As a seasoned veteran of trans masc-on-trans masc discourse crimes, allow me to emerge from my cave to swing at the hornet’s nest once more. Today’s installment is inspired by an ancient Bluesky thread that has since been immortalized by Facebook, which is where I saw it. My partner wanted my opinion about it and now I’m making that opinion your problem because, you know, seasoned veteran and all that.

The sentiment expressed in this thread is a widespread one in trans spaces. It’s also a sentiment that I used to hold and have since come to kind of hate.

It’s not that the sentiment is factually incorrect. Yes, it is true that trans men experience elevated levels of violence. My issue is rather with the framing. Most times, whenever I see this sentiment, it’s done to defend trans mascs’ identities while drawing a hard line between ourselves and cis men and/or to win an argument with a trans woman who may or may not be acting a bit mean online.

Now, I’m not particularly interested in putting this thread’s author on blast. I’m utilizing it because it’s a succinct example of this sentiment and the troublesome framing. But to fully understand my issue with the framing, we need to first do a fact check.

What the Data Says

The Advocate article linked in the thread is a frequently referenced one. The op-ed, published in 2015, was written by Loree Cook-Daniels. Cook-Daniels has been involved with LGBTQ+ activism in the Midwest United States for more than four decades now. Her husband, Marcelle Cook-Daniels, was a Black trans man who founded multiple organizations for trans mascs and trans mascs of color, specifically. FORGE was created by the couple to address the needs of trans mascs and their loved ones. While FORGE technically serves trans people as a whole nowadays, there is still an obvious trans masc tilt to the organization. While Marcelle has since passed away, Cook-Daniels continues to advocate around trans mascs decades after the fact.

In the op-ed, Cook-Daniels writes that “other types of violence -- the kinds of violence that affect thousands more trans people than do hate crimes resulting in murder -- actually happen at least as often to transmasculine individuals as transfeminine individuals.” To back up her point, she shares the results of a 2011 FORGE survey in graph form.

While Cook-Daniels does provide a link for this graph, the link is dead. Putting it through the Wayback Machine brings up a two-page fact sheet on the lack of research into the issue. There’s nothing about the survey itself. We don’t know the methodology, or how many respondents were categorized as MTF and FTM, or how these various types of violence are defined, or the demographic breakdown of respondents to see if there are other factors that contribute to the responses received. It’s challenging to draw any conclusions from this without an official report about this survey.

Fortunately, the missing 2011 FORGE survey is not the only one of its kind. I found four much more thorough reports about trans people in the US and experiences with violence: the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Study; the 2015 US Trans Survey; the 2017 LGBTQ and HIV-Affected Hate and Intimate Partner Violence Report; and the 2017/2018 National Crime Victimization Surveys. I won’t bore you with paragraphs of data, so here is what I gleaned from the surveys:

• Trans fems are more likely to experience violence from strangers or colleagues.

• Relatedly, trans fems are more likely to experience hate violence -- that is, violence that happens because they are trans as opposed to violence where their trans identity is incidental.

• Trans people, overall, experience similar rates of violence regardless of identity.

• Trans people, overall, experience elevated rates of violence when compared to cis men and cis women.

• Class and race are far better predictors for victimization than gender alone is.

As for the claim that trans men experience sexual violence more than trans women, the evidence is inconclusive. The 2011 and 2015 reports, for instance, were both published by Advocates for Trans Equality (formerly the National Center for Transgender Equality) yet had contradictory findings: trans fem respondents in 2011 were much more likely to report experiencing sexual assault while the opposite was true in the 2015 report. This may be because the 2011 report focused more on anti-trans violence as opposed to the more open-ended approach in the 2015 report. What did remain the same, however, is that trans people as a whole experience more sexual violence than cis people. So even when trans fems experienced more violence than trans mascs, trans mascs still experienced a statistically significant amount of violence.

Yet the rhetoric surrounding the violence that trans mascs face is rarely talked about on its own terms. As seen in the Bluesky thread I shared, it’s much more frequently compared to the experience of trans fems, specifically. A large part of the reason why this comparison is so common is because it’s often used in arguments with trans fems. But… why? Why do we feel so compelled to express that we’re sexually victimized more frequently than trans fems to their faces, or to just randomly use their experiences of violence as a metric to quantify our own suffering?

A Little Bioessentialism as a Treat

The “ban men” skeet that the Bluesky thread was responding to has since been lost to the void, so we’ll have to make some assumptions about what it must have communicated based on this thread. Given that the author asserts that “blaming [trans men] for the violence of our oppressors is fucking bullshit,” we can reasonably presume that the “ban men” skeet likely expressed frustration with male violence by implicating all men. The mention of trans women may also indicate that the post was either made by a trans woman and/or supported by multiple trans women. Whatever the case may be, I’ll assume that there are two basic points communicated by the “ban men” skeet: 1) men do incredible amounts of violence, and 2) no men would mean much less violence.

Regardless of how you may feel about the missing skeet, the thread author does not actually argue at all with the first point. He directly states that cis men oppress trans men and implies that cis men are responsible for the elevated rates of violence that trans men experience. His issue with “ban men” is the second point -- cis men do violence, not trans men, so “banning” trans men alongside cis men wouldn’t actually resolve the issue of male violence.

This is the framing that irritates me. It’s a classic trans masc discourse maneuver. Discussions about patriarchy and male violence get flipped in a way that removes any negative connotations of manhood from trans mascs and rather frames trans mascs as victims of patriarchy. And to be absolutely, abundantly clear: yes, the elevated rate of violence against trans mascs is because of patriarchy and, from personal experience, is largely done by cis men.

The problem, however, is that this framing also implies that trans men are not men but something more like Men Lite. The implicit logic here is that cis men are naturally brutish and don’t really understand what it’s like to be victims of violence, especially sexual violence, and so to say that we’re men in the same way all cis men are men is wrong.

Except… men do understand what it’s like. In 2024, for instance, the FBI reported that men were over three times as likely to be murdered than women and twice as likely to be robbed. And remember how violence against trans people was best predicted by socioeconomic status and race? The same is true for cis people too, like how Black men constituted 43% of all homicide victims despite being less than 6% of the overall population, or Black Americans as a whole being three times as likely as white people to be robbed.

Furthermore, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) found that people living below the Federal Poverty Level experienced nonfatal violent crimes at a rate two times higher than the national average between 2008 - 2012. The impact of class is particularly obvious with white Americans, as impoverished white Americans were three times more likely than high income white Americans to be victimized and experienced the overall highest nonfatal violent crime rate.

It’s necessary to note that these statistics are ultimately incomplete. For instance, the FBI relies on data reported by police stations across the country. As the NCVS notes in that study, about half of violent crime goes unreported. The true rate of victimization, especially divided up by specific demographic information, is unknown.

And while yes, men still overwhelmingly make up the majority of crime perpetrators, the point to understand here is that, like women, men are also victimized by men. To carve out a caveat for trans men from blanket anti-man statements because trans men are victimized by cis men is absurd. Take, for instance, the 2016/2017 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey which found that gay and bisexual men experienced essentially identical rates of sexual and intimate partner violence as straight women -- including rape. The data for queer cis men in this survey is very similar to the data we have about trans men. Does this mean that we should also object to “ban men” on the behalf of cisgender queer men? If so, what about the fact that the people victimizing queer men in this way are most frequently other queer men?

The fact of the matter is that men are more likely to commit violence against others. This includes other men. Men being violent to other men is so normalized that we don’t even really process it at times. This is how patriarchy is ultimately sustained: men are encouraged to do violence unto others to maintain hierarchy and control. As bell hooks succinctly put it,

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is… that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.

Violent men are violent because, far more often than not, somebody else was violent to them first. In turn, men are often violent to prevent being victimized. Violence is, unfortunately, inherent to the male experience under patriarchy.

My issue with the framing of the sentiment expressed in the Bluesky thread is its implicit assertion that cis men are, by nature, violent and unable to be victimized whereas trans men are victimized and therefore cannot be understood as something akin to cis men. The explanation for this difference always returns to our assigned sex at birth. While the author of the Bluesky thread did not say this, that’s ultimately the implication: we cannot truly be understood as men because we are not cis men. There is something about the body we are born with that makes us incapable of bearing responsibility for patriarchal violence.

