Trans in the Age of Trump and Butler

An interview in the wake of the 2024 US election

My friend Sigrid was kind enough to let me interview her about how she sees her current situation in the US after the election of Trump. There’s a lot here, including things that may seem controversial to some. On the other hand, I suspect many will find themselves heartily agreeing with things they might not otherwise have considered or with views they hadn’t yet heard.

Topics we discussed included the issues of Self-ID, early gender transition, the cynical politicization of trans identity by the left and the right, the recent ideological shift in what transness actually is, and quite a few other related subjects. Especially important I think is the end, what both the “right” and “left” need to consider.

I offer this in hope that it will help people on all “sides” to see a bit more clearly.
Please read it with that same spirit.

Also, I’ve made it public, so please share it widely once you’ve read it. I’ve also made the decision to leave comments turned on (for now), but will close them off if they get abusive.

Thanks for reading.

Rhyd Wildermuth: First of all, could you start by telling everyone about yourself, your situation, and how you're feeling right now after the past few months of election insanity and the actual results?

Sigrid: Okay. I'm a 46 year old woman in the United States. I began transitioning at the age of 21, by which I mean I began the process by which I went on hormone replacement therapy, eventually culminating with SRS (an admittedly outdated term, Sex Reassignment Surgery) at the age of 25. I was living fully socially as female sometime in my 22nd year, as well as mostly legally (some documents required SRS to change gender markers at that time, but not all did). I was partnered, and eventually married, for about 18 years to my former husband, a cis male. I moved from a big city to a rural town some years ago. It's worth mentioning that in the roughly 25 years or so that I've lived as female, I've spent the majority of that time as “stealth" — which, if anyone doesn't know the term, means that I've passed as a cisgendered woman and don't openly identify myself as trans.

Being politically moderate, I've been like many people — usually, in my experience, people that began somewhere on "the left”— that have felt "politically homeless" for quite a while. As a result, I tend not to get swept up in the dramatic swings of emotions that have accompanied national elections in the US for the past decade or so. They come and go, they're all bad in their own ways, and whether national leadership has dramatically hurt or helped me individually has often had very little to do with party.

I was not particularly excited by either candidate. I did not find Trump to be a harbinger of apocalypse and I didn't imagine Harris would improve anything at all.

But this election, with the Republican party choosing, oddly, a particular focus on anti-trans rhetoric (for various calculated reasons, I suspect), I began to experience something that living stealth for a long time can make you unused to — hearing everyone around you, all of a sudden, talking about "the trannies,” lots of misinformation and anger flying around among people that prior to a few years ago probably never thought about trans people at all and prior to this election year probably never thought about us in a political sense.

I tend not to live close to the television or radio, but in every single bar, supermarket, car ride, you name it, once election season started, every channel was filled with campaign ads from Republican candidates promising their constituency that they would rid America of the transgender menace threatening their women and children (especially their girls, and especially their girls' sports teams). It kept the topic on the tip of everyone's tongue and front of mind, and angry about things that had likely never actually affected them and likely never will. It made me, for the first time in a long time, genuinely more than a little bit scared.

I was mildly surprised by Trump's victory, but not extremely. My immediate reaction is that the end of campaign season will likely lead to a dramatic cooling on this issue as there won't be a need to continuously blast rhetoric about it, it won't be in everyone's ear 24/7, and most people will gradually lose their obsession. But a lot of damage has been done; we're a more hated population and that won't go away, and with Republican majorities in many areas of government, my main concern is that anti-trans legislation that could see me denied healthcare or legal status that I haven't thought about in decades will be coming down the pipe.

Rhyd Wildermuth: Before this conversation, we talked about an article in the New York Times regarding the DNC's perennial search for an excuse as to why they lost. It said, in part:

"Mr. Trump spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-transgender television advertising, which went unanswered by the Harris campaign and its allies.”

And later the article talks about how Democrats were arguing over whether or not their previous focus on trans rights was to blame, or if the problem was that they were not listening enough to concerns. First of all, it must be really unpleasant to read things like this, hearing your existence treated like a football essentially. But on the other hand, you've been a bit critical of some of the previous social justice framings of trans existence. Can you pick this apart a bit?

Sigrid: Trans people have been a political football basically since a kind of revival of public interest in our existence roughly a decade ago, but the fact is, aside from cultural objections to our existence or ideological defense of our right to exist and/or have various civil rights, we weren't something that had any particular reason to mobilize an electorate of average people who didn't already have very strong ideological reasons for caring about trans people. We were very cynically thrust into the spotlight by both sides, and I don't think the lives of trans people have been improved by that scrutiny, at all.

