Trans identities in lies and shadows

Getting to decide how trans identities are frames is a matter of who has access, who has the furthest reach, and who can shout the loudest. Framing who is trans, what is trans, and the reactions against trans identities are pressing, especially given that it is disaffected cis folk who are shouting the loudest with lies in their attempts to cast trans folk back into the shadows. Over the course of 2023 people like Riley Gaines have monetized their transphobia, weaponised their distain and hate, using their right-wing funded platform to marginalize trans folk. Legislatures in both the US and UK have listened intently to lies repeatedly told about trans people, to the point where trans rights are reduced, restricted, and stripped away.

In the olden days of 2015 we were told that there was a trans tipping point, where transgender identities would be treated as a normal part of society. Instead, after the election of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in the UK trans people have been further marginalised, their lives treated as false and phony. We are the whipping folk, driven through the virtual streets of Twitter to be branded with the scarlet letter T, never allowed to simply exist. Our every misstep recorded and blown up beyond all recognition, our good deeds drowned out in cries of “Man!”, “TIM!”, “groomer!”, “Mutilator!” and worse. No more are we allowed to simply exist as woman, man, or non-binary person alone, we are forever branded.

A year ago I would have said the above was being hysterical, I would have dismissed it as a mere fragment of social media discourse. No more. Having experienced a small sliver of the online abuse many activists have long suffered, I am ashamed to say I am feeling the slings and arrows of the lies told about people like me. As a trans woman who transitioned in 2000 I thought I was long past all these feelings, the sense of peril, the personal attacks, being made to feel small for simply being me. These are weird feelings, a sense that if I stand up for the rights of others my personhood will be impugned with a regularity it feels clockwork. Standing up for other people should not require a side dish of therapy or counselling, yet the more I engage the more I find myself disillusioned with the course of the world.

We trans folk are being framed as worse than paedophiles for standing up for trans kids, called groomers and mutilators because we want the best for trans children so they do not suffer from the worst body dysmorphia that gender dysphoria can bring on. I was on the fence about trans child healthcare, hoping that more science would emerge either way. Instead, what pushed me into the pro camp was the concerted hate campaign against trans kids, their parents, and the healthcare professionals aiding them. I see the lives torn apart from the lies told about them all, lives forced unwillingly into the spotlight all because bigots flex their petty power. When a child’s future is determined by the hate of a cabal of gender critical adults you know who the real child abusers are.

It is a sad reality when living in stealth comes back into vogue. Instead of it being an individual choice to avoid the low level abuse, now it is potentially a matter of life or death. Stealth and passing have long tortuous histories in the trans community, especially as queer theory began to supplant older notions of gender identity. In 2015 being stealth was seen as almost passe, something you did if you really wanted to be cisnormative and live amongst the cis folk. In 2023 it is possibly the only thing between you and a hate crime in waiting. For those who cannot go stealth, or choose not to, the world has become darker and bitter.

Part of me dislikes writing about the pain within the community, sincerely wishing I could look away and muse over lighter fare, but that would be remiss of me. I have a degree of person power and access many trans folk do not have, an education denied to working class trans folk by dint of money, a genetic lottery that gave me looks and circumstances through which I could become myself without too many difficulties. My activism comes from a place of observed concern, not from direct lived experience. My lived truth is one of blessings and walking through the world as me. This is why I fight for other trans folk because I want equity for all, not just others to have parity with me. Lies and shadows are cast about like an infernal red legion, a towering inferno that draws the credulous, exclusionary feminists confecting a warlock’s brew. Its as if trans folk are the new fallen, taken apart piece by piece by witnesses to some foreign god. We become travellers in a foreign land, thrust into a dead zone, a place of twilight in the shadows. It is our seeming destiny. Yet, while we may be hunted and run a daily online gauntlet, this is no twilight gap, we become guardians of our own futures, rising to meet the challenge.

In fighting the trinity ghouls of exclusionary feminism, right wing media hatred, and wider apathy, trans folk are forced into a crucible not of our making. We all have our dreaming cities on the hill, a reef over which the hate crashed and burns. No matter if exclusionary feminists act as modern day Rasputins stirring up the masses, we choose to turn to the light and not the darkness. Each strand of hope tears at the sex based stasis exclusionary feminists seek to wrap society in, the deep void of hate burned away in bright arcs of light. There is no final shape to sex and gender, just the lived experiences we all have, and while we each may feel like ghosts over the world, the reality is together we raise an iron banner to fight back the right wing hive mind. The world may want to force us into the shadows, but we walk in the light, awoken and affirmed, beholden only to our own ideas of our gendered selves. For all the lies we are rekindled Mars and Venus, reef forged and reef born, light bearers one and all.