This fixation on our bodies creating some kind of ontological difference that makes us victims instead of perpetrators can get especially insidious when comparing the experiences of trans mascs to trans fems. Take, for instance, the following take, “trans women are privileged because they can’t get pregnant (from rape).”

The concept of “privilege” is one I’ve found more harmful than helpful for some time now and precisely for reasons like this. “Privilege” refers to some sort of right or advantage that is specially granted to one person or group over another. These rights and advantages are often something that could be granted to all people but aren’t for whatever reason. To say that trans fems are privileged because they cannot get pregnant firstly makes the absurd claim that the physical body they are born with is an unfair advantage granted to them but not trans mascs. It also inadvertently quantifies certain kinds of rape as privileged. For instance, is it a privilege to be raped anally as a person who was AFAB? You can’t get pregnant from that, after all.

Here, we see a similar flattening and quantifying of sexual violence and an assertion that the bodies of any people who are unable to get pregnant are unfairly advantaged. This user goes a step further to question the political dedication and character of trans women because of their inability to get pregnant. Trans women -- a group of people who have been policed, maligned, abused, neglected, and subject to forced sterilization and medical experimentation throughout history and across many cultures -- apparently cannot comprehend the “horrifyingly dystopian invasion of autonomy” posed by the loss of abortion rights because their anatomy is ontologically privileged.

But this is ultimately a natural conclusion to come to when you are guided by bioessentialism over anything and everything else. When you concede to the idea that violence is innate to the penis (as is implied by people arguing that trans men are not men like cis men are), you also concede to the idea that to have a vagina is to be a victim. A line is drawn in the sand. We stop engaging with human beings as human beings and start to categorize them. This categorization is extremely convenient to the goals of patriarchy as it obfuscates and normalizes violence. Historically, patriarchal violence has been viewed as good and necessary unless violence against a woman specifically results in an outcome that undermines her value to her respectable husband or parents (e.g., an unintended pregnancy).

Arguing that it’s a privilege to be raped and not get pregnant is ultimately an extension of this patriarchal logic. Both trans fems and cis men experience sexual assault more frequently than most people think. But because it’s so normalized we end up with people arguing that trans men cannot be men because men do not experience sexual violence, and that even trans women are more suspect than we are when it comes to being men because their bodies are just too similar to cis men. When cis men harass and stalk and beat and grope and rape and murder trans women, it’s simply boys being boys. Survival of the fittest. She had it coming.

Male Realities

In the 2011 NTDS report, there’s a chapter dedicated to experiences with identification documents. Trans mascs with an F marker on their IDs were 50% more likely to experience harassment when presenting their IDs than trans fems with an M marker. Notably, both groups experienced the same rate of physical violence; oftentimes, trans fems are more likely to be physically assaulted.

When I read this, it didn’t surprise me. My home state of Kansas recently passed SB 244, a law which serves as both a bathroom and gender marker change ban. Many of my trans friends are in the process of leaving or already have left because of this law. Yet the friend of mine who has received the most harassment by far is a trans man who I would describe as a bear. He’s physically big, bald, and has a long beard. He’s taken an outspoken, malicious compliance sort of approach with SB 244; in response, numerous people have threatened to beat and even murder him for being in women’s spaces.

I’m sure when the Kansas legislature passed SB 244, a lot of them imagined that they were ~ protecting the women and children ~ from a transmisogynistic caricature. They certainly weren’t thinking of people like my friend now facing a misdemeanor for not using the women’s restroom. No, the anti-transmasculine caricature at this point is a geeky, fandom-obsessed teenager with short hair dyed an unnatural color. He does not pass for male but rather looks like a weak little girl playing pretend. The trans masc is not a threat but rather a misbehaving child that needs to be reprimanded.

Now, as a former ROGD Tumblr teen, this caricature is a bit painfully on point for myself, at least. But nowadays, I am almost exclusively understood as male. It’s rare that someone misgenders me and when they do, they generally correct themselves without me saying anything and write it off as a misunderstanding. So the caricature is not only bad on its own (i.e. cringe fandom teens deserve respect and autonomy too), it does further disservice by also blatantly erasing and obscuring the vast majority of trans masc experiences.

Do you know who else leans heavily into this caricature without even meaning to do so? If your answer is something along the lines of “trans mascs who obsess over being (sexually) victimized,” you’d be correct!

The third skeet in the Bluesky thread that kicked this whole essay off complains about how the reality of being a trans man does not match people’s ideas about us, “esp[ecially] in early transition [when] we’re seen as gender non-conforming women and punished accordingly.”

Yes, of course there are pre-/early-transition trans mascs who experience discrimination, harassment, and violence because they do not pass. I’m not arguing with that. My issue is the subtle assertion that trans men who pass generally experience less violence than trans men who don’t. This could not be farther from the truth in my own personal experience. The problem is that this thread and others like it don’t differentiate between anti-trans “hate violence” and “other violence,” as Cook-Daniels called it.

No, I generally do not experience direct transphobia in my day-to-day life. I pass as male. But what I do experience now is life as both a man and a gay man, specifically. Since passing as male, I’ve had one man who wanted to have sex with me corner me for nearly an hour before help showed up, another man come into my workplace multiple times to ask me to make fetish content for him, a third man get up in my face and threaten to murder me before my partner was able to intervene, and multiple other men harass me and call me slurs. I don’t actually feel safer walking on my own at night, I feel like an even bigger target. And statistically speaking, my increased anxiety is justified. Of violent crimes committed against men in 2024, it’s estimated that up to 72% were committed by strangers and just 6% by intimate partners or family members. For women, this is up to 40% committed by strangers and 28% by intimate partners and family members.

My own lived experience corroborates these general data trends. Before transitioning, the brunt of the abuse and violence I faced was from my own family. Since transitioning, it’s been exclusively from strangers. Even my experiences with sexual violence mirror this: while women were estimated to be five times more likely to experience sexual violence than men in 2024, up to half of sexual assaults against men were committed by strangers as compared to just under a third of sexual assaults against women.

My point with this is that I do, in fact, experience violence as a man and that I experience it even more as a man than I did when I was understood as a woman. The kind of violence and who is being violent has changed but it still happens. When we primarily locate trans masc experiences with violence in pre-/early-transition experiences, we are, in fact, also ignoring the broader realities of trans mascs. It inadvertently pushes the idea that the violence we experience is linked to what is essentially violence against women. This idea conveniently reaffirms the narrative that trans men can’t be men in the same way cis men are men. That is: we are victimized because we are female, and to be female is to be victimized.

I am not proposing that we stop focusing on any violence directed towards pre-/early-transition trans mascs. I simply want to push back against the idea that the anti-transmasculine caricature is actually a genuine representation of the bulk of trans masc experiences. This caricature means we miss realities like my trans man friend from Kansas who receives death threats because the state legally declared him to be female and the fact that I have been sexually victimized not as an adult woman but as an adult man. And not even as a trans man -- the men who harassed and assaulted me understood me to be cis.

Does this not count in the wider realm of violence against trans mascs? Does violence against me only matter when it can be interpreted as violence against a woman or as anti-trans hate violence specifically? Does this not further normalize men being violent to other men under patriarchy?

Invisibilizing Violence

My partner spent his childhood and adolescence moving between trailer parks and ghettos around the Capital Region in New York with a one-year stint in the mountains of Northeastern Mexico. Violence was a very normal part of his experience growing up. He himself was beaten and sexually abused multiple times. He had to be diligent about where he was and who was around to avoid being violently assaulted like some of his friends were. People around him died very sudden, brutal, and tragic deaths stemming from drug abuse and general negligence. It wasn’t uncommon for his family members and neighbors to be involved with gangs and face the risk of death because of it.

