Social media is about us grabbing the narrative back and telling our own stories – this is our reality, this is what we go through and this is what matters to us. We're here, we're in your face, we definitely exist. —Paris Lees

Transgender people have a gender identity that differs from their biological sex. Such individuals have either have been medically diagnosed as suffering from Gender dysphoria, and may be in the process of transitioning to the other sex, or self-identify as the other gender.

C

  • The preoccupation with transition and surgery objectifies trans people. And then we don't get to really deal with the real lived experiences. The reality of trans people's lives is that so often we are targets of violence. We experience discrimination disproportionately to the rest of the community. Our unemployment rate is twice the national average; if you are a trans person of color, that rate is four times the national average. The homicide rate is highest among trans women. If we focus on transition, we don't actually get to talk about those things.

D

Hence sprang the fable of Tiresias,
That he the pleasure of both sexes tryde;
For in a daunce he man and woman was
By often chaunge of place from side to side;
But for the woman easily did slide
  And smoothly swim with cunning hidden art,
  He tooke more pleasure in a woman’s part.
—John Davies
  • And how was Caeneus made at first a man,
    And then a woman, then a man againe,
    But in a daunce? which when he first began
    Hee the man’s part in measure did sustaine:
    But when he chang’d into a second straine,
      He daunc’d the woman’s part another space,
      And then return’d into his former place.
    Hence sprang the fable of Tiresias,
    That he the pleasure of both sexes tryde;
    For in a daunce he man and woman was
    By often chaunge of place from side to side;
    But for the woman easily did slide
      And smoothly swim with cunning hidden art,
      He tooke more pleasure in a woman’s part.

