Yes, The Trans Community Has A Rhetoric Problem. But The New York Times Is Wrong.

If we want to win, we must tread carefully—not for them, but for us.

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article titled ‘Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.’ Immediately, it drew significant backlash, and with good reason. At the article’s core, the message is simple: Democrats won’t win on trans issues, so they have to become more ‘moderate.’ In other words, the Democrats should follow the UK’s Labour in abandoning the trans community. That’s a scary reality to think about; if the Democrats turn heel, the US’ two-party system would mean the end of transgender rights as we know them.

Although Republican attacks have fueled a large-scale decline in the electorate’s perception of trans people, opposition seems to have a plateau of around ~70%. On the surface, that’s somewhat good news; it means things can’t get much worse than they already are. But it also means nothing is getting better. 70% is now the status quo, a status quo shaped by both Republican attacks and the pro-trans rhetoric that emerged in the mid-2010s. Thus, to challenge the new status quo, things need to change in the trans community.

‘I identify’

Last month, I wrote about Gallup’s LGBTQ+ rights poll. As I covered in the article, a trend in the poll is clear: the more the public believes being queer is a choice, the more they will oppose our rights. From 2019 to now, the GOP has made significant progress on this front thanks to rhetoric feeding that very perception; ‘keep it away from children, it will make them gay,’ ‘trans kids will get over gender dysphoria and accept their bodies,’ and ‘what if a man transitions in order to get access to women’s spaces?’ are all prime examples of this. And as evidenced by public opinion, their effects have been extraordinarily consequential for the LGBTQ+ community.

However, Republicans aren’t solely to blame, because unknowingly, the trans community also contributed to that perception. The culprit? ‘I identify.’ Before the 2010s, the prevailing narrative surrounding trans people was that we were men/women ‘trapped’ in the bodies of women/men. Although this framing doesn’t resonate with many trans people—myself included—and leaves out those outside the gender binary, it works much better in the eyes of cis individuals than what replaced it, implying a need for transition and a rejection of our bodies instead of a mere preference for another gender.

Saying ‘I identify’ instead of ‘I am’ naturally invites skepticism. It separates what used to be one concept—that trans people are in the wrong bodies and therefore they must change them—into two: that someone can ‘feel’ like another gender and that they can choose to act on those feelings. Making it about feelings instead of being opens itself up to outsiders believing who we are isn’t absolute, and thus the phrase ‘facts over feelings’ emerged. Throughout all this, the overarching theme is simple: when the right chose to seize on the flaws found in progressive language, the trans community failed to adapt, sticking to the same rhetoric even when it became clear it was an ineffective defense.

Pick Your Battles

The fact of the matter is that things must change, not with politics or with Democrats, but with us. We must respond as a community to the shifting tides. Every word has the capacity for change. Those leading the charge against us understand this. The rhetoric they’ve chosen has been carefully crafted for maximum effectiveness, and at its core, it relies on the notion that we’re wrong about who we are. That they know who we are better than we do. That rhetoric must be challenged. Not with ‘feelings’ or ‘identification,’ but with being. We do not ‘identify as’ or ‘feel’ who we are; we just are.

There is a lot of truth to the statement ‘rights are not negotiated, they are taken,’ but it isn’t the full story. Political change works best when accompanied by cultural change, and thus, while rights can absolutely be taken, they must also be defended. And that defense must start at the individual level. First and foremost, we have to pick our battles, not in a political sense but in a rhetorical sense. Being such a diverse community means there are nuances most cis people won’t immediately understand, and we can’t expect them to.

This was something the gay rights movement understood, and as such, its narrative can be summarised by only two phrases: ‘born this way’ and ‘love is love.’ Together, they lead to the following idea: who someone loves cannot change. ‘Trans women are women’ and ‘trans men are men’ get close to achieving this, but ultimately they fail to normalise our existence in the way ‘love is love’ does for same-sex attraction.

To this end, I believe the phrase ‘let trans people be’ and/or ‘let us be’ may work better. How well we’re understood by society is significantly less consequential than anti-trans policies and the lives they cost. So whether you’re a trans woman, trans man, non-binary, or anything else in between, ultimately, we all just want to be allowed to live our lives in the way we see fit. And most importantly, we cannot leave anyone behind. The more generalised the concept, the more likely it will stick.

Meanwhile, Democrats don’t need to become more moderate, they need to call out these attacks for what they are: a distraction. Although trans people are a hot-button issue, we aren’t a problem America faces. However we’re defended, most voters won’t be impacted. But we will be harmed if they don’t act, and they need to be made aware of that. After all, they need us and the LGBTQ+ community at large to win elections. Use your vote as a weapon. Punish those that don’t defend us—like Gavin Newsom—and reward the ones that do—like JB Pritzker. Remember: any action to ‘let us be’ is a victory. And right now, that is what we should ask them for.

However, we can’t rely on them forever. The change we need starts with us. And we have the power to make it so. Even if most voters won’t immediately become allies, they could stop caring. As the Republican Party loses momentum, the depoliticisation of trans people could very well be around the corner. But we must fight for it, word by word.