In high school, my partner received a scholarship to a private arts college. It was one of those scholarships meant to help poor (and racialized) kids with potential to achieve more than the humdrum working class life. And while his time there was largely positive, he was also a fish out of water. For example, one of his acquaintances was the son of a literal, honest-to-god billionaire. Although most students there may not be the children of billionaires, the student population skews very rich. So rich, in fact, that they’re not even aware of how rich they are. My partner has a story about a classmate who declared once that while she didn’t know what socioeconomic class she is, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to survive without her vacation home in Maui.

This economic reality was the most obvious difference my partner noticed between himself and the other students. The poor racialized scholarship kids with SAT scores that were too low for the university’s standards were herded together in a specific program. My partner’s friend -- a Black boy from the Bronx -- complained about how the program degraded and paternalized him. My partner’s neighbor -- also Latina, also from the ghetto, also in the program -- dropped out because of how alienated she felt. Because my partner’s SAT scores were high enough, he didn’t have to participate in this program… and technically lost his full-ride scholarship because of it. The scholarship still existed, it just wasn’t full-ride.

My partner describes this as a pipeline: colleges like this “poach” poor kids of color, often from urban settings, so the student body looks more diverse, which attracts the interest of rich white progressives looking for diversity. Those rich white progressives then pay the tuition for their kids to receive the full advertised experience while the poor racialized scholarship kids are stuck within a program that fails to fully respect their intelligence, autonomy, and identity. The scholarship kids struggle to integrate into the study body, become demoralized, and sometimes drop out. The rich kids, completely oblivious to this, have a great time.

So, despite the fact that there’s a sizable population of students of color on campus, they’re largely lower class and removed from mainstream student life. The bulk of student activity comes from the rich, white, mostly female students -- women consistently make up close to two-thirds of the student body each year.

My partner noticed during his time there that on-campus political activism was exclusively focused on sexual and intimate partner violence. While these are very much issues worth talking about, no other kinds of violence were ever discussed or addressed. It makes sense; the kind of violence most likely to happen to upper class, college-aged women in an economically well-off, suburban area is sexual and intimate partner violence.

As human beings, we’ll naturally gravitate to focusing on the things that personally affect us. There’s nothing wrong with that. But what inadvertently happens is that other issues and experiences become lost. One might wonder, for instance, what the student activism might have looked like if the scholarship kids had an active role. Maybe there would have been more of a focus on robberies or physical assault or the failures of policing or violence against men as well. Even if the focus stayed on sexual and intimate partner violence, the participation of poorer kids likely would have improved it. Poverty exacerbates sexual violence; the inability of the rich students to recognize their wealth ultimately encumbers the mission to end violence.

What we’re left with is this: a college crafts a progressive environment partially through the recruitment of poor racialized students; the progressive environment empowers rich female students to speak openly about sexual and intimate partner violence; and the wealth (and racial) disparities of this crafted progressive environment leaves the poor racialized students unable to speak about their own experiences in the same way.

This is invisibilization. It is often unintentional. But it still happens.

The point of this long-winded story is to demonstrate: 1) how we focus on issues that make sense to our lived realities, 2) how we can be oblivious to other realities, and 3) how the focus on our realities can come at the expense of the realities we are oblivious to.

When trans mascs focus on the idea of sexual victimization as something unique enough to trans mascs that it separates us from cis men -- or even trans women, for that matter -- we are participating in invisibilization. When we become so focused on this intrinsic uniqueness that we start saying things like, “trans women are privileged because they can’t get pregnant (from rape),” we are now not just invisibilizing violence but downplaying it and normalizing it to some extent.

I’m not saying this from a moral high horse, I promise. I stated at the beginning that I used to agree with the sentiment in the Bluesky thread too but I’ve since changed my mind because my experiences changed. Not even just because I transitioned, but because of other life events too, like moving or changing jobs. Now, I feel invisibilized when people would rather focus on the sexual abuse I faced as a girl than any of the violence I experience as a man. I feel invisibilized when people argue that violence against me primarily matters if the person doing it thinks I’m a woman or figured out I’m trans. I feel invisibilized when people insist that my experiences are far more in line with cis women than cis men.

The ultimate outcome of this invisibilization is the continued propagation of anti-transmasculine narratives and normalization of patriarchal violence. We are men. Men are encouraged to be violent to other men. Maybe most trans men aren’t violent, but I’m willing to believe that the majority of cis men aren’t either. Instead of putting distance between ourselves and cis men, maybe we can make it our mission to be the men who are outspoken about male violence.

Leave the Girls Out of It, Please

With all that said, I have one final plea: please stop using trans fems as your way of measuring how much you suffer. It simultaneously removes the humanity of trans fems and fetishizes their struggles while also failing to actually address issues facing trans mascs. Tovi wrote a succinct and excellent critique of (white) trans mascs trying to make “Protect the Dolls” about ourselves. While she is speaking of transfemcide specifically, her point is broadly applicable:

The hyperinclusion of transmascs when talking about transfemicide is not only conflating and equating our struggles, but de-centers those who this movement is truly about. It also does less to help transmascs than you think.

To make it clear: transmascs deserve attention, support, and campaigns for the oppressive forces against them. Yes, transmascs are killed for being trans, and even experience domestic violence more quietly in relationships, but they are not experiencing murder rates the same as ours. Even if you take into account how transmascs get lumped with cis-women for statistics, (Black/Latina/Native) transfems are still murdered the most. It is disrespectful for their unique issues to be lumped in with ours when they deserve their own specific attention to address and solve their issues. Piggybacking off of us contributes to the erasure of their issues because they are conflated with ours. It’s lazy and minimally helpful. It reads like a politically correct move to get them to feel included, rather than a charged attempt to do something. They don’t need to be included, they need to be uplifted in a separate but connected way, with (BIPOC) transmasc activists leading that discourse.

This is the grand irony with the trans masc fixation on being victimized. There is some weird, unspoken belief that only the people who experience the most hardship deserve attention. Even if trans mascs were the least sexually victimized out of all people, cis or trans, it would still be an issue worth talking about because violence always sucks to experience. Yet this belief actively undermines the people who suffer the most, whoever that may be, by tokenizing that suffering and also dismisses the suffering of everyone else.

Instead of obsessing over being a Trans Masc TM and trying to force everyone into some kind of standard narrative based on identity, we should look instead to the broader forces making us more vulnerable to violence. Aside from transmisogyny and racism, Black, Latina, and Native trans fems are so vulnerable to violence largely because they have such high rates of poverty. Poverty makes you sicker, limits your opportunities, and forces you to rely on people you might not otherwise because it’s all you have. All people benefit when poverty is ended, trans fems and trans mascs included.

The preoccupation on comparing rates of violence -- and sexual violence specifically -- as a way to assert the suffering of trans men comes off to me as someone who is not politically serious and doesn’t engage with the issue at all. After all, there’s very little said about how to end this violence. Mostly I just see people complaining about other people (mostly trans fems) for not acknowledging how serious violence against trans mascs is. But I suppose that if you tacitly assume that trans mascs are female because to be female is to be victimized and to be male is to victimize, then the conclusion would be that there’s nothing to be done.

Being a trans man has taught me otherwise. I write these terribly long essays complaining about other trans mascs because I do believe something can be done. I want a strong community of trans mascs who are bright, curious, critical, and motivated to make change. I want trans mascs who are confident in being trans mascs and use that confidence to cultivate community instead of taking a contrarian or defensive role. And maybe you can accuse me of fulfilling that role, I suppose, but I write these things not to attack but to build a better political understanding. I hope this essay ultimately continues that project.

I feel an obligation to serve as an older brother, if you will, in trans spaces. I’m nowhere near old enough to be thought of as a trans elder but I have enough experience and knowledge that I would feel guilty if I didn’t guide the “baby transes.” As such, I regularly check in with a number of online spaces where questioning, newly-identified, and pre-transition trans people ask for advice and support.

Over the years, I have seen one particular genre of post repeatedly. Generally, it goes like this: the person posting it was assigned female at birth and is attracted to men. Sometimes they identify as nonbinary, sometimes as a trans man, sometimes as both. They are currently in a relationship with a cis man; most often, this cis man identifies as straight. According to the poster, the relationship is great. They love their partner. But they’re worried about what might happen if they transition. While this can include social transition, more often than not, they have socially transitioned and are worried about medically transitioning, specifically.