F

The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society. I say 'liberation' because I believe that the humbler goals of 'trans rights' or 'trans equality' are insufficient. Trans people should not aspire to be equals in a world that remains both capitalist and patriarchal and which exploits and degrades those who live in it. Rather, we ought to seek justice – for ourselves and others alike. —Shon Faye
  • The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society. I say 'liberation' because I believe that the humbler goals of 'trans rights' or 'trans equality' are insufficient. Trans people should not aspire to be equals in a world that remains both capitalist and patriarchal and which exploits and degrades those who live in it. Rather, we ought to seek justice – for ourselves and others alike. Trans people have endured over a century of injustice. We have been discriminated against, pathologized and victimized. Our full emancipation will only be achieved if we can imagine a society that is completely transformed from the one in which we live.
  • The demand for true trans liberation echoes and overlaps with the demands of workers, socialists, feminists, anti-racists and queer people. They are radical demands, in that they go to the root of what our society is and what it could be. For this reason, the existence of trans people is a source of constant anxiety for many who are either invested in the status quo or fearful about what would replace it. In order to neutralize the potential threat to social norms posed by trans people's existence, the establishment has always sought to confine and curtail their freedom. In twenty-first-century Britain, this has been achieved in large part by belittling our political needs and turning them into a culture war 'issue'. Typically, trans people are lumped together as 'the transgender issue', dismissing and erasing the complexity of trans lives, reducing them to a set of stereotypes on which various social anxieties can be brought to bear. By and large, the transgender issue is seen as a 'toxic debate', a 'difficult topic' chewed over (usually by people who are not trans themselves) on television shows, in newspaper opinion pieces and in university philosophy departments. Actual trans people are rarely to be seen.
  • ‘Trans’ [...] is an umbrella term that describes people whose gender identity (their personal sense of their own gender) varies from, does not sit comfortably with, or is different from, the biological sex recorded on their birth certificate based on the appearance of their external genitalia. The standard view of how sex and gender manifest in the world is as follows. Babies born with observable penises are recorded as male, referred to and raised as boys, and as adults are men; babies born with observable vulvas are recorded as female, referred to and raised as girls, and as adults are women. To be trans is, on some level, to feel that this standardized relationship between one’s genitalia at birth and the assignment of one of two fixed gender identities that are supposed to accurately reflect your feelings about your own body has been interrupted. How the person who experiences this interruption reacts to it can vary hugely – which is why ‘trans’ is a catch-all word for a diverse range of identities and experiences.
  • When we talk about trans people, we’re usually referring to individuals who were either recorded as male at birth but who understand themselves to be women (trans women) or, vice versa, were recorded as female at birth but who understand themselves to be men (trans men). Not all trans people, however, find simply moving between the pre-existing categories of man and woman satisfactory, accurate or desirable. Such trans people, who are less well understood, generally unsettle mainstream society more than trans men and women, because they challenge not only the prevailing idea that birth genitals and gender are inseparable, but also the idea that there are just two gender categories. Often, these people are accused of making up their experience out of a need for attention or a desire to feel special – though in reality the political, economic and social costs for such ‘non-binary’ trans people (who don’t straightforwardly see themselves as men or women) can be immense.
  • Suicide attempts occur at a higher rate among trans people than the general population. Indeed, the statistics are truly alarming: research by the UK charity Stonewall published in 2017 found that 45 per cent of trans young people had attempted suicide at least once. Yet, behind the statistics are individuals, suffering in private and leading complex human lives: there is rarely one simple explanation for such a tragedy.
  • In the final months of her life, when she must have been experiencing a degree of mental anguish, Lucy Meadows was bullied, harassed, ridiculed and demonized by the British media. Her death remains one of the darkest chapters in the British trans community’s history, and one of the most shameful episodes in the long and shameful history of the British tabloid press. [...] By the end of the 2010s, trans people weren’t the occasional freak show in the pages of a red-top tabloid. Rather, we were in the headlines of almost every major newspaper every single day. We were no longer portrayed as the ridiculous but unthreatening provincial mechanic who was having a ‘sex swap’; now, we were depicted as the proponents of a powerful new ‘ideology’ that was capturing institutions and dominating public life. No longer something to be jeered at, we were instead something to be feared. Soon after the Lucy Meadows inquest, that fleeting opportunity to shed light on the bullying of trans people evaporated. In the intervening years, the press flipped the narrative: it was trans people who were the bullies.
  • The media agenda with respect to ‘the transgender issue’ is often cynical and unhelpful to the cause of trans justice and liberation. Media coverage of the trans community rarely seems to be driven by a desire to inform and educate the public about the actual issues and challenges facing a group who – as all evidence indicates – are likely to experience severe discrimination throughout their lives. Today, the typical news item on trans people features a debate between a trans advocate on one side and a person with ‘concerns’ on the other – as if both parties were equally affected by the discussion. As trans people face a broken healthcare system – which in turn leaves them with a desperate lack of support both with their gender and the mental health impacts of the all-too-commonly associated problems of family rejection, bullying, homelessness and unemployment – trans people with any kind of platform or access have tried to focus media reporting on these issues, to no avail. Instead, we are invited on television to debate whether trans people should be allowed to use public toilets. Trans people have been dehumanized, reduced to a talking point or conceptual problem: an ‘issue’ to be discussed and debated endlessly. It turns out that when the media want to talk about trans issues, it means they want to talk about their issues with us, not the challenges facing us.
  • Human beings rely on familiarity to understand and empathize with others, and we find it easier to extend compassion to those we can relate to. Given that, like any minority, trans people are unfamiliar to the average person, we rely more heavily on media representation, on political solidarity from people who aren’t trans and vocal, and ongoing support from public institutions to create the right conditions for understanding and compassion from the rest of society. By the same token, we’re especially vulnerable to the spread of misinformation, harmful stereotypes and repeated prejudicial tropes. And the latter, unfortunately, are widespread in public culture, just as they have been throughout history. Trans people are discriminated against, harassed and subjected to violence around the world because of deep prejudices that have been embedded into the fabric of our culture, poisoning our capacity to empathize, and even to accept trans people as fully human.
  • Family rejection and estrangement have devastating long-term health implications. They also have a material impact. For some kids, the only option is leaving home. Others have no option at all: their parents kick them out. As a result, trans teenagers and young adults in Britain are much more likely to experience homelessness than their cisgender peers. [...] A minority within a minority, trans young people are disproportionately over-represented in the homeless population: one in four trans people have experienced homelessness.

