Why are trans debates so intense? It’s not just political correctness.
Right-wing propgandists brought the fire. Leftist activists brought the fuel. Trans people burn.
This is an edited repost of this Quora answer.
The answer is twofold: externally, the well-funded right-wing propaganda machine has set its sights on another minority to ostracize as the source of all social ills (real or imagined), and internally, the mainstream narrative behind trans advocacy has gone all-in on rhetoric unpopular with the general public and a significant subset of trans people, making the right-wing’s job easier.
The intense debates exist, not only between cis and trans people, but between what I’ve come to call “gender anarchists” and “trans pragmatists”; there are genuine, unresolved tensions that different groups experience very differently, and we’ve shot down all disagreement about those tensions, even if it could have led to productive dialogue.
I’m basing this answer on this YouTube video (How Transphobia Won by Doki Doki Discourse), and my own responses to its rhetorical blind spots (on Tumblr).
Abstracting away the stakes
The conversation isn’t just about whether trans people exist, but also about how they should exist. The video points out that the intense debates aren’t abstract philosophy, but concern real laws and policies that affect real lives, for example on whether trans people lose access to healthcare, face discrimination, and experience violence, and on who is allowed to play sports as they are, access bathrooms as they are, or be protected from discrimination as they are.
The problem is that the abstracting-away is done on both sides: the transphobes denying trans people’s legitimacy by citing theistic moralistic arguments, and the gender anarchists neglecting trans people’s measurable needs for medical transition and an accepting environment for their gender (including “man” and “woman”!) to instead prop up the idea of “gender abolition”: that there should be no such concept as “men” and “women”. Both delegitimize the existence of binary trans people, who are caught in the crossfire, watching the political climate getting worse and worse.
“What Is Transgender?”: the Thrilling Sequel to “What Is a Woman?”
As I point out in my Tumblr essay, there is no consensus on what the “aggressively pro-trans stance” suggested in the video should look like, between gender anarchists and trans pragmatists.
The gender anarchists’ view is that gender and sex categorization completely lacks utility, and should be deconstructed entirely (hence the common term “gender abolitionism”), in favor of total freedom of personal identification without any rules, standards, or norms, including gender presentation, gender identity labels, and even personal pronouns (hence my term “gender anarchist”). Their view suffers from the hugbox/echo-chamber problem: because they think things ought to be some way, and because their in-group thinks so too, you think people in general should agree with that, and any disagreement is just bigotry, including by trans people not belonging to the echo chamber. Gender anarchists are the reason why workplaces have “pronoun circles” instead of “gender circles”, and why Discord Messenger has a “pronouns” box instead of a “gender” box in a user’s profile.
Trans pragmatists like me start from where society currently is, and argue for refinement of those often-oversimplified understandings, based on evidence such as from biology, sociology, and psychiatry. We recognize that sweeping social change is impossible if it disagrees with the general populace’s views, and that the best way to bring change is incrementally, using existing understandings as a launch-pad.
Binary gender categories currently exist in our civilization, and have existed in all others, because human sex dimorphism is real and measurable, and at least 98% of all humans (at least of adults in the United States) belong to one of the two clusters (male and female). Trans pragmatists first affirm these basic-level observations, and then insert nuance.
“Yes, binary gender categories have their use, but it’s an oversimplification to assume that all people are always and entirely the same category, only male or female. There are many different parts to human sex differentiation, and they sometimes don’t correlate with each other. Sexual orientation is just one of many ways that sex appears in humans, and so are external genitals, internal gonads, hormone levels, skeletal structure, subconscious sex, and gender expression. And it’s a natural expression of human diversity, not a genetic error, though some people suffer from their subconscious sex differing from the rest of their sex features, and seek medical intervention to alleviate that disconnect, which should not be socially shunned.”
Gender anarchists delegitimize the gender binary as a whole, instead of meeting people where they are and guiding them towards a deeper understanding of gender using scientific conclusions. Gender anarchists criticize or shun binary trans people when they express concern (or worse, discontent) about gender abolitionism’s neglect of men and women—cis and trans—and their innate need to be recognized as, and recognize themselves as, men and women. However, it is true that gender anarchists do not provide a way in which these men and women can be affirmed as they are; validity is conditional on being “queer”, i.e. violating the gender binary’s norms, which many men and women, cis and trans, do not want to do. Society should not force men and women to be nonbinary, just as it should not force nonbinary people to be men and women.
Funding disparity
The video also points out that intensity partly comes from asymmetric investment: Anti-trans activists have turned this into a lucrative career path with significant institutional backing ($215 million in ads, six-figure salaries, media empires). Meanwhile, trans people are fighting for basic rights with grassroots resources. When one side has everything to gain politically and financially, and the other has everything to lose personally, emotions run high.
Why is it even a “debate”?
I agree with the video on this: framing this as a “debate” with two equal sides has been disastrous. The video lists climate change denial as one of many times that the right created a false impression of scientific controversy, by amplifying tiny minorities of dissenting voices, when the vast majorit of scientists all agree with the facts. The “Teach the Controversy” hubbub about Creationism in schools is another example, though not nearly as high-profile.
In this case, medical consensus says that trans people’s lives are much improved after medical transition in an understanding environment, but giving equal airtime to skeptics such as “BOYcotters” like Riley Gaines, “detransitioners” like Oli London, and “Gender Critical” pundits like Graham Linehan and J.K. Rowling, makes it seem contested.
But at the same time, gender anarchists made this much easier by arguing against scientific consensus themselves. When activists say “sex is a social construct”, rather than (or without really meaning that) “sex is bimodal and a complex aggregate of features”, they hand opponents an easy strawman: that so-called trans people are so confused or delusional that they believe that men and women don’t exist.
Sub-conclusion: A deep, internal divide, of which the Right takes advantage
The elephant in the room is that the trans community itself has deep disagreements about visibility, assimilation, medicalization, and what “trans” even means. Binary trans people who want to pass and live stealth have different social, societal, and governmental needs from non-binary people whose idea of gender is completely divorced from binary gender, pronouns corresponding to gender, or even the idea of having a (single) gender identity. Medicalized trans people have different wellbeing needs, such as medical transition and mental health problems arising from dysphoria, that those who call for demedicalizing transness lack.
When these internal tensions not only aren’t acknowledged, but are made into a discursive minefield, everyone gets painted with the broadest brush, and nuanced positions become impossible. Just as a trans woman who just wants to live life as she is gets conflated with a male crossdresser or a “confused” man, she is also conflated with gender anarctists who want to abolish gender entirely.
Why it’s not just “political correctness”
Dismissing this as “just political correctness” misses that:
People’s lives really are at stake: This isn’t just about hurt feelings or respect. Hinging on this “debate” are access to healthcare, safety from discrimination (often violent), and legal recognition.
There are real philosophical questions about how sex, gender, biology, and society interact, that neither transphobes nor gender anarchists want to discuss.
The debate has been deliberately manufactured and funded as an ongoing political strategy of the right of “picking a minority to scapegoat”, and not an organic development out of the mold of political correctness.
Neither side is a monolith, even if right-wing media, as well as trans activist circles, tend to flatten both sides into a broad-strokes label. It’s just as true that different people are skeptical of trans people for different reasons, as it is true that different people “under the trans umbrella” belong there for different reasons, for being different things. And while I myself have described “gender anarchists” and “trans pragmatists” as two poles, they, too, have many people being in between, or with more or less extreme versions of these ideologies.
The biggest tragedy is that the intensity and walking-on-eggshells-ness of the “debate” itself is harming the very people it’s ostensibly about.