The concerns spiral from there. What if he doesn’t love me anymore if I transition? Or, he told me he won’t be attracted to me anymore if I medically transition, what do I do? Or, he uses my name and pronouns but won’t stop identifying as straight -- why? Or even, it’s not that bad presenting feminine/as a woman and my partner likes it that way, so how do I cope with everyone deadnaming and misgendering me and the dysphoria I get from that?

There are other common posts I see that are not exactly the same as this but related. For instance, people asking how to medically transition without becoming hairy, going bald, having too deep of a voice, and so on (“Micro-dose T!” is the most popular response); a fixation on identifying as either gender nonconforming and/or a trans femboy and valorizing femininity over masculinity; and iterating the similarities between themselves and women and the differences between themselves and men, just to name a few.

These are the posts that compel me to respond and push back. Not because I am judging these concerns, not because I think I am better than the posters, but because I relate. Deeply. Everything I mentioned are preoccupations that I have battled before and, admittedly, still battle at times. They are reflections of transfags trying to navigate a landscape that is already harmful and is becoming even more hostile to our existence.

Fortunately for us, we already have a term to describe the forces causing these anxieties: compulsory heterosexuality. Unfortunately, nobody from my knowledge has yet to articulate how compulsory heterosexuality impacts trans men, much less gay/bi trans men specifically. I hope to initiate this conversation with this essay.

A Brief Overview of Compulsory Heterosexuality

As with many buzzwords, compulsory heterosexuality (or “comphet” for short) is often used and used incorrectly. The term was popularized by the 1980 essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence by lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich. In the essay, Rich argues that heterosexuality must be understood as a political and economic system in which all women (not just lesbians) are coerced into maintaining and prioritizing sexual relationships with men. As a classic example, throughout history, women have relied on marriage as a way to secure economic security. We can still see this reality reflected in the modern-day US through statistics like single mothers having a poverty rate that’s twice as high as single fathers and 6 times higher than married parents and married lesbian couples having a poverty rate that’s 1.2 times higher than married straight couples and twice as high as married gay couples.

Because of this demonstrable link between relationship with men and economic wellbeing, and because of a variety of other tactics used to threaten, bully, and force women into relationships with men, Rich presents a thought-provoking question: in a world where patriarchy didn’t exist and women faced no repercussions for rejecting relationships with men, how many would choose those relationships to begin with?

Rich concludes that it is essential for feminists to interrogate the reasons and motivations for why they engage in relationships with men and to stop assuming that the desire for these relationships are a default, basic instinct. Such an interrogation isn’t to prove that women should never engage in relationships with men but rather to encourage a more thoughtful analysis of the ways in which patriarchy obfuscates female oppression and conditions women to accept this oppression. Ultimately, this interrogation will secure much more satisfying and equal relationships for women with whomever they choose. As Rich explains,

Within the institution [of heterosexuality] exist, of course, qualitative differences of experiences; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent upon the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives.

Simply put: while some women may have genuinely beneficial and nurturing relationships with men, women’s ability to choose whether or not to engage in these relationships, both helpful or harmful, is hampered by external factors that punish women for rejecting them. If women are unable to say no to a relationship without a detrimental outcome, then this is a coerced decision that enables the exploitation and abuse of women by men. The erasure and minimization of lesbians and other kinds of meaningful relationships between women is a way to further reduce the self-determination of women.

It likely goes without saying that Rich was writing from a cis perspective. The usage of “women” here refers to anyone assigned female at birth. Rich was not particularly trans-inclusive; Janice Raymond explicitly thanks Rich for her support in the foreword of The Transsexual Empire. However, as trans women are, indeed, women, nearly everything described in Rich’s essay on compulsory heterosexuality is true of trans women’s experiences as well.

But if trans men would technically be covered under Rich’s definition of “women,” it’s far less obvious how we are impacted by comphet, especially queer trans men. This lack of acknowledgement is unsurprising; the rare academic or political conversation about trans men tends to either lump us in with lesbians or, more recently, characterize us as confused, clueless children. When the subject of sexual relationships between trans men and other men appears, we are generally farmed as traumatized victims (for instance, I’ve been told multiple times that I “became” trans as a way to cope with being sexually abused by my father) or sexual predators (like the other dozens of times I’ve been accused of being a rapist targeting cis gay men for simply identifying as a gay trans man). In both cases, the relationship between trans men and other men (always assumed to be cis) is framed as inherently violent, abusive, and deeply traumatizing to one party involved. It also implicitly asserts that our male identity is some sort of ruse devised to trick ourselves and/or an innocent other.

With this alone in mind, is it any wonder that the trans groups are filled with baby trans mascs expressing nonstop anxiety about their relationships with men? We are essentially gaslit on a regular basis about ourselves and our experiences. It’s easy to feel unmoored when everyone else seems to understand your existence as some sort of inherently problematic issue, especially when being trans is the one thing that has finally made sense to you.

Perhaps someone like Adrienne Rich would argue that this anxiety is actually reflective of comphet’s profound impact on women, that our internal sense of purpose and identity is so intertwined with men that we’re rejecting our identity as women and still agonizing over men’s role in our lives. And maybe she wouldn’t. I won’t put words I heard from online TERFs in Rich’s mouth.

But regardless of whether Rich or some other rando might argue that point, I’d like to offer: what if this framing of trans men as traumatized victims or sexual predators and the impact it has on us is actually comphet in action?

Compulsory Cissexuality

I would like to make my position clear now: I do not believe trans men are women. As a trans man who started my medical transition nearly five years ago now, I move through the world as a man. I am rarely misgendered. To argue that I am a woman would be completely ridiculous.

With that said, it is also true that trans men have a different gendered experience than cis men. No matter how well you pass, there is always the threat of being outed and mistreated. My home state, Kansas, just passed a law that reverted all of our gender marker changes back to the original marker and banned trans people from using the bathroom that best aligns with our gender. Additionally, the push around the country to ban trans healthcare for minors (which Kansas also did last year) is turning into a push to ban trans healthcare for adults. These are tactics meant to forcibly detransition us.

To return to Rich, I agree strongly with her suggestion that heterosexuality is a political and economic system that coerces women into relationships with men. What she misses is that heterosexuality is also innately cissexist -- that is, trans people are also explicitly erased and punished for refusing to adhere to socially prescribed categories. The most obvious example of this is gender clinics in the US refusing to operate on gay trans people until 1986. The Benjamin scale, which gender clinics followed to make these medical decisions, required the “true transsexual” to desire the life of a heterosexual person. After all, if the purpose of sexuality is primarily reproduction, and if reproduction can only be done between a man and a woman, then why would a doctor ever operate on a gay trans man who could be a wife and mother, or a lesbian trans woman who could be a husband and father?

The structure of 20th century gender clinics resulted in an absence of choice, as Rich would say, for trans people. Either you adhered to heterosexual expectations of your gender or you simply were not allowed to transition. Yet refusing to adhere to the standards of the gender clinics and broader heterosexual social norms meant continued struggling with dysphoria, social rejection for gender non-conforming behaviors, lack of employment or underemployment, assault, homelessness, poverty, and/or any mental health conditions resulting from the stress of all of that combined.

In 2012, the 7th edition of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care officially endorsed the informed consent model for accessing hormones. In place of requiring trans people to prove our identities to multiple providers over years to access healthcare, providers could start giving us hormones as long as we demonstrated that we understood the effects of taking them. In the US, I suspect that this shift, in addition to Obama-era policy changes that extended insurance coverage to trans healthcare, has much to do with the apparent explosion of the trans population recently. Nearly fifteen years later, we are embroiled in a reactionary backlash to revoke our access to healthcare and our right to even identify ourselves as we please.