G

J

  • This powerful new [transactivism] lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for. And it serves their interests very poorly. Its ideological focus means it seeks to silence anyone who does not support gender self-identification - which includes many post operative transsexuals, who are under no illusion as to how much bodies matter. It also ignores other possible solutions to problems faced by trans people - research into the causes and treatment of gender dysphoria, for instance, or adding unisex facilities alongside single sex ones. Its overreach is likely to provoke a backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance. When the general public finally realises what is being demanded, the blame may not land with the activists, where it belongs.
  • . . . as gender clinics have come under activists' sway, the treatment they offer has taken an ideological turn. Instead of advising parents to watch and wait with sympathy and kindness, they now work on the assumption that childhood gender dysphoria destines someone to trans adulthood. They recommend immediate 'social transition' - a change of name, pronouns and presentation - followed successively by drugs to block puberty, cross-sex hormones and surgery, often while the patient is still in their teens. This treatment pathway is a fast track to sexual dysfunction and sterility in adulthood.
    • Helen Joyce, "Trans - When Ideology Meets Reality", p. 7
  • Detransitioners speak of trauma from experimental drugs and surgeries, of having been manipulated and deceived by adults, and of being abandoned by friends when they detransitioned. I have seen them abused and defamed on social media, accused of being transphobes and liars, and of trying to stop genuine trans people getting the treatments they need. In fact, most are simply urging caution, and have no desire to stop others living as they wish. Their most obvious wounds are physical: mastectomies; castration; bodies shaped by cross-sex hormones. But the mental wounds go deeper. They bought into an ideology that is incoherent and constantly shifting, and where the slightest deviation is ferociously punished. They were led to believe that parents who expressed concern about the impact of powerful drugs on developing minds and bodies were hateful bigots, and that the only conceivable alternative to transition was suicide.
    • Helen Joyce, "Trans - When Ideology Meets Reality", p. 10

K

L

  • People have been taking the piss out of trans people for 60 years. The narrative on trans issues has been controlled by people who have no understanding of them. Social media is about us grabbing the narrative back and telling our own stories – this is our reality, this is what we go through and this is what matters to us. We're here, we're in your face, we definitely exist. That's the most important thing – realising we exist.

M

  • The AMA has sent a strong message to America’s governors cautioning that interfering in the medical care of transgender minors would be detrimental to the health of transgender youth. AMA Executive Vice President and CEO James L. Madara, MD, warned that these measures would “insert the government into clinical decision-making and force physicians to disregard clinical guidelines.”
  • We’re not fighting for equality. None of these conflicts against systems of oppression are fights for equality. They are fights for accurate regard of supremacy. We’re better at sex than y’all. We’re better at art. We’re better at warfare. These are things carried in the old understandings of so-called, whatever-you-want-to-call-it: non-binary, queer, genderqueer, trans, gay, lesbian. Just like the neurodiverse peoples, these people are all sacred beings, superior to other beings.
  • [Social Justice Campaigners] decided instead to push vigorously on trans: to pick up the hardest part of the whole question ('I am who I say I am and you can't prove otherwise') and run with it: 'Trans lives matter'; 'Some people are trans. Get over it'. Everywhere, with a wearying predictability, the people who always complain about every aspect of the patriarchal, hegemonic, cis-supremacist, homophobic, institutionally racist, sexist state, decided to run with the trans issue. They specifically claimed that yes, if a man said he was a woman and didn't do anything about it, then yes he was a woman and it was transphobic to suggest otherwise.