If you want to talk about this in a social justice context, understand that for much of trans people's existence as legal entities (I mean this in the sense of modern societies needing to figure out what to do with us — not so much our literal existence, as we've always existed in some number or another probably everywhere), there was very little philosophizing about "whether trans people ought to exist," unless you're talking about repressive regimes that cracked down on sexual minorities in general for ideological or religious reasons. There were a tiny handful of people born male or female that had a problem with that, found doctors willing to do something about it (or simply wore certain clothes and adopted certain social roles), and governments would typically carve out paths by which they would be recognized, at least as legal entities, as the sex they identified as.

But coinciding with the postmodern deconstruction of sex and gender, 'being trans' became much more of an ideology than what it was when I transitioned — a medical problem that you found a solution for and moved on with your life. The definition of being trans moved increasingly away from being framed as something biological or psychological and increasingly towards something ... very nebulous, with elements of psychology (it's sorta kinda a mental health issue but we don't want to call it that because it makes trans people sound crazy and therefore invalid?) but a lot of elements of simply identity politics, where what it meant socially to be trans became about “self identification.”

I think the critical mass of self-id theory impacting mainstream society is when lots of people that didn't think about us very much felt like all of a sudden there were trans people everywhere, in vast numbers (not really), and everyone's kid is trans, and now they're furries, and now they're trans furries, and what's this nonbinary business, and Ragnarok is upon us. Self ID (the idea that, in this context, anyone is male/female who says they are) becoming the accepted standard by the mental health community led to dramatic changes in what it meant to DO being trans — what therapy looked like, whether and how easily you got HRT (hormone replacement therapy), whether you could get SRS (which they call GAS, gender affirmation surgery, in most quarters these days), and importantly, whether insurance was required to pay for any of this stuff.

It also impacted how easy it was to get your legal status changed — the vast majority of legal documents with gender markers don't require any form of surgery today to change, and many don't even require anything like a letter from a doctor or therapist, simply a request to do so. This feeds into a common source of “trans panic,” the situation of incarcerated criminals abruptly identifying as the opposite sex to go into different facilities (and the inability to gainsay such a thing), and so forth.

All these changes made the public face of doing trans look very different to the average person, and started to feel like it impacted their lives. And that was really the beginning of politicizing this. Once your tax dollars are paying for sex change operations, or you're being told that someone who, for all intents and purposes, looks like a man to you, is going to hang around your daughter or wife in a locker room, or lots of other things like this, you're someone that can be engaged by people looking for a political distraction. And, as always, trans men are completely forgotten in the chaos of this.

So there was a cynical use of our existence on both sides of the political professional spectrum — as scapegoats, as victim classes, as a Threat To Our Children, as a sign of moral and cultural decline. It was inevitable that trans people would end up in the position we're in now. I called it over a decade ago.

Rhyd Wildermuth: This reminds me of a study that had come out in 2017 that showed two things in relation to homosexual “innumeracy,” which is the situation where people incorrectly believe there are many more gays and lesbians than there actually are. That study had shown that areas where people thought there were many more homosexuals than there were tended to be the least tolerant of gay marriage and other related things, whereas more accurate estimates correlated with more tolerance. And it seems something similar has happened with trans people: the prominence of the topic leads people to think there are many more trans people than there really are, and this may be leading them to many of the negative and panicked reactions. If so, that would also indicate that maybe much of the social justice focus on trans identity has actually harmed trans people.

And in one of our earliest personal conversations on this, I had mentioned that something really seemed to have changed in the way transness was seen. All the old “trannies” I knew as a young gay punk saw who they were as something completely different from the way it’s seen now, and they were among my earliest heroes. But when the academic ideas — particularly via Judith Butler — started to become prominent, they found themselves suddenly at odds with a newer generation who told them to their face, “you can't call yourself a tranny anymore.”

So, though it's likely wrong to put all this at the feet of social justice activism, it still seems like a shift occurred that no one really had a say in. Especially with matters of self-ID, there was no discussion of what the potential consequences might be, or any effort to implement these ideas in a way that ensured trans people didn't become an unwitting vanguard (or cannon fodder) for a larger war led by generals who weren't even trans themselves. How do you see all this?