While all of this seems far removed from the posts I described at the beginning of the essay, it is necessary context to consider how transfags are impacted by comphet and why comphet manifests the way it does for us. Additionally, we must keep in mind the recent fixation on trans men by the anti-trans movement, such as the FDA and Texas Attorney General suing binder companies (with Ken Paxton accusing them explicitly of child abuse) or President Trump signing an executive order lamenting “the horrifying tragedy that [trans boys] will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”

Rich is clear that she wrote Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence due to her frustration with feminists for simply assuming that their desire for relationships with men is apolitical despite broader structures at play that force women into those relationships whether they like them or not. Similarly, it is of utmost importance to consider the intensifying attack on trans rights when a trans masc seeks validation for their hesitation about medically transitioning and their romantic/sexual relationships with (mostly straight, always cis) men.

The Dreaded Personal Essay Portion

As I shared before, the reason for my interest in this subject is because it is, ultimately, a personal one. I’ve been with my partner, a cis bisexual man, since 2019. When we began dating, I was still mostly closeted; only friends knew that I was trans. Fortunately for me, my partner has known since the moment we met that I am a trans man; my transness was never an issue.

Exactly 15 days before our second anniversary, I started testosterone. He continues to be incredibly supportive of my decision to transition. He regularly reminds me to take my T; he was the one who took care of me in the weeks after I got top surgery. And yet despite constant reassurance from him since the beginning that no, me being a trans man doesn’t bother him and actually, he likes that I’m a trans man, I spent those first two years of our relationship fretting about what would happen if I transitioned.

I bring up my partner because I had the absolute best-case scenario for a pre-transition, mostly closeted trans person. I’m from a deeply evangelical background and have no contact with essentially every relative except for my sister and my mother, the latter of which doesn’t approve of me being trans and tries to convert me back to Christianity on a regular basis. I didn’t come out to my mother until 2020; by that point, I had spent seven years agonizing over what would happen when I came out. I waited that long because I wanted to make sure I had a bachelor’s degree, a place to live, a job, and a car in the event that I was disowned.

My partner was really a light in the dark. I was an absolute wreck those first two years. The abuse and emotional fatigue sustained from spending a life being denied who you are and shoved in the closet doesn’t make you a particularly pleasant person to be around. I was much more emotionally dysregulated. My partner, on the other hand, was steady. It took me those two years to fully digest that I could actually trust him, that he wouldn’t abandon me at any moment.

So, now, imagine that you’re in my position. You’ve just graduated college and moved out on your own. You have no friends you can reliably go to for help. Your grandfather, a retired evangelical pastor, is a co-signer on your lease because you’re not financially stable enough on your own. You struggle significantly with your mental health and these symptoms are exacerbated considerably by gender dysphoria. But coming out to your family poses a genuine risk of rejection, homelessness, loss of insurance, and even violence. You also live in an area that doesn’t have any anti-discrimination protections for trans people and hardly any sort of public assistance.

And then you have a partner. He’s your out, quite literally the one and only thing that can protect you from being on the streets if the worst scenario happens.

Despite how much my partner reassured me that he was okay with me being trans, I still frequently considered not transitioning for him. Sure, I thought, he says he’s okay with it, but what if I transitioned and he stopped being attracted to me? I would lose the only support I have. It would be proof that I am undesirable not just to him, but likely to every other man, too, because no one but him has ever expressed interest in me. I won’t be able to survive on my own.

So I started reconsidering. I thought: it’s not that bad being read as a woman, I guess. Maybe it makes me feel kind of dead inside but it could be worse. And there are more straight men than queer men, and plenty of queer men are vocally against dating trans men, so it probably makes more sense in the long run to just get misgendered as an androgynous woman than to limit the pool of potential men that could support me. I can use whatever name and pronouns I want and maybe people won’t respect them but you take what you can get.

This kind of thinking sent me down a genuinely dangerous path. My desperation to make sure there would always be men who could financially support me led me to bioessentialist, TERF-like beliefs, like that I am innately a female no matter what I say or do and that my capacity to physically reproduce is a marker of this femaleness and essential to my identity. My self-worth was tied to whether or not men would desire me enough to want to marry me and have kids, regardless of if I wanted that. I became so consumed by this anxiety that it ruptured friendships and negatively impacted my relationship with my partner, too.

Now I ask you: is this not a perfect representation of compulsory heterosexuality? I was psychologically held captive by a societal standard forced upon me through the very real threat of destitution. And even though my partner has always supported me and my decisions, has always respected my autonomy and personhood, I was still unable to fully appreciate and enjoy the relationship for what it was because I was so terrified of losing everything if he stopped being attracted to me because I transitioned. The most rational conclusion to me was to simply try my best to be a woman even though I loathed the concept so much that it made me suicidal. And despite the fact that my partner and I are queer polyamorous communists, I still had an idea in my head that not achieving the stereotypical American Dream was indicative of some kind of moral failing on my part and therefore also indicated how much I would deserve losing everything.

The absence of choice Rich described in her essay is what I experienced as a transfag. Was I able to fully consent to my relationship because I actively wanted it, or was it hampered by the fear I felt about what would happen if I didn’t have a partner? What about people who are in the same boat I was but with a partner who is far less supportive, far less accepting, maybe even abusive? Are we allowed to say no? Are we allowed to walk away without repercussions?

Transfag Comphet

There is nothing wrong with being a gender non-conforming trans man. I wear women’s clothes all the time. I’m not particularly interested in being masculine. But I do have to wonder if the rise in things like the trans femboy and the continued popularity of validity politics (e.g. “trans people who don’t transition are valid!”) are comphet masquerading as self-determination. The difference largely comes down to a matter of confidence. The feminine trans men and the trans people who don’t transition and who are confident in that decision do not go around seeking validation for it.

It’s not a crime to need validation every so often. Part of being human is feeling insecure from time to time. But when a certain topic comes up again and again, when you need to be continually reminded and reaffirmed that something is “valid” or whatever word you’d like to use, then it’s not a bad idea to interrogate why you need that reassurance.

For instance, sure, it’s completely acceptable for a trans person to determine that medically transitioning is not for them. But why was that decision made? Because they’re scared of facing unemployment, harassment, and homelessness? Because of government persecution? Because they don’t want to lose their relationships? Because healthcare is inaccessible? If any of those are the case, then that is really an absence of choice, and the choice to not transition is a coerced one. An uncoerced choice would not have such drastic outcomes for refusing the “standard” decision. After all, no person I’m aware of has faced any of what I mentioned for refusing to medically transition.

Similarly, why do some trans mascs feel the need to so readily defend being feminine? Is it because they genuinely like being feminine or because they’re scared of what might happen if they present more masculine? Why are some transfags so frightened of using testosterone and developing physical features and traits associated with maleness, like body hair, alopecia, and deep voices? Is it because most men are straight, and straight men aren’t attracted to men? Is it because we have been taught our whole lives that our value as human beings is defined by our romantic/sexual relationships with men?

If that is the case, and we’re trapped in a political landscape that is robbing us of our right to transition and even criminalizing our existence, it would make sense that being understood as or mistaken for a woman feels safer than being readily read as men. After all, if we’re all going to be forced back into womanhood, doesn’t detransitioning after years of hormones and surgeries make us damaged goods? That’s what all the anti-trans fearmongers say about trans men. We don’t want to be destitute social rejects.

Determining what is and isn’t comphet might seem challenging, but transfag comphet can really be boiled down to one question: are you able to refuse things associated with (straight) womanhood without facing repercussions?

Yes, your (cis) male partner is included in “things associated with (straight) womanhood,” even the best, most supportive, queer partners like my own. It’s worth asking yourself whether you actually benefit from that relationship or if you’re scared about what might happen if he wasn’t there. Or maybe if you’re trying your best to conform to heterosexual expectations and he’s your best way of accomplishing that. Or even if you would be able to live as a queer male couple or if he would be resistant to that.

I do not believe I know better than anybody on how to live their life. It could very well be the case that any of the people posting their concerns are in a situation that makes sense for them for the most part. But I want to make sure people are actually thriving in that situation, not just tolerating it. I could tolerate being seen as a straight woman, but I thrived when I started transitioning finally, when I was understood as a man by others, when I looked into the mirror and saw a male looking back at me. My relationship with my partner improved significantly because I improved. And when I improved, I gained more confidence to say no.