P

  • If cisgender people, who are 99.5 percent of the population, are accused of transphobia for simply existing, failing to use the correct terminology, allowing genitals to influence their dating preferences, or even having non-queer Theory beliefs about gender, this is likely to result in much unfair antagonism against trans people (most of whom do not believe in this either).
  • Girls deserve equal opportunity to compete and achieve in sports. The Biden administration’s reinterpretation of Title IX is a slap in the face to young women and girls, telling them their hard work, on-field achievements, and athletic futures do not matter. Title IX was designed to stop discrimination and ensure equal athletic opportunities for women. By allowing biological males to compete in girls’ sports the Biden administration will be reversing 50 years of progress for women. H.R. 734, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023 strengthens the law’s existing protections for women, ensures a level playing field for female athletes, and protects the law from the Biden administration’s radical regulatory scheme.
    • U. S House of Representatives, Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act (2023)

S

  • Transgender activism purports that biological sex and "gender" are non-binary fluid constructs.
  • Some trans activists are just as creative as their rejection of reality. Two popular YouTube trans activists (Riley J. Dennis and Zinnia Jones) have proclaimed that it is "cisgender" for people to restrict their mating preferences to "cisnormative" individuals; or in other words, heterosexuality is bigoted. It would seem that my my marriage is transphobic because I never considered a transgendered individual as a prospective wife.
    • Gad Saad, "The Parasitic Mind", p. 108
  • In January 2019, the Wall Street Journal ran my piece, "When Your Daughter Defies Biology." It provoked nearly a thousand comments, and hundreds of responses to those comments. A transgender writer, Jennifer Finney Boylan, quickly wrote a rebuttal in an op-ed that appeared two days later in the New York Times. Her op-ed garnered hundreds of comments and hundreds more reactions to those comments. All of a sudden, I was flooded with emails from readers who had experienced with their own children the phenomenon I had described or had witnessed its occurrence in their kids' schools - clusters of adolescents in a single grade, suddenly discovering transgender identities together, begging for hormones, desperate for surgery. . . . This is a story America needs to hear. Whether or not you have an adolescent daughter, whether or not your child has fallen for this transgender craze, America has become fertile ground for this mass enthusiasm for reasons that have everything to do with our cultural frailty: parents are undermined; experts are over-relied upon; dissenters in science and medicine are intimidated; free speech truckles under renewed attack; government healthcare laws harbor hidden consequences; and an intersectional era has arisen in which the desire to escape a dominant identity encourages individuals to take cover in victim groups.
  • While some cisgender people refuse to take our experiences seriously, the fact of the matter is that transgender people can be found in virtually every culture and throughout history; current estimates suggest that we make up 0.2 – 0.3% of the population [or possibly more]. [...] In other words, we simply exist.
  • Like women more generally, many trans women are feminists. Feminism and transgender activism are not in any way incompatible or mutually exclusive. As feminists who acknowledge intersectionality, we believe that we should be fighting to end all forms of sexism and marginalization — this includes both traditional sexism and transphobia. Forcing trans women into a separate group that is distinct from cis women does not in any way help achieve feminism’s central goal of ending sexism.
  • Accusations that IP is inherently “narcissistic” and “divisive” have become quite prevalent among EC-centric leftists lately. [...] In addition to disregarding all forms of non-EC marginalization, accusations that IP activism is inherently “narcissistic” or "divisive" severely confuse cause and effect. After all, I’m not the one who is “obsessed” with my identity. [...] It’s the people who harbor anti-trans attitudes who are obsessed with my identity, not the other way around! While I would absolutely love to live in a world where my trans identity was not especially notable or worth calling attention to, these people insist on making an issue out of it. Furthermore, by making a distinction between transgender people (who they single out for discrimination) and non-transgender people (whose identities and experiences they respect), it is they (not us) who are the ones being divisive. Once we acknowledge this causality, it becomes clear that IP is not an expression of navel-gazing or narcissism, but rather a form of organized resistance against those who are actively trying to delegitimize and disenfranchise us.