Sigrid: I mean, one can argue that only granting negative rights to perceived-small groups doesn't make sense (why does it matter if more or fewer gays are getting married), but equally importantly, I think, is your invocation of the idea of "panic" — civil rights, whether we like it or not, are ultimately things granted by the strong to the weak (whether that relative strength is due to numbers or wealth or force of arms or something else) and if there's the sense that “there's a veritable tidal wave of gross people that can only be stopped if someone legislates them out of existence,” people are going to be reactionary.

And yes, you're right, it would be wrong for me to “blame” social justice whole cloth. At the end of the day, so-called conservative politicians didn't HAVE to rise to the provocations of progressive activists — you can deal with the matter of legal rights and protections in non-political ways, you can look at precedent, you can look at the Constitution, etc. There are actually good little-c conservative arguments for trans rights, religious objections aside.

There's an old problem — maybe not even a problem, maybe simply a reality, because valence is something we decide post hoc as humans — that every minority faces. The loudest, most visible, and most vocal members of a population become its representatives. And often, such people are not necessarily very representative of their population, but they're the ones willing to address power structures and assume risk, so they end up being both the face and the voice of that group.

In the case of trans people, we not only had this, but we also had the broader gender critical/deconstructionist community kind of egging on the most radical ideas about what transness meant and should mean socially.

You've told me before that those OG trannies were your heroes, and it made me smile at the time, but it's almost hard to imagine. My experience of transition was kind of like being a vampire in edgy modern horror fiction — it was something you did mostly alone, you tended to find large groups of your own kind unsettling and possibly even risky to your survival, and if you ran into each other, you kind of nodded discretely and moved on. “Outness” I think is something that has always meant slightly different things to the gay communities and the trans community. The idea of being “aggressively” out as trans is still something that's hard for me to wrap my head around.

I'm going to say something very spicy here along the lines of self-ID and my earlier statement about representatives choosing themselves: I think that since self-ID became the norm, not everyone calling themselves trans (or being encouraged to call themselves trans) is “really” trans, or if they are, they're not the same kind of thing I am or was. Around the time of the Judith Butler generation of academics you mentioned, there was an important popular shift from the common use of the term “transsexual” to the “transgender” that most people know today. Interestingly, in very recent years I'm encountering a small but growing number of people reclaiming “transsexual” as a distinction.

I've seen discussions of transness where it is posited as a serious argument that one can feel male today and female tomorrow, and both of those are valid and require social recognition each time, and that feels different from "my body as it stands is horrifying to me, someone made a mistake at the shop, get it off get it off get it off.” The complete separation of one's relationship to their body and their gender identity (“girldick”) is something that feels very different from what I spent a very anguished childhood waiting for the agency and freedom to deal with.

Rhyd Wildermuth: I think you’re right about the difference in outness, and I think that’s especially relevant to this shift in how transness is seen.

Gays and lesbians find ways to signal to each other because that’s how we find mates. All the “subcultural” stuff that comes along with it — “camp” culture and other stuff — is just one version of it, which unfortunately then gets internalized as something that defines you, rather than just a form of expression. So, being gay then means liking Madonna or caring about fashion, and being lesbian then means knowing how to build a house or owning a kale farm.

And I don’t like Madonna and I know shit about fashion. That resulted in a lot of alienation for me when I was younger, and even a significant doubt that I was “really” gay. I then later had the great fortune of moving to a city with a large enough population of gays that I could meet other guys who weren’t into those things and didn’t rely on those subcultural markers to define who they were.

It was there I first met those “OG trannies,” and they possessed that same kind of independence and modeled it for others in a really liberating way. There was really a “no fucks given” attitude about it, an awareness they were different without a need to justify themselves to others. Like, they didn’t need an academic theory or political formation to back them up — they just existed, and that was enough. And I’m quite certain Judith Butler never asked any of them what they thought before declaring to the world that gender and sex were just social constructions.

And I’ve seen this tension you speak of between this newer version and the previous one, especially around reclaiming transsexual. I guess they’re derogatorily called “truscum” or “transmedicalists.” Also, they’re often labeled a “transphobic” in a similar way to how I was called a “homophobe” for not using effeminate affectations in my speech. There was something wrong with me, and something wrong with them, because we don’t identify or internalize the currently popular way of expressing who we are.

I’d like to take up one issue that’s extremely controversial but also at the crux of a lot of the political arguments. That’s the matter of earlier “interventions,” especially during puberty. Here in Europe, there’s been a significant pull-back of earlier policies of prescribing puberty blockers because of large waves of later detransitions. On the other hand, activists in the US have really made youth transition a core part of social justice programs. You have a very nuanced (and I think very balanced) view of this — can you explain it?