This isn’t to say that you’ll never have moments of uncertainty or anxiety about being single. That’s all part of life. This is why I agree with Rich when she stresses the importance of questioning your feelings and desires instead of just accepting them as they are or seeking validation for them. Sometimes anxieties are the consequence of growing pains, other times they reflect a more fundamental conflict between who you are and how others understand and treat you. But you won’t know unless you really look at them and be honest with yourself.

There is no need to moralize; moralizing often makes things worse, in my experience. So just follow the questions that Rich posed and my more condensed version:

1. Are you able to refuse?

2. If you could refuse without any issues, would you still make this choice?

If your answer to both is “no,” then you might be experiencing comphet.

The Bottom Line for Transfags

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again as many times as I need to: the world does not want you to be a transfag. If that weren’t the case, then we wouldn’t be experiencing such an unprecedented attack on trans rights currently. When anti-trans figures moan about you losing your capacity for reproduction, what they’re quite directly telling you is they want you to marry a man and be a mother, that your only value can be found in your ability to reproduce. The same rhetoric isn’t used for trans women because comphet has dictated that your worth is only found in birthing children for cis men.

It’s not a coincidence that anti-trans attacks are co-occurring with rolling back abortion access, an obsession with “parent rights,” and a general return of fascist thinking. The ruling class is attempting to restore an older patriarchal order and you becoming the transfag of your dreams is a direct threat to that. Even if you do get married and have kids, it’s still not satisfactory if you’re a transfag while you’re doing it. Why else would they be tearing away our identification documents? Making it illegal to use the men’s restroom? Barring our access to gender-affirming care?

When we’re painted as traumatized victims or sexual predators, the goal is the same. We are broodmares who have escaped our stall and need to be wrangled back inside. And once we’re back in our cramped stall, we get scared. We think, maybe it’s not so bad in here. Maybe my body isn’t that bad. Maybe I shouldn’t change it for my partner because he’s the only person who loves me and takes care of me, even if that love and care is ultimately contingent upon his approval of my body. Maybe people are wrong when they say I don’t have to live like this. Maybe those people are the real enemy; it’s valid to be a broodmare in a stall, after all. Broodmares don’t belong in the fields. Broodmares are too different from stallions.

The truth of the matter is that taking the jump to transfaggotry is a deeply terrifying experience. It is also a deeply rewarding experience despite everything. I wouldn’t ever take back my decision to transition. The absence of choice is designed to kill you, spiritually or literally. Don’t let heterosexuality take the victory so easily.

Author’s note: I use the word “queer” throughout this essay as shorthand for men who are gay, bi, pan, etc. I also talk about trans men. If “queer” bothers you, or if you dislike trans men, either click out now or be civil should you choose to respond.

Also, CW for discussions of sexual violence, abuse, and homophobia.

On New Year’s, I made the egregious mistake of criticizing Heated Rivalry.

I’m not going to explain all the ins and outs of the ensuing dogpile and my crash-out because it’s not necessary. What is relevant, however, is this: my exposure to the show prior to this point was almost exclusively non-queer men praising it for being groundbreaking in its depiction of queer male sexuality and emotionality. This made me suspicious as such praise blatantly ignores decades worth of queer art and media. Combine it with the fact that I also saw hostility directed towards queer men who criticized it and I was primed to feel cool towards it.

When I saw that Brock McGillis -- the first of two professional male hockey players to come out as gay -- expressed his hesitation over the claim that this show would be helpful for other queer male hockey players, it helped articulate some of my own budding complaints. So I shared the article with some additional concerns about how wish fulfillment stories about queer men can misrepresent our lived realities and negatively impact our political consciousness. The backlash to my thread was swift and plentiful, with some criticizing me for taking the show too seriously and others criticizing me for downplaying how important and meaningful it is for queer people. Chief among the complaints, however, was that I should not share my opinions on a show that I haven’t seen.

So I watched it. And, of course, my concerns didn’t change because it was never really about Heated Rivalry to begin with. Heated Rivalry and the discourse around it are simply another symptom of a broader culture that values assimilationism and consumerism over art and political literacy and engagement. The contradiction present in the pushback to what I said perfectly highlights this: I want to be critical of mainstream depictions of queer men and the real-world implications of such depictions, and others do not want me to do so. I was accused of being pretentious, an asshole, a snob, a misogynist, of disliking queer happiness. There was intense resentment towards my efforts to politicize and dissect it, to compare it to the real-world experiences of queer men, to criticize queer fluff and porn that is elevated over queer art.

Now that the dust has settled, I’ll be poking the bear once more by fleshing out my thoughts and criticisms more in depth. And please -- for the love of God -- hear me out before you start yelling at me this time.

i. Shattering Queer Mirrors

In 1969, the Academy Award for Best Picture went to Midnight Cowboy. The film follows Joe Buck, a young Texan man who moves to New York City and ends up squatting in an abandoned apartment with a disabled con man named Rico Rizzo. Joe’s work as a sex worker -- including his encounters with both women and men -- is central to the story and depicted on-screen. The queer elements of the film should come as no surprise: Midnight Cowboy was directed by John Schlesinger and written by James Leo Herlihy, both of whom were gay.

In addition to being a critical success, Midnight Cowboy was a commercial success, grossing $44.8 million against a $3.2 million budget. In 2025 dollars, that’s $351 million, a gross high enough that, if released in 2025, it would be the fourth-highest grossing film in the US. In 1969, it was the third-highest grossing film.

Fifty-five years later, Luca Guadagnino, an openly gay director, released Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella. The story follows William Lee, an American expat in Mexico, and his fixation on the younger Eugene Allerton; the film explicitly depicts their sexual encounters. While critics praised Queer, most awards for it were given to Daniel Craig for his performance, not the film itself. The Academy Awards didn’t acknowledge it at all. Commercially, it fared even worse: it grossed only $7 million worldwide against a budget of approximately $52 million.

Comparing these two films -- admittedly, two of my favorites -- reveals a few points: one, that queer art has existed for decades; two, that queer art has always been unapologetic; and three, that queer art is now arguably more devalued than it was before. Midnight Cowboy and Queer are similar in their background and content and yet the film that came out when sodomy was still illegal in most states received far more commercial and critical success than the film that came out nearly a decade after Obergefell v. Hodges.

My investment in this conversation isn’t purely academic or contrarian, but rather personal. Queer was revelatory to me as a gay trans man. I’d read the novella earlier while working on my own novel about queer men. Despite knowing the plot already, the film still destroyed me emotionally. Yet when I sought out others’ opinions, I was shocked to see how much negativity was directed towards it. Many people did not like the fact that Lee is pathetic and creepy instead of likeable or sympathetic; they decried the sexuality in the film as predatory and gross. I felt that this was missing the point, as Lee is supposed to be Burroughs himself, and Burroughs was a pathetic and creepy person with unsettling relationships. To make him anything else would be to erase its honesty and artistic integrity. He does not need to be likeable or sympathetic to be an important, meaningful gay character, and sex scenes do not need to be gratifying to be worth portraying. Sanding down his rough edges or making the sex scenes sexier might have made it more consumable, but it would have removed the emotional turmoil of the story and left it hollow and less authentic. More crucially, we should question why audiences demand to see polished, clean queer characters in queer art.

See, I draw a strong line between what I consider “art” and what I consider “content.” Art is something that challenges the person who engages with it and creates a deep sense of empathy by holding up a mirror. Art should not be comfortable; it should be transformative. I know that I’ve engaged with art when it has a profound impact on how I understand myself, others, and the world around me. Art leaves you wiser.

The fact that I was deeply unsettled by Queer is why it is art. It hit way too close to home by opening up deep wounds and examining fears I’d prefer to keep buried inside. I left in tears because I felt seen and understood and because I never wanted to be a Lee or an Allerton.