  • I would love to live in a world where the word “transgender” serves the same simple purpose — a mere sharing of information about my life experiences — but unfortunately, it doesn’t. On top of being a descriptor, the word “transgender” is also politically loaded. But that is not my, nor other trans people’s, fault. As discussed in the last section, there’s a long history of people hating, ostracizing, and criminalizing us, and much of this history took place before words like “transgender,” “transphobia,” and analogous terms even existed. In fact, those terms were created in response to that marginalization, not the other way around. And even if I were to relinquish my trans identity, those people would still exist and continue to discriminate against me for supposedly being a sinner, or freak, or deviant, or for being delusional, or whatever other rationales they might concoct in order to justify their bigotry.
  • The most infuriating assertion regularly made by the "trans women are biologically male" camp is that trans people are somehow "denying" or "erasing" biological sex differences, and that this hurts cisgender women/“biological females.” This is patently untrue. I can assure you that trans people are highly aware of biological sex differences — the fact that many of us physically transition demonstrates that we acknowledge that sexually dimorphic traits exist and may be important to some people! I would reframe things this way: Transgender people often have a more complicated relationship with our sex-related traits (as they may be discordant with our identified and lived genders), and thus the language that we use to describe or discuss these traits may seem arcane, or nonsensical, or unnecessary to the average cisgender person. And because they are unfamiliar with this language (and/or flat-out antagonistic toward us), some cisgender people will subsequently misinterpret this language and differing perspective as some sort of "denial."
  • Matt Sharp, a top lawyer at ADF who drafts model legislation on the group’s behalf, said he expects issues dealing with transgender athletes and medical care to reach the Supreme Court. In an interview, Sharp compared judges ruling in favor of allowing gender-affirming care for transgender minors to courts upholding forced sterilization for disabled individuals a century ago.
    “I think it’s always worth stepping back and remembering the courts get it wrong sometimes,” Sharp said. “It was about 100 years ago that the Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization for individuals with mental disabilities. It was a wrong decision. And thankfully, both the courts and the medical community recognized the damage that they were doing to a vulnerable population and corrected that mistake. Similar here, these are courts that are struggling now.”
  • Paul Smith, who successfully argued the 2003 landmark Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, which found the U.S.’s remaining sodomy laws unconstitutional, said the repeated victories for LGBTQ people and advocates are “a sign that these laws are mostly being thought up based on their appeal to a certain frenzied group of people in the country who were very excited about picking on LGBTQ people right now, not based on their legal merits and sustainability.
    “Take a law that says, you can’t have a drag show. It’s hard to imagine an easier First Amendment case to win, because it’s just plain content censorship,” he said. “And there’s not going to be any evidence that is harmful to somebody.”
    Smith, a professor at Georgetown Law, said the cases regarding restrictions on transition-related care are more complicated, but the wins still make sense, because in those cases the care is supported by the adolescents, their parents and doctors, and by expert testimony.
  • It is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear. The highest purpose of the [medically defined] transsexual is to erase h/erself, to fade into the "normal" population as soon as possible. Part of this process is known as constructing a plausible history--learning to lie effectively about one's past. What is gained is acceptability in society. ... In the transsexual's erased history we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender.
    • Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Politics: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (1991), pp. 280–304.
  • To attempt to occupy a place as speaking subject within the traditional gender frame is to become complicit in the discourse which one wishes to deconstruct.
    • Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Politics: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (1991), pp. 280–304.
  • Transsexuals for whom gender identity is something different from and perhaps irrelevant to physical genitalia are occulted by those for whom the power of the medical/psychological establishments, and their ability to act as gatekeepers for cultural norms, is the final authority for what counts as a culturally intelligible body.
    • Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Politics: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (1991), pp. 280–304.