Sigrid: On the extremely rare occasions that I skulk into trans spaces and open my mouth I am universally called truscum. Like your OG tranny heroes, I am what I am.

So, youth transition is one of the big targets of the current circular firing squad blame game going on right now in the wake of the election — “we wouldn't have hated you so much if you hadn't fucked with the kids,” “you idiots, we were doing fine why did you have to push for puberty blockers"

It looks like low-hanging fruit. Compared to the lack of options a generation ago, it looks and smells radical, and The Children are always a really good way to get everyone extremely sensitive, quick to anger, and to mobilize straight men who are current or future dads to start feeling like they've got a great excuse to start getting really aggressive.

And if I were being purely pragmatic and self-serving, I'd play along. I'd say, I've got mine, I did okay, if this is the one thing in the way, let it go. But I'm not gonna do that, for a couple of reasons.

One, it's never the “one thing.” If puberty blockers didn't exist, it'd be bathrooms. It's simply one of the most convenient scapegoats because it involves medical intervention and The Children. (Please do not confuse my eye-rolling and disdain for a disregard of children — I adore children and spent a lot of my career protecting and educating them, and children are often instinctively drawn to me as a nurturing and safe presence because I do genuinely care for them. But I think that “the children” is about the most time-honored cynical mechanism of any political agenda and virtually never is about actually doing something for actual children that is needed or wanted. It’s simply a universal excuse for extreme measures and untempered, almost gleeful aggression — see also, Terrorism.)

Second: I was a kid once. I was a kid that knew something was very wrong, and it didn't take forever for me to put a label on it for myself. Because there was nothing whatsoever I could do about it as a child or as a teen in those days, I simply didn't tell anyone (except for a small number of very rare, very stupid confessions that always went disastrously). But I was not an okay kid. I was depressed and self-injured, a ton (mortifying the flesh felt like something I could do). I was a social disaster and absolute raw meat for bullies. I was anorexic, something virtually unheard of for 'boys' at that time, through most of high school with the specific goal of attempting to suppress puberty and secondary sex characteristics (don't try this at home, but it ‘worked' — I don't advocate anyone be anorexic but I bring it up to illustrate how intentional this very maladaptive behavior was).

But I knew. I educated myself, I planned, and I waited. As I traveled around the world with my family, I prayed and offered allowance money at shrines and temples to every strange god I met to fix me, because they seemed to operate on different rules than the one I’d been saddled with (I suspect this was an early grooming for paganism.) That hope kept me going.

I was a miserable kid. I was unhappy, weird, and really didn't like myself for reasons I couldn't tell anyone or do anything about. I seriously contemplated suicide numerous times and did not succeed mostly by blind luck.

Because I went through a male puberty, albeit a weaker one, I needed surgeries to correct characteristics that arose from that puberty. Because I transitioned at the (for the time) young age at 21, I needed a lot less than others (I didn't undergo FFS — Facial Feminization Surgery — as many adult transitioners do today). But not none: shaving very prominent thyroid cartilage and a few other things besides SRS. These were expensive, not without risk, and had painful recovery, and never guaranteed of the intended results (in my case, I was always very fortunate — I suspect those gods I once petitioned have smiled on my strange venture from the outset after all, once I had the mettle to do it). I was fortunate enough to be able to get the money, be healthy enough to do it in the first place, and come through it unscathed. These are not guarantees for everyone.

I want to point out that because I ended up being a “passing” woman within a few years, that weird, unhappy, self-hating kid virtually vanished — in very short order I grew into the person I have essentially been since: a confident, poised, extroverted, charismatic woman with lots of friends, generally good self esteem, an active sex life, and grateful for being alive even at my lowest moments.

I often wonder how much better things would have been if that 13-year old kid would have been able to tell someone and do something. It would have saved me painful years of self-doubt before finding my way, saved me surgeries, given me years more gendered socialization, and changed my outlook

And I think of all the trans people I've met over the years that were bludgeoned with the wrong puberty like a sledgehammer — they’ll take tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of surgery (assuming they can even get it) just to try to pass (or at least not have crippling dysphoria) that they often won't be happy with, they'll never quite fit into the world the way they want to, they might end up unhealthy or impaired.

