Ink Tea Stone Leaf

One of my more self-destructive behaviors is plugging myself in to a social media stream for part of a day and exposing myself to other people’s “takes.” These “takes” are what we call the bite-sized pronouncements of opinion in reaction to the news of the day, as posted by people hoping their particular phraseology will attract positive attention and/or somebody to fight with in a low-stakes digital environment. I get the takes that various algorithms think I will engage with, and I die a little inside as I flow past them, mentally filing them away into such marked folders as correct, mostly correct but overgeneralized, dubious, and brain-dead insane.

The worst part of these takes is that the compulsion to engage with them is very real. If some one is wrong on the internet, after all, how can you just let them be? I have long since learned my lesson and I resist most of the urges, having seen too many people be wrong about the same things for long stretches of time to believe that charging heroically into their notifications will make the world a better place. Mostly I just seethe while I scroll (which is probably contributing to an eventual aneurysm), until I purge my system and post my own vague takes that nobody sees. When I do anything else, I usually regret it.

I do need to say one thing very specifically, however. In the aftermath of the presidential election, the under-performance of Kamala Harris has been attributed to the putative rejection by the nation (if such a thing exists) of the “woke agenda.” Supposedly, liberal elites have shown that they care more for the niche issues affecting minority groups than the bread-and-butter issues that affect bread-and-butter Americans. Trump and the Republicans have of course devoted themselves exclusively to solving the problems that affect ordinary people and ordinary people alone, which is why they have made a point of announcing that Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender woman elected to the U.S. Congress, will not be allowed to use women’s restrooms in the Capitol.

Of course, this Republican framing of the issues is false. Republicans care very deeply about niche issues that affect minority communities. Their position on these issues is generally that minority groups should be bullied into silence and submission, because what they don’t care about is the people. They see a world where transgender people are consciously anxious about who they can trust or what spaces they can safely inhabit, and they say “good, they should be anxious, that will teach them not to be different.” Ensuring that people who are different understand that being different is wrong is a core principle of the modern conservative movement, and they won’t stop until they have banned blue hair dye and mandated photo ID for the purchase of neckties and eyeliner.

The United States of America, so the theory goes, is by default a transphobic nation. By opposing the persecution of trans people (and those who do not conform to gender norms in general), Democrats have opened themselves up to the charge that they are the party of the freaks. Since the votes of trans people are a negligible proportion of the total electorate, Democrats must immediately abandon all pro-transgender messaging in order to reassure centrist voters that they are, in fact, made of bread and butter just like them.

That is the kind of take that certain bread-and-butter brains have about the best way forward. In my opinion, your brains would have to be of some very odd consistency to conclude that the key to effectively opposing a fascist movement like Trumpism is to concede the debate about the rights and dignity of at least one vulnerable minority to them.

I understand perfectly well that I’ve already turned off a lot of people by reminding them that it was in fact a fascist government that we just elected, because that is a serious bummer. But I also understand that trans people eat bread and butter too. I understand that they are relentlessly mocked and degraded and bullied and pathologized and assaulted and murdered for totally innocuous behavior. I can’t get on board with the idea that even a “tactical” retreat on transgender rights serves the interest of justice, and I consider the suggestion to be evidence of how badly our discourse has been degraded by mere exposure to fascism.

I have known many people who have changed their names or clothes or pronouns, or who have had surgeries and hormone treatments to refashion their bodies. Some of them have been children, and some have not; some of them have laid claim on a definite new identity, while others have been more comfortable with fluidity. Some have been open about their changes, while others have treated them as closely-guarded secrets. I’ve met enough people to know that there is no threat whatsoever in their transitions, unless it’s a threat to the certainty that the opposition of two sexes is a fundamental property of the universe. That certainty holds no water, and the people who live contrary to that certainty are not predators or monsters for it. In fact, some of them are among the gentlest people I’ve ever known.

As a resident of a state that hasn’t swung since I was an infant, I was mercifully spared a full barrage of advertising by the Trump campaign. One ad that did make its way to my TV screen, however, included a typically divisive declaration that Trump stood for “us,” while Harris stood for “they/them.” As an educator, this brought to mind the times when I was taken into the confidence of a sensitive young person who wanted nothing from me except that I listen respectfully, and who nevertheless asked me to call them by their former name and pronouns during conferences, lest they face a hostile reaction from a family that would not accept them as they were. When it comes to the ability of young people to know themselves and live in freedom, I can only be for “them.” When families are willing to tear themselves apart over a member who won’t conform to expectations, I have no idea who “us” is supposed to be.

It is not necessary that everybody should understand the experience of being trans in intimate detail: there is no such single experience. If I can’t quite conceptualize the sense of being a different gender from what I’ve been called my whole life, that has nothing to do with where some other person can go to the bathroom, or whether there’s some ultimate ontological truth behind gendered categories that must be reflected in human legislation. It is enough if we let people figure these things out for themselves and respect their conclusions, even if they reach those conclusions before they reach the age of majority.

Transgender rights are only one among the many issues where the ascendance of the far-right represents a threat to the well-being of the American people and the world, but none of those threats are inconsequential, nor can they be disregarded. Singling out their causes to be dropped from the Democratic party’s political mission would not only be cowardly, but a signal to all members of any potential coalition of Democratic voters that the party’s stances on human rights and social justice really are just faddish affectations, and that they matter less than flattering the prejudices of the ignorant. Transgender rights are a matter of principle, not expediency, and they matter just as much as the rights of the comfortably cisgender. We’ve gone far enough in indulging the myth that difference is a dirty word, or that the problem lies in what people wear and not who they hurt.

So that’s my take, for all it may do to save the world or comfort the afflicted. If I’m wrong, and appeasement turns out to have been the right approach to navigating this moment in time, then I’m afraid I don’t even know what it means to live in a free country. I only know that people want to be free.