T

  • “The laws do so much damage when they’re passed that I think it’s difficult to see even the court victories as a good thing on balance,” said Ryan Thoreson, a University of Cincinnati law professor and former researcher for Human Rights Watch. “The sheer number of these laws has been significantly disruptive to the care that transgender children are receiving. They’ve had a chilling effect on providers who are now much more cautious about providing some of these services to kids and their families.”
  • In this prospective clinical cohort study of TNB youths, we observed high rates of moderate to severe depression and anxiety, as well as suicidal thoughts. Receipt of gender-affirming interventions, specifically PBs or GAHs, was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate to severe depressive symptoms and 73% lower odds of self-harm or suicidal thoughts during the first year of multidisciplinary gender care. Among youths who did not initiate PBs or GAHs, we observed that depressive symptoms and suicidality were 2-fold to 3-fold higher than baseline levels at 3 and 6 months of follow-up, respectively. Our study results suggest that risks of depression and suicidality may be mitigated with receipt of gender-affirming medications in the context of a multidisciplinary care clinic over the relatively short time frame of 1 year.
    Our findings are consistent with those of prior studies finding that TNB adolescents are at increased risk of depression, anxiety, and suicidality and studies finding long-term and short-term improvements in mental health outcomes among TNB individuals who receive gender-affirming medical interventions. Surprisingly, we observed no association with anxiety scores. A recent cohort study of TNB youths in Dallas, Texas, found that total anxiety symptoms improved over a longer follow-up of 11 to 18 months; however, similar to our study, the authors did not observe statistically significant improvements in generalized anxiety. This suggests that anxiety symptoms may take longer to improve after the initiation of gender-affirming care. In addition, Olson et al found that prepubertal TNB children who socially transitioned did not have increased rates of depression symptoms but did have increased rates of anxiety symptoms compared with children who were cisgender. Although social transition and access to gender-affirming medical care do not always go hand in hand, it is noteworthy that access to gender-affirming medical care and supported social transition appear to be associated with decreased depression and suicidality more than anxiety symptoms.
  • Our study provides quantitative evidence that access to PBs or GAHs in a multidisciplinary gender-affirming setting was associated with mental health improvements among TNB youths over a relatively short time frame of 1 year. The associations with the highest aORs were with decreased suicidality, which is important given the mental health disparities experienced by this population, particularly the high levels of self-harm and suicide. Our findings have important policy implications, suggesting that the recent wave of legislation restricting access to gender-affirming care may have significant negative outcomes in the well-being of TNB youths. Beyond the need to address antitransgender legislation, there is an additional need for medical systems and insurance providers to decrease barriers and expand access to gender-affirming care.

V

  • I'm non-binary, which means it's not just that I'm challenging the binary between male, female, man, woman, but between us and them. And in your statement, you said, "why don't I help them", as if this struggle is not your struggle too. The reason you don't fight for me is because you're not fighting for yourself fully. And any movement that's trying to emancipate men from the shackles of heteropatriarchy or emancipate women from traditional gender ideology has to have trans and non-binary people at the forefront, because we are actually the most honest. We're tracing the root, where did these ideas of manhood and womanhood come from? They come from a binary structure, and so that's why people like me, who are visibly gender nonconforming, who are both feminine and masculine and none of the above, we experience the brunt of all of these collective fantasies that were created that are killing other people, that are also killing us, it just looks different. And so one of the things that I try to do in my work is say, "don't show up for me because you wanna protect me, or you wanna help me. I don't need your help. I have an unshakeable and irrevocable sense of who I am, because I am divine." [...] I don't need to be legitimized, or I don't have anything to prove. What I want us to rephrase the conversation is, are you ready to heal? And I don't think the majority of people are ready to heal, and that's why they repress us as trans and gender variant people, because they've done this violence to themselves first. They've repressed their own femininity, they've repressed their own gender non-conformity, they've repressed their own ambivalence, they've repressed their own creativity. And so when they see us have the audacity to live a life without compromise, where we say there are no trade-offs, where we say we actually get to carve in a marrow of this earth and create our own goddamn beauty, instead of saying "thank you for teaching me another way to live", they try to disappear us because they did that to themselves first.

W

  • Do we have a theory on why people are gay? No. They just are. The only reason we even feel like we need a theory about trans people is that society is so unaccepting of us that it’s constantly demanding we justify our own reality.
  • I feel like trans culture is just so obsessed with reassuring ourselves that we’re valid, that we sometimes forget that the end goal of a political movement is not validity, it’s equality.

See also

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