“There are no ‘trans’ people. There are people with mental illnesses. They need to receive treatment, they don’t need to be coddled and force everyone to pretend that their delusion is reality.” (Transphobic Facebook comment in the Atlanta area, January 2025)
“Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity.” (Executive Order, January 2025)
“Before Trump, there was Jerry Falwell. It’s the same old, same old. Even now, we’re still not acceptable. They still want to get rid of us and/or force us to assume a pretense of not being who we are. I think that’s the issue, of course. They don’t care if we fuck each other; we’re just supposed to be ashamed of ourselves and do it in private. And I’m not ashamed of myself.” (Dorothy Allison interviewed by Rae Garringer, Aug. 2, 2018)
“If there is no such thing today as femininity, it is because there never was.” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex)
It’s a strange feeling to wake up every morning this year and get told that you don’t exist.
Oh it’s true, we thought we existed for a little while—it was so extravagant, shiny and implausible, drifting in the pulse of feelings, sensations, long matted threads or chopped-up fragments of moments with each other, without each other, the giddy joy of living and the sadness, the wandering dreams that vanished upon waking—
It’s comical, in a crackpot universe like this, that for an instant we were so deep into life—I mean trans people, we are talking about people, trans people—we were in way over our heads, contemplating, pretending, longing, facing, hiding, kissing the lips, the neck and beneath the ears, and sleeping, and eating, and and and
Mid-kiss, we were reminded by some spiteful autocrats that we didn’t exist after all.
“There are no ‘trans’ people,” the trolls say.
Does this statement negate our existence? Or does it ironically presuppose our existence to be told that we don’t exist? If all publicity is good publicity, perhaps our existence is darkly magnified by the negative attention, even though we’re also undone by it.
Naturally, I am inclined to say the obvious, liberal things. Trans and genderqueer and nonbinary people do exist. We are a feature of humanity rather than a bug. We cannot be regulated out of existence. We deserve to be here. All that.
But honestly, there’s also a part of me that hears the trolls and… feels like I’m not as real as I used to be. Lately I’ve often felt fake, alone, vulnerable, a little bit hollow, a little bit ashamed.
What does that tell us? That feeling of … nonexistence?
I have long felt that we are made real by other people around us: we become partly a reflection of what people see in us. And because the other’s gaze can be a malevolent force, we have to be thoughtful about how we let ourselves be looked at. The gaze can also hurt so deeply; it can demolish its object. That’s their goal, right?
Different people look at us and see different things: recognition can bring love or dejection. We might look at ourselves and see different things, depending on the moment. We might see ourselves through other people’s eyes, or through our fantasy of what they see. Isn’t this the fate of an evil queen—to look at herself in the mirror and feel ugly and inadequate, which is also what she fears other people must think?
Thus our sense of recognition contains multitudes: this much is obvious. And it changes our sense of what’s real, sometimes from one heartbeat to the next. What’s real for trans people becomes a space of struggle, because how we are seen is now up for grabs.
This struggle can seem to revolve around two opposing theories. Are trans people a pernicious illusion, as the reactionaries think, a disguise cast over what they consider the eternal biology of sexual difference? Or on the contrary, are trans people just living out our true, authentic selves, expressing the inner truth of our gender as it wells up from deep within us, overcoming the awkwardness of being born into the “wrong bodies”?
These opposing views appear to share something: the premise that there is a single clear essence of a person, in matters of sex and gender. Trans people really do exist or they really don’t. Either way the truth is clear and definite; we just have to acknowledge it. Such views seek the timeless essence of someone’s gender and, subsequently, tend to downplay ambiguity, multiplicity and contradictions.
Yet in my experience, being trans is a mess, a complicated mess. We exist and we don’t — sometimes almost at the same time.
RIVER: “Is that why you are so scared of our body, which / is multiplicity, an ours, we, and an us, an ours, we, and an us, a they without progeny or parental law. They are the sentences that do not finish and the grammar that will not sit still.”
Unsurprisingly, the reactionaries are coming now to collect what they think is still theirs — our bodies, our thoughts — and they want to rid of a multiplicity that scares or revolts them. Public trans existence threatens both their power structure and their symbolic order. I doubt they really care if I wear a dress while hiding in my closet, but “we’re just supposed to be ashamed of ourselves and do it in private,” as Allison put it during Trump’s first term. The shame is meant to represent the gender police in your head: your inner incredulousness towards trans existence, which is to say, towards yourself.
It’s easy to react against the reaction and become trans-essentialist, claiming that trans identity is simply a kind of inner authenticity that needs liberating. “It’s about embracing and finding joy in your identity, and celebrating the story of your authentic self,” as one trans healthcare provider puts it. For sure, there are reasons to strategically adopt such an essentialist stance (which many trans people also believe in unironically). In so doing, we might aim to defend the more trans-inclusive symbolic order that has lately started to exist: the world of trans driver’s licenses and passports, trans kids playing sports or changing pronouns or just being out in the world.