Content, on the other hand, tends to veer more towards wish fulfillment. In place of revealing anything about ourselves, it scratches deep, psychological itches by allowing us to see ourselves in our fantasies. Sometimes that looks like finding the love of our life; sometimes it’s being the strongest person on the planet; sometimes it’s causing unimaginable pain and destruction.

Let me be clear: I don’t think content is an inherently bad thing, just like I don’t think it’s a bad thing to enjoy eating a Hostess cupcake everyday. But if most of your diet is Hostess cupcakes, it’s going to have some notable, negative impacts. Your physical health will likely suffer, for one, as you’re not getting all the nutrients you need. Then your personal taste may suffer as well, as you become so accustomed to the taste of the cupcake that the thought of trying other food may become uncomfortable or even repulsive. Similarly, too much content, not enough art fractures our spiritual health and makes it more challenging to appreciate art when we encounter it.

This differentiation matters because it explains why so many people have been eager to call Heated Rivalry “groundbreaking” (and, for that matter, every other mainstream gay story since the film adaptation Love, Simon). Queer art already broke these barriers long before now. But mainstream queer content -- that’s newer.

I suppose Heated Rivalry is groundbreaking in the sense that I’ve never seen something that feels like a gay version of Fifty Shades of Gray receive this much attention and praise from straight people and dozens of mainstream news outlets. But I don’t know if I would categorize this as a meaningful win for queer men. I’ve seen plenty of depictions of gay intimacy before now, some of which are particularly explicit and even taboo -- I’m thinking, for instance, of novels like The Sluts and Exquisite Corpse. And even beyond written fiction, we’ve had graphic gay sex on mainstream television in recent years, such as Showtime’s Fellow Travelers and AMC’s Interview with the Vampire.

So, really, Heated Rivalry isn’t doing anything new at all. I’ve seen gay fluff before; I’ve seen gay sex before. It’s familiar and angsty and cozy in the way the gay fanfics I read on Tumblr as a teenager were. The show didn’t particularly move me. I thought the Scott and Kip storyline was cute; everything else felt very standard. And yet -- for months -- I have seen dozens of people insist over and over and over that this show is groundbreaking, that it’s doing something unprecedented for queer men.

And it’s not just the sex that’s allegedly groundbreaking. For instance, a New York Times opinion piece (written by a gay historian, no less), stated:

Maybe what we ache for now is not culture built to serve a political end but a focus on the intimate — someone on top of us, breaking down in tears as he confesses his love. What is turning us on is not the thrill of naked bodies but the shock of being emotionally known. That is what some of us have been missing.

I deeply empathize with this point. This is precisely why I love queer art -- it makes me feel emotionally known.

However.

My first objection is to the idea that Heated Rivalry gets at the emotional interiority of queer men in a way that is unmatched by previous iterations of queer art -- or content, for that matter. I’ll expand more on this point later. My second -- and much deeper -- objection is to the idea that the intimate must be prioritized over the political, or that these can even be separated at all.

To be fair to the author, I don’t believe Jim Downs is arguing that queer stories should abandon politics entirely. Rather, he seems to be criticizing the phenomenon where stories about or featuring queer people often turn into a sort of after-school special to teach straight people about how gay people are just like them, too.

Still, it’s worth noting that much of the pushback I got to my original thread was because I was making the show too political. The phenomenon Downs mentions -- no doubt exhausting and patronizing -- is the politics of gay assimilationism. Unfortunately, Heated Rivalry is simply the next iteration of gay assimilationism, whether intentionally or not.

ii. Fujoslop Brainrot

Boys’ love (BL) -- or yaoi, if it’s more sexually explicit -- refers to a Japanese genre of media that depicts queer relationships between men. One of its key defining features is that it is created by women, for women. Japanese media about queer men, by queer men, and for queer men is referred to instead as gei komi or, by some, as bara. Female fans of BL have been tormented over the years; the term fujoshi, which translates to “rotten girl,” was coined to describe them -- and has since been proudly reclaimed.

While fujos have been calling themselves such for years, the recent proliferation of the word is linked to the explosion of popularity of BL outside of Japan. And while BL does refer to a specific genre with specific tropes, its popularity very much coincides with the popularity of gay content as a whole in the West. Take, for instance, this timeline of BL compiled by a fan on Reddit between the 1970s and 2022, where approximately 43% of the main entries came out in the last 10 years. Another fan’s documentation of BL TV shows in various Asian countries reveals that between 2018 and 2022, the number of BL shows multiplied eightfold.

Notice, too, how the subreddit I linked to is in English. BL is now globalized; it overlaps heavily with other queer art and content. Even in that timeline of BL, the original poster added Brokeback Mountain, Call Me By Your Name, Love, Simon and Heartstopper as other influential BL works despite the fact that they are ostensibly not BL in the original sense of the term.

BL tropes and fujoshi tastes have become more ubiquitous. BL loves its beautiful, androgynous boys. Sexual dynamics largely revolve around anal penetration, with bottoms (uke) being more effeminate and tops (seme) being more masculine (but still often beautiful and hairless, not overtly manly). The abuse and rape of the uke -- especially by his love interest -- is quite common. This is what I’m referring to when I say “fujoslop”: content (not art) about the sexual and/or romantic lives of queer men primarily consumed by non-queer men.

Fujoslop touches all queer media nowadays, even queer art. For instance, let’s return to Luca Guadagnino. Seven years before Queer, Guadagnino directed Call Me By Your Name, another explicit, gay love story between the 17-year-old Elio and the 24-year-old Oliver (although the book was written by André Aciman, who identifies as straight). Unlike Queer, Call Me By Your Name was a commercial success, grossing $43.1 million against a $3.5 million budget. It won over 100 awards and received over 250 more nominations, including a Best Adapted Screenplay win for (the openly gay) James Ivory and a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars.

Now, am I calling Call Me By Your Name fujoslop? Not necessarily. But I do think there is a considerable fujoslop factor as to why it was so successful while Queer failed to make a substantial impact. Specifically, the dynamic of Elio and Oliver in Call Me By Your Name has far more in common with BL tropes than the dynamic between Lee and Allerton in Queer. I believe that those commonalities ultimately aided in its success.

Look, I just don’t believe that Timothée Chalamet’s performance as the beleaguered twink in Call Me By Your Name would have made him a star if he hadn’t also captured the fujo heart. On Archive of Our Own, the most popular spot for fan fiction on the internet, we can see this truth: Call Me By Your Name has nearly 2,400 fanfics, with Elio being the most popular character tagged within these fics. Compare this to Chalamet’s other 2017 movie, Lady Bird, which only has 38. Queer, meanwhile, barely has 40 versus the 1,100+ fanfics written for Guadagnino’s other (homoerotic, bisexual) 2024 film, Challengers.

I don’t know why Queer failed so hard in comparison to Call Me By Your Name. But what I do know -- just based on our AO3 numbers here alone -- is that Queer resists fujoslopification.

Heated Rivalry, on the other hand, is perhaps peak fujoslop. Our gay hockey players look like Ken dolls. Ilya is dominant, straightforward, and horny; Shane is our timid, gay virgin who’s also eager to try. In the first two episodes, a quarter of the runtime is spent on Shane and Ilya being sexy and naked and fucking. They spend literal years fucking in-show before we finally get our soft boy emotional breakdown in the last two episodes.

Is it wrong to enjoy fujoslop? No. I already mentioned that I enjoyed the Scott and Kip plotline, which is absolutely fujoslop for the fluff lovers. Hell, I have written fan fics with similar plots to Heated Rivalry. But it’s content, not art. And the problem is that fujoslop content is incredibly popular right now. Its popularity incentivizes the profit-driven media industry to invest further in fujoslop, because that’s what’s going to get high returns, especially from female audiences as they are -- by far -- the largest addressable consumer audience. And if everything mainstream about queer men -- even queer art -- is inevitably affected by fujoslop, then what impact does that have on us? What messages are we getting about queer men and queer life? How is it shaping the way we understand homophobia and queer liberation?

