To understand bigotry, study the bigot not its victim. The exercise is a repudiation of the poison but it is also rational: bigotry is fostered, nurtured, and manifested by all manner of factors which affix to a victim – usually (but not always) a vulnerable one – but which have little to do with them. Bigots are protecting something internal, something to which they lay claim and pledge loyalty. The victim bears the brunt of those imbalances.
It is insulting to the intelligence of the American public to insist that Republicans hate trans people because trans people are a physical threat to cis safety. This insult has a history. It was bandied about when mothers from coast to coast yammered about the threat a college trans swimmer posed to female athletes across the country, as if some monster had been set on their daughters. Once, after I dismissed the hysteria regarding Lia Thomas on a podcast, the mother of a female athlete (a soccer player, not a swimmer) emailed me to express horror at the thought that a trans woman might knock down her daughter on the field or God forbid stare at her in the locker room. (As resident Lesbian correspondent for Liberties I was bemused: don’t the soccer moms know about girls locker rooms? That’s where they breed us.) Come, come – there aren’t enough trans people in this country, let alone enough in college or professional sports, to pose a mass threat to anyone at all. Now, there are all kinds of systemic threats within the athletic community that should inspire anxiety and rage. Performance enhancing drugs? Spates of coach-harassment scandals? I’m no expert but all this seemed to me misplaced.
It was not misplaced then and it is not misplaced now. It is misrepresented. We should not bother to treat the arguments seriously. We should not behave as if transphobia is the bitter fruit of benign misunderstanding.
The mainstream, obscene contempt for trans people is no mystery. Americans may be bigoted but we are not imbeciles: we know that people fear what they do not understand, and we know that that fear can be harvested and manipulated for political gain. We know these things because we experience the fear and bigotry ourselves and we see them in our friends. Transphobia has been incubated on the center-left for at least as long as I’ve been reading what it has been printing. It has been proliferated for years by that great mirror of the vast American middle, The Atlantic which has been at the forefront of this “battle” since long before Trump announced his first campaign. And it is no coincidence that that organ continues to hector that Harris lost the election because Biden was too woke. “She talked about trans people too much” When? How I wish she had! “and about protecting immigrants” Did she? Did Biden? Somehow I can’t recall “and both of them bellowed with pride repeatedly that Harris was a black woman running for the highest office in the land” Right?? If we’re going to get slashed for championing the vulnerable I wish we could at least be guilty of the courage.
The Atlantic and its fellows in the middle package anti-trans sentiment in prettier packaging than Trumpites. The center left doesn’t want to be brave, it wants to be seemly. Bigotry is less vile when it is seemly. That is how much of America likes its hates. And we have so many of them. They are what propelled the unseemly hate to high office: Trump did not swell his base, he merely failed to ignite the fury of the opposition. The fat, comfortable middle refused to turn out and vote because the fat, comfortable middle has been fed on seemly hatreds.
The middle does not express its hates the way Trump does but, well, don’t they basically agree? After all, when we press them on it, the thing they most fear from Trump seems to be his unseemly manner. They don’t like a scene, and the scene is what they will spend the next four years screeching about while trans children grow fearful.
Earlier this week, Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace introduced a bill to ban transgender women from the Capitol’s female bathrooms. The bill was designed to target one trans woman in particular: Sarah McBride, the first openly trans person elected to Congress. Mace bloviated that the bill was an effort in “standing up for women, protecting their spaces, and restoring a bit of sanity to Capitol Hill.” Standing up for women? The hypocrisy is nauseating. She said this the same week that Pete Hegseth was named as Donald Trump’s pick to helm the Pentagon, the same day that Matt Gaetz withdrew as Trump’s pick for attorney general, and the same month that the first ever convicted felon and rapist was elected president of the United States. No one believes that Mace is motivated by female solidarity. She was doing it to target one of the most visible and powerful trans people in the country in order to send a message to every other trans person, as well as to the rest of us: conform or be humiliated. If McBride can be harassed in this manner then anyone can be.
MAGA insists that this election granted a referendum on their conception of American identity. But American identity is never on the ballot. No one has a claim on it, no one has a right to legislate and bully and beat the rest of us into any image of Americanhood.
Banning trans women from women’s bathrooms is one strategy for militating conformity to a particular kind of masculine and feminine American presentation. Trans people will suffer most for this ban, but they are not remotely the only people who will suffer. Enforcers of bathroom bans across the country will harass strangers who do not present as adequately male or female. Ordinary Americans – adults and children – will be forced to present proof of biological sex. “Show me your papers or drop your pants” is not a strategy for protecting women.
Every single person who professes discomfort with the visibility of trans people has already allied themselves with the MAGA image of Americanhood. They are not liberal allies. They are enemies of liberalism.
It is not the job of a liberal to decide whether another citizen’s personal identity is comprehensible to them, and judge them worthy of the preservation of their rights on the basis of that analysis. We do not, we must not, vest ourselves with the power to tell other people who they are and what they are worth. It does not matter what we personally believe about Sarah McBride’s relationship with her gender. That is not our business. But it is our business to make sure that she is treated with the respect accorded to all human beings. It is our business to demand that the halls of our government, which we pay for with our tax dollars, are not converted into an arena for humiliating fellow citizens and stripping them and all those they represent of their dignity and their claim on American membership. On January sixth they threw a fit for losing, on November fifth they won.
Cruelty is the tool that this Republican Party uses to force the rest of us into their cramped image of proper Americanhood. It is our civic duty to condemn this nastiness, to be unabashedly, brazenly kind and supportive of trans people, and of every other vulnerable minority that Trump and his gang go after. That is our civic duty regardless of what we think about their gender or religious or political or ethnic identity.
Every time they attack we must rally. That is what is demanded of us, that is how we must spend these cursed four years.