To say nothing of the fact that puberty for a trans kid is just a nightmare. It’s a popular conservative argument to say “all kids are uncomfortable about puberty, it isn't fun for anyone, we shouldn't go around messing with it just because it's hard or confusing,” but this is a bullshit statement: puberty for a boy who is essentially fine with the idea of being a boy is weird and awkward and uncomfortable but it isn't horrifying. It doesn't represent the most fundamental betrayal of the self by the body.

But, to your point, we have detransitioners. And I respectfully question (but don’t flat out deny) those “large waves” and point at the earlier mention of innumeracy as a possible thing. And of course, there are potential (but very poorly measured and understood) permanent effects of puberty blockers. I'm not going to be glib and say that people are railing unreasonably against something with absolutely zero risk — nothing about being trans, including inaction, has zero risk.

But I will point out that the consequences of self ID I've mentioned so frequently connect to this. When I was transitioning (remember, I was a legal adult — there was essentially no such thing as minor children medically transitioning even with parental consent), we had something colloquially called the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care that were the guidelines practiced by psychiatrists, doctors, endocrinologists, therapists, etc. Up to version 6, the 2001 edition which was in effect when I transitioned, these standards included the things that today are regarded as “gatekeeping” practices and “jumping through hoops” and which the self ID movement universally panned as unjust. I was in therapy for a year before I was allowed to begin HRT, I was on HRT for a year before I was given clearance for surgeries, I needed separate consults with psychiatrists and clearance letters to change legal documents, etc. Whether you agree or disagree where the lines should be drawn, it was always explained to me that the lines were there for one very clear purpose- to make absolutely, positively sure that this irreversible, risky thing is the thing that I should be doing. And to be honest, I never disagreed with it.

The current climate of medical transition is one that essentially advocates, sometimes successfully, for the complete elimination of speed bumps or rendering them essentially toothless, with no cooling off periods or therapy required before beginning medical transition (getting HRT on demand from, for example, Planned Parenthood is referred to as a 'harm reduction' model and in most cases requires virtually no prerequisite beyond a medical exam). This, I think, is where the idea of "transing the kids" has fallen down and become vulnerable to being viewed as something abusive and barbaric.

If a child needed to go to a counselor for a year (or maybe even two) and been checked by a psychiatrist first, and is still insisting on this, I'd argue that the risks of having made a “mistake” at that point are within much more acceptable ranges, considering how many life-changing decisions are made for kids without their consent anyway. And, again, most of the time, these things are reversible within a certain window — detransition is not literally always a tragic horror story (except to the extent that all transition is seen as inherently horror to people who can't grasp it).

So, my very nuanced perspective is this: if you want to give minors the possibility of transitioning early enough to avoid the wrong puberty, you've got to have gatekeeping — lots of it — much more than we have today for adults OR children. You'll end up with people that haven't gone through the “opposite” puberty, essentially eliminating the “but trannies in sports” problem, they'll pass and have less dysphoria without expensive and painful surgeries, and they'll be better socialized and equipped for adulthood in their target gender.

The politicization (and ideological adoption) of being trans and the subsequent elimination of most gatekeeping of medical and legal transition is a very, very big part of how we got to where we were on November 5th.

Rhyd Wildermuth: There’s quite a lot there, and I’d love to underline a few points. First of all, it strikes me that your position — which is one I’ve heard from other trans friends — really eliminates a lot of the political contention and disarms many of the more prominent critics. And this is also the position many of the European state health systems which “pioneered” early transition are now taking. It’s also the position of the much-maligned Cass Review in the UK. All of them are saying basically the same thing: slow down a bit, make sure that the reported dysphoria isn’t a symptom of other conditions or “social contagion.” Really find out about the person, talk them through all the possibilities, and don’t immediately put them on a medical track they don’t yet understand.

So, that really destroys the “transing the kids” criticisms. If there’s a recognised process in place that everyone understands and isn’t rushing people (in the UK, much of the speed was due to understaffing; in the US situations, it was often a result of the for-profit medical system putting pressure on clinicians to increase efficiency and patient load), then that assuages a lot of concerns.

Also, it stops some of the documented abuses of self-id, men suddenly declaring themselves trans to enter women-only spaces (like the Wi Spa incident in the US, or the many instances in UK prisons). If there’s an official and longer process to get that recognition, there’s really no harm in that and I suspect even many radical feminists would accept this.

Of course, this position wouldn’t be enough for some social justice activists and would be too much for the virulently anti-trans activists. But simultaneously, it’s a position I think most everyday people would readily support, and also one that I think some believe is already the default.

