Trans Activism Is the Worst

Any activism this obnoxious better have some damn good results. And they don't.

Image credit: David Klein

It’s no secret that race has been the most incendiary issue in America for years, and it hasn’t even been close — until just recently. There’s a new kid on the block: one who’s well-connected, obsessed with pronouns, and has your boss on speed dial. Almost out of nowhere, trans issues shot to the top of the political charts in the past few years. No issues are more likely to get you shunned, canceled, fired, or blackballed than the politics of race or trans. But there are two huge differences between them.

Race in America reaches back 400 years, for obvious reasons. Trans in America doesn’t go back 400 weeks as a prominent issue. Roughly 40 percent of the US population is non-white, and 13.4 percent is black. Transgender Americans, by contrast, comprise somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6 percent. Race may be highly charged, but it’s also enormously consequential for hundreds of millions of people. Trans politics has become a third rail; ruining lives, driving us further apart, and inflaming extremism and hate on both ends — all in purported service of less than one percent of the population, among whom there is a diversity of thought. Trans activists should not be conflated with the transgender community — many activists are not trans, and many trans people are not activists. Many just want to go about their lives rather than be sideshows in some activist spectacle.

Between the denial of biological sex, bizarre women-erasing language games, the relentless crusades to destroy heretics, the capture of institutions, and the steamrolling of open discourse, trans activism has been quite a doozy. It’s the gift that keeps on giving for the political right. Here’s the bottom line: for activism this obnoxious, there’d better be some damn good results. And yet, there aren’t any. What victories have trans activists won for the transgender community? How has anyone’s life actually been improved? What measurable progress has been made in society as the result of the left going balls to the wall into trans activism? Maybe it’s time to state the obvious: the left needs to give it a rest with trans activism already.

No Nuance Allowed

Trans politics, like all culture wars, has taken on a Manichaean nature that reduces all thought to two diametrically opposed positions:

• 1. The bigoted position: Trans doesn’t exist. People who identify as trans are simply mentally ill, and as such, they should not be recognized as belonging to their preferred gender. Discriminating against or otherwise mistreating trans people is, if not actively encouraged, at least tolerated.

• 2. The activist position: Trans is real. Biological sex is not. Anyone who says they are trans is trans, even young children. No outside factors (societal trends, peer groups, etc.) could ever influence one’s gender identity. Children should always be allowed to transition medically. Trans people should always be allowed to use the gender-segregated spaces of the gender they identify with. Trans people should always be allowed to compete in sports for the gender they identify as. Anyone who disagrees with any of this is a transphobe, and virtually nothing is off-limits in bringing such people to justice.

If you don’t fully adhere to the activist position; if you deviate, even slightly, your stance will be conflated, both by activists and genuine transphobes alike, for the bigoted position. Activists and their allies will regard you as transphobic scum, and actual bigots will welcome you as one of their own. But these are not the only two views. There is a middle way, and while it’s not the loudest, it may be the most well-subscribed.

• 3. The liberal position: I have no problem with trans, and trans people are entitled to the same courtesy, respect, dignity, rights, and protections as anyone else. My problem is with elements of trans activism and ideology, which are often counter-productive, anti-science, illiberal, and authoritarian.

Liberals and moderates have too long allowed the wingnuts to hijack the conversation. It’s time for the exhausted majority to speak up in greater numbers.

The Iced Tea Threshold

Once the Supreme Court functionally legalized gay marriage in the landmark 2015 case of Obergefell v. Hodges, the policy goal at the center of the gay rights movement had been achieved. But rather than celebrating a job well done and retiring to the comfort of their porches with a glass of iced tea, the activists pivoted, rebranding themselves from gay rights to trans rights. Trans was their new crusade. And then in 2020, when the Supreme Court, in another landmark ruling, decided that the Civil Rights Act covered LGBT people as well — iced tea time, right? Nope. There is never an iced tea time for the far left. And yet the elephant in the room remains: what rights don’t transgender people have that trans activism is fighting for? Don’t expect many clear answers to this — and on what few answers you do get, ask yourself if keeping the intensity dialed to a permanent 11 is commensurate with the problems to be solved. The truth is, some people’s need to be activists supersedes the need for activism.

Lying with Statistics

In order to conjure a pretext for their hair-on-fire histrionics, activists recite the mantra of an “epidemic” of trans suicides and murders, and misrepresent everyone with differing views as inciting or even committing violence against trans people. In reality, the number of transgender people killed per year is in double digits. That’s around how many people are struck dead by lightning. There is surprisingly little data on US trans suicides — most deals with suicidal ideation or suicide attempts and focuses narrowly on trans youth. Using a recent survey of trans youth from an activist organization, and crunching the numbers with the CDC’s reported suicide attempt-to-death ratio gives us a trans youth suicide rate of 0.67 percent, compared with a non-trans youth rate of 0.33 percent. A 45-year Dutch study of trans adults found a suicide rate of 0.04 percent, which compares to the overall US suicide rate of 0.014 percent.