I’m defending all those practices too, for sure, but what I’m really defending is something beyond the transgender jargon of authenticity or the Biden-era transinclusive policies that went with it. What I want to defend is what’s uncanny, surreal, and radically creative at the heart of everyday life. We can call this the possibility of stumbling towards utopia, of cultivating a radical imagination, of letting ourselves be moved by history. We can call it the possibility of seeing differently, and being seen differently.
This to me is what’s radical about transgender existence over the past few decades: the fact that we can change and see new things, that we are not captive to the patriarchal order as it was, and that outside the reactionary gaze something else can exist. As if another world could start to exist inside the burning husk of this one. As if transitions were possible. One could call this the optimistic side of social construction, which reactionaries hate, of course.
We often say that gender is socially constructed, but what we mean by this is a whole bunch of different things put together. It’s about how you’re seen at work or school, and on the street, and in a clinic, and by the police, and at home, and by your parents, and by your friends, and by your own self, and by your therapist, and by what G.H. Mead called the “generalized Other,” by society and culture at large. All these things can align nicely with each other — or not.
A lot of what we call a “gender transition” is about finding alignment between all these different things. The last year or two, I’ve gotten to the point in transness where most of the time these things add up into the kind of recognition I want. I’m called she most places I go, and my voice sounds how I like (mostly? I think?), and I have clothes I like (most days), and I changed my name, and Facebook shows me ads for “mature women’s sweaters” (I did not make this up!) and hot flash meds (I am in my 40s). When I told a guy at work that I was stressed about transphobic policy shifts, he said unguardedly, “But how could that affect you at this point — you already did it all, isn’t your transition done already?”
But of course, it does affect me — everything that was made can be unmade.
Under heavy pressure from reactionaries, trans recognition doesn’t vanish all at once. But many things we relied upon will soon start to fray, to decouple, to drift apart from each other. It’s already happening; please don’t visit the passport office, dare to play sports, or pee in public. Stuart Hall wrote in 1983 that “politics moves, not by the total replacement of one set of practices by another, but by the constitution and dis-constitution, formation and destruction of competing or conflicting political forces.” That’s what’s happening now: the dis-constitution of a liberal trans politics and the attempted destruction of queer-friendly public culture.
As I was writing, I decided to look up what the trolls call trans folks these days. Per a GLAAD report on “extreme anti-trans hate,” they tend to use words like freak, tranny, devil, demonic cult, pervert, sicko, sick, evil… I have a bad tendency to absorb what people say about me (or even about “people like me”), so I’m trying to sit with that language and see if I can learn anything from it. I want to learn from their nihilism.
Honestly, I find it difficult to see anything there. It hurts, of course, that they would want to hurt me, us, you, anyone, for purely ideological reasons. It’s gross to feel vilified and dehumanized, particularly when it also presages actual violence… But their specific insults have such a juvenile, theological and dated character that it’s hard to take them in. “Pervert” is antiquated Freudian jargon; I don’t believe in devils or theological evil; and as for “freaks,” I’m inclined to consider it a compliment.
For me personally, what hurts more than the insults is being told I (we) just don’t exist at all. “There are no ‘trans’ people. There are people with mental illnesses.” That hurt to read. And what scares me is that people in my community — my very queer and trans friendly community — might start to think this too. Because when it comes to gender identity, while I have developed a certain confidence about it, I still don’t feel very assertive about it. I really only want to exist as a transgender woman if that’s existentially OK with the people I care about. If that becomes impossible — I don’t like to impose myself. Nonexistence is an option, symbolically speaking.
In the end, we can always find other ways of being, even if we have to invent them. I remember what it feels like to live in permanent rebellion against categories.
But in the meantime, here we are at the crisis point of liberal trans-inclusion, and what choice is there but to keep struggling, somehow, from that point? Social constructions don‘t just exist automatically; we have to fight for them. And not just for the impersonal things like passports and policies, but also for our emotional relationships with the people around us. In the end, it’s a struggle for relationships and for community. That’s where recognition comes from. That’s what makes us feel real or not so real.
Megan Steffen writes in Real People:
How hard must it be to feel like a real person when someone else has decided that you have nothing worth losing, that you can afford to have your life completely uprooted and untethered? What must it feel like to know, suddenly, through your soaked clothes, that after surviving one flood, your leader was prepared to let you perish in another? How long can someone bear knowing their lives were less real in the eyes of their government than others?
One can only think: Not that long. Not forever.
But she also adds:
The life she’s carefully building for herself will eventually be lost. But also: oh well. Losing one possible life is not the same thing as losing one’s life.
One can experience gender not as a destiny but as a tendency, a possible belonging, a space of transformation. Yes, we might lose the life we’ve been carefully building for ourselves, and this will be a loss. But it might also reopen the possibility of becoming something new, afterwards.
That sounds a little bit empty, but right now it’s the best I have, and better than nothing.