I’d especially like to also underline your final point about the influence of politics and ideology here, how larger groups on both sides have turned something that really should be a matter of bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty into a terrain of war. It doesn’t need to be, and we’re not the first societies to have encountered this. Every non-Western society that recognises variance of gender or sexuality has seen this as something that just happens. And then they create rituals around it, and even specific roles — often spiritual ones — to recognize a kind of sacred otherness. But we have none of that now.

So, in conclusion, besides giving you a space to add anything else you’d like, I’m curious if there’s anything you really wish each “side” understood. Especially since you consider yourself a political moderate, what would you wish that the “right” and then the “left” — if those words even have any real meaning anymore — understood?

Sigrid: I think the ship has sailed long ago on the idea of a “third sex” or “sacred otherness” in a modern society, and I don't know that I'd want to have to occupy that place in society instead of blending in, at least in this society. Sacredness is incompatible with a modern pluralistic democracy, for better or worse. It's also worth pointing out, even though I tend to cleave to pre-modern ideals of such things as you do, that plenty of these historical non-western societies have also, after serious consideration, come to the conclusion that we're gross and just thrown us in fires. Much is touted of Native and Polynesian and South East Asian cultures having third sexes, but you don't have to look very hard to see that at least in modern times they're basically second-class citizens no one would want to date or marry and probably not befriend, relegated to the roles of sex workers or beggars or a similar underclass with a vague nod to them being sacred. Being sacred can be very lonely, and I like having romantic partners and being seen as desirable. There's something to be said for having your existence tolerated and protected under modern law, sure, but you can't force people to like you (and there's probably something there for the place we currently find ourselves).

I also want to make sure my point on transgender care for kids isn't being smoothed over — I do think that there are valid cases for minors receiving medical transition care, and anyone who's ever transitioned at any age will tell you that earlier is always better than later. I'm simply asserting that a return to the much more careful screening process that governed care for adults should be done for this new frontier as well, and that it's arguably more important to do so.

Here's what I'd say to the “left” and “right” about living with trans people as we move into the future.

To the left: Try much, much harder to seek out and listen to the moderate, everyday voices of the trans community to hear what we want. We are not an object of academic or ideological interest, a sort of ideology made flesh to project a postmodern agenda on. Be willing to accept the possibility that trans people as a social issue have become conflated with many other emerging areas of philosophical thought about sex and gender that may be exciting and make for great thesis papers but don't reflect the reality of asking society to accept and protect us.

Be willing to accept the possibility that there has been an overreach in expanding what it means to be trans and its implications for having to engage social institutions made to serve the average masses. Understand that it is not wrong or bigoted to exercise prudence (but not bans or a lack of equity) in giving access to functional aspects of transition like medical intervention and changes to legal status, especially for children. Lastly — and this is always hard for the left — understand that change like this is a two-way street: if the election results are due in any part to a backlash against trans issues, it is because your efforts were perceived as coercive to the majority and an aggressive, pervasive challenge to societal norms that suit the overwhelming majority of the world just fine. I would far rather people be indifferent or even ignorant of my existence than be reminded every day that their entire worldview is going to be legally revised against their will for my benefit.

To the right: We will exist no matter what you do to us, whether that is denying us access to transition care in any form, covering the ears of your kids to our existence (better hope they're not already one of us), criminalizing our public existence and throwing us in jail, or killing us. Trans people are going to happen whether you (or we) like it or not, and we are not inherently bad. Sometimes we will be your own children. (I was.) “Beating the trannies” will not make this weird anomaly that suddenly mattered to you go away forever — it will simply create a class of people made more miserable and mentally unwell, less productive, and more antisocial, and will make some of us die (which admittedly may for some be a feature rather than a bug).

I hear and empathize with your confusion and discomfort, but remember also that, again, we are your kids, your siblings, and your best friends, and just like your gay and lesbian acquaintances, we cannot stop being what we are even if we wanted to. I won't ask that you try to put yourselves in our shoes — I recognize the near impossibility of such a thing. Ask questions from the source — us — not from politicians or activists on either side. (You can contact me anonymously through Rhyd if you'd like me to be such a source.) The saying goes that “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” We're not a nail.

Lastly, don't let the leaders who promised to crush us on your behalf keep using us as a distraction from the real issues that have made us all worse off. You were emotionally manipulated and should be angry about that.

Note from Rhyd: you can contact Sigrid by sending me a message at rhyd@abeautifulresistance.com or by replying directly to the email version of this post, and I’ll forward your email on.