Based on this franken-data, the trans suicide rate appears to be higher than the non-trans rate. This is how you lie with statistics. You can always point to disparities, but at the end of the day, the difference between each of these groups is a fraction of a percent in absolute terms. Suicide is certainly a problem in society, and for young people in particular. But characterizing it as an “epidemic” is going too far, and due to the Werther effect — the established phenomenon where highly publicized suicides lead to more people killing themselves — this rhetoric may in fact contribute to the very problem it seeks to improve. The constant drumbeat of a trans suicide “epidemic” may be causing more deaths than any anti-trans bigots. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Human Rights and Pyrrhic Defeats  

What's baffling about today’s left-activism is that it's somehow not enough for them to simply fight for universal human rights — their ideologies must also be accepted, even where they conflict with science. It’s not enough to treat trans people with courtesy, and to support their political and civil rights — we must also accept trans ideology, including imbecilities like the rejection of biological sex, a bedrock scientific fact, or the insistence that gender identity can never be influenced, even in part, by external factors. This is like a religious community demanding not only the freedom to practice their religion, but that the rest of us must also convert to it, and that anything less is oppression. This is where activism crosses over into coercive proselytization.

Everyone is entitled to their rights, dignity, and protection under the law. They are not entitled to their own set of “facts” that they can impose over society and even science, crying bigotry in the face of resistance. This shift from political activism to thought control should trouble us. The fact that trans activists feel the need to wage these wars actually undermines the philosophical basis for human rights, by acting as though rights are conditional on various scientific facts. Activists seem anxious that if science says this or that, it will invalidate their case for why X group is entitled to human rights. But that's not at all how human rights work. They are inherent — you get them just for being human! We see a similar dynamic in other forms of left-activism, such as fat activism and anti-IQ activism. Science is not your enemy, and going into attack mode in this way against facts you find politically inconvenient not only leaves you with egg on your face, it erodes the foundations of human rights.

In terms of politics, it doesn’t fucking matter if trans people are trans from birth, or choose to be trans, or are influenced by social trends. It wasn’t a constructive avenue to go down fifteen years ago when the context was homosexuality, and it isn’t now either. This only matters to someone who has abandoned universalist human rights. The argument shouldn’t be “Please give these people some rights, they can’t help it!” But rather “What other people do with their lives is none of your fucking business, period.” Leftists so often argue from compassion and empathy, when they should be arguing from freedom and liberty. Trans people are not pitiful oppressed wretches to be coddled or protected; they are, like all of us, raw human potential to be set free. Whatever the actual truth may be as to how or why some people are trans is interesting academically, and probably medically, too. But it’s politically irrelevant. You are not fighting for human rights if you don’t understand that. You are fighting for conditional privileges.

You Can’t Bully an Entire Culture Into Changing Their Minds

Above everything is the all-consuming fact that trans activism, especially online, is a singular repository for some of the world’s foremost assholes. I mean top-choice, grade A, super deluxe, first ballot Hall of Fame assholes. Their approach to activism involves little in the way of persuasion, winning hearts and minds, and fighting for concrete policy goals. No, trans activism instead takes what would ordinarily be decades of organic cultural change on some of the most fundamental aspects of human life, and tries to impose them overnight by fiat, bum-rushing anyone who isn’t kowtowing abjectly enough to the new management. There’s no room for evolution or a learning curve, much less disagreement. Adopt the new norms and orthodoxy this instant or get skeletonized. But that’s not how humans work, and it never will be.

There are things that need to be openly, honestly, and fairly debated, such as youth medical transition or women’s bathrooms or sports. Of course, leftists will insist that these things are being debated, that no one is prevented from saying their piece. “Look, you wrote this article, nobody stopped you.” Except the government doesn’t have to start hauling people off to prison for speech to be suppressed. Who honestly thinks an environment where roving mobs are eager to snitch, doxx, sleuth, dogpile, harass, intimidate, or threaten has no chilling effect on speech? Where vindictive psychos will report you to HR or your boss over a difference of opinion, and where the corporations you work for or the institutions your livelihood relies upon will throw you under the bus at the drop of a hat either out of cowardice or ideological capture.

The problem, ultimately, is that too many on today’s cultural left see most questions as having cut-and-dried answers. Everything is settled. There is nothing else to discover. No data to wait for. Nothing to work out. The answers are all there, and they have them. And so, to raise questions, even tepidly, to engage in open debate, to acknowledge nuance and complexity — this tacitly challenges the settledness of these issues, which is obscene, and to such people amounts to a deep ethical failing that cannot be tolerated.

This trend among progressives of deciding that certain issues are simply settled because they said so, and that debate itself is evil, must be resisted if we are to be a free society. There are understandable concerns that hundreds of millions of people have over some of the claims or edge cases of trans politics. These concerns cannot be shouted down indefinitely. You can only get so much mileage out of calling everyone who disagrees with you a transphobe or a TERF, or trying to ruin their lives. There is a segment of the population susceptible to being bullied into certain behaviors or political positions, whose social circles, professional networks, or institutional affiliations place them within the cultural left’s reach. But that segment is not 100 percent. It is not even 51 percent. Sooner or later the upper limit will be reached, and activists are going to have to convince some portion of society. And you can't convince people without actual discourse.

See also:

“The Dance that Sculpts Society: What the Left and Right Are, and Why They Both Matter”

“Did New Atheism Enable Wokeness?”

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