This is why my criticisms of the show are political, ultimately. For instance: I’ve seen multiple people claim that this show will make a dramatic impact in the lives of gay hockey players. But when one of only two openly gay hockey players expressed some trepidation about that claim, the response from many was irritation, as if he doesn’t have intimate familiarity with homophobia within the professional hockey world. This alone proves that Heated Rivalry did not actually open a conversation about homophobia in hockey; rather, people have directed their ire towards one of those gay hockey players talking about homophobia because it harshes their vibe!

And even if we wanted this to be completely apolitical, to divorce it completely from any serious conversations about homophobia, it’s still worth interrogating. For starters, Heated Rivalry was adapted and directed by Jacob Tierney, a gay man, but it was originally based off of the Game Changers novels, which were written by Rachel Reid. While I haven’t read the novel of the same name, multiple Goodreads reviews assured me that the novel is, essentially, erotica… and that the majority of people reading this book appear to be women.

So yes, Heated Rivalry is fujoslop. Even if Tierney added scenes to the show to build Ilya’s and Shane’s emotional arc, the foundation is still fujoslop. And I object to spinning this as a win for gay representation when fujoslop has existed for ages and only ever represents the same kind of queer man because, ultimately, it exists for women to jerk off to.

To be more pointed: when Heated Rivalry introduced Shawn, my immediate thought was, oh, of course the one fat, Black character gets to be the sassy, flamboyant friend and not one of the gays getting laid. And of course none of the four gay leads are overly effeminate; they all exist within the realm of men that straight women would plausibly want to fuck. And of course I have to sit here and listen to people assert that this is good and groundbreaking gay representation when I know for a fact that this show would be dead in the water if Shane had a pussy instead of a cock, as evidenced by the number of gay transphobes who have made it very clear that I am a disgusting, mutilated pervert because of my genitals and the fanfic girlies who bend over backwards explaining how their male characters can give birth in the Omegaverse without a vagina.

This is fujoslop brainrot. It’s framing -- quite frankly -- pornography as a representation win. And to be extremely clear, I’m not an anti-sex prude in the least. I strongly believe that people are too moralistic and censorious when it comes to art. No, my issue is that porn(-adjacent) depictions of sex are lauded and valued more than artistic depictions of sex, and any attempt to point out the imbalance at play -- or how it’s ultimately consumerism promoting it at the expense of meaningful art -- is immediately shut down. If porn was liberatory, then women would have been liberated long ago. Why should we believe any different for queer men?

Lastly, before anyone accuses me of being too harsh to women, let me clarify three things. Firstly, not all stories about queer men created by women are fujoslop. Brokeback Mountain is perhaps the best example of this. Jack and Ennis do not exist to fulfill a fantasy but rather represent men grappling with longing and grief. Secondly, BL ultimately falls within the realm of romance fiction, a genre that has always been predominantly created and consumed by women. Women have historically been the most active within yuri spaces as well – the Japanese genre about queer relationships between women. The gender division tends to skew very heavily towards women. Finally, even if queer men are producing and consuming fujoslop, it’s still ultimately bad for queer art. My criticism doesn’t change. A fujoslop diet is a Hostess cupcake diet; it does not help queer men learn more about ourselves or encourage curiosity in the world around us.

iii. No Fun Allowed

As I was writing this essay, I saw a post from the Lemkin Institute that warns that the US government is engaging in genocidal actions and rhetoric against trans people. Regardless of your thoughts on that statement, I mention it because being trans in this day and age is a nonstop battle to make people take your right to exist seriously and to believe that you are a human being with autonomy. It’s so deeply stupid and dehumanizing to have to do things like check to make sure I’m not breaking the law in every state I visit by pissing in the men’s restroom. But that’s how life is at the moment.

So yes, actually, I get pissed off when people either insist that we make queer art and content less political, or when they claim that the absolute, bare minimum is political. Quite literally every part of my life is readily turned into political theater and is something I have to be constantly aware of. Every day I am subjected to some sort of abuse because I have the audacity to be trans. My queer art is political because my life is political. It pushes boundaries because others have to learn to be uncomfortable with the status quo to make any change.

One argument I hear a lot is that since everything is political already, it’s only fair for us to turn our brains off every now and then. But apoliticism is still political. As far as I’m concerned, there is functionally no difference between, say, the Trump administration’s focus on stopping trans boys from transitioning and mainstream content about queer men never including trans men. Even if the fujoslop creators are self-described trans allies, the end result is still the same. Trans men are too politically controversial; trans men aren’t sexy enough for the general public. So the media industry says we aren’t profitable enough. We don’t get to exist in shows like Heated Rivalry. The audience who would enjoy trans fag wish fulfillment is simply too small.

But I don’t want trans fag wish fulfillment because it would depoliticize the struggle for trans liberation. Instead of challenging the status quo, trans fag wish fulfillment would find our place within it. Wish fulfillment necessitates depoliticization because it neglects the parts of reality that contradict our wishes and instead gives us the outcome we desire. In fact, I’d argue the reason we’re in this fujoslop era to begin with is because cis queer men have been so heavily depoliticized.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the wave of fujoslop content started immediately following Obergefell v. Hodges. In his New York Times opinion piece on Heated Rivalry, Jim Downs wrote:

For years, queer representation in mainstream culture was driven by a political imperative. We needed to be palatable, monogamous and mortgage-ready to be tolerated. You could see this impulse in “Will & Grace,” where queerness was domesticated through friendship and slapstick, and later in “Modern Family,” where the suburban gay couple were beloved precisely because they reassured straight viewers that nothing about them was too strange, too erotic or too much. A lot of what is being produced about gay men, even now, replicates a straight world in rainbow colors.

Once again, I generally agree with Downs on this point. However, I do have two issues: one, the “political imperative” driving this assimilationist depiction of queer men was, ultimately, a depolitical urge that sought to normalize affluent, cis, and mostly white gay men at the expense of the more “undesirable” queers; and two, that the fujoslop content mill still plays into this assimilationist mindset by refusing to meaningfully challenge the status quo.

To better demonstrate what I mean, let’s return to the discourse around Heated Rivalry. Much of it has focused on the safety of queer male professional hockey players. Rachel Reid herself stated that she wrote Game Changers in response to homophobia within the NHL.

Alright, then. In 2025, the NHL opened with a roster of 726 men. If, say, 5% at most were queer, then we’re looking at up to 36 queer NHL players active right now.

Does the current state of gay rights really hinge upon the ability of 36 players to be out openly?

Maybe this seems like an unfair point to make. After all, there’s far more to professional hockey than the NHL; the International Ice Hockey Federation reported 1,386,209 registered male hockey players in 2024, for instance. Additionally, the animosity that queer men face within the locker rooms of the NHL is a serious issue that can be felt in all traditionally masculine spaces.

But that’s just it -- this issue is not limited to NHL locker rooms. The vast majority of queer men -- nearly 100% -- are never going to step foot in an NHL locker room. Heated Rivalry barely addresses homophobia within the locker rooms to begin with, much less outside of it. Homophobia is largely implied but never really confronted outside of brief discussions about how terrible it is to be gay in Russia. I spent the show feeling confused about why Shane was so reluctant to come out considering nobody in his life demonstrated homophobic sentiments and were quite supportive otherwise. Really, the show felt like it was actively refusing to grapple with how homophobia impacts the lives of these hockey players (beyond concerns about Russia) and their relationships with each other in favor of a much more sexy, straightforward plot. None of our characters are politically active or aware; they are not complicated and messy. They are just there to look pretty and have gay sex.

So when people argue that this show is a step forward for queer men, I wonder… how? Because it depicts queer men existing? How is that useful if the primary audience is already seeking out stories about queer men to begin with? And then when people argue that this show isn’t political, I again ask… how? Reid stated her inspiration was to combat homophobia within the NHL, so doesn’t that already carry with it a political motive? Is it truly possible to be apolitical?

Defenders of the show are stuck in a mentality where they want to have their cake and eat it too. That is, Heated Rivalry is a bold step forward for the rights of queer people everywhere, but also it’s unfair to view it politically because it’s silly fluff and not a serious political statement. Missing in this broader conversation, though, are things like the dozens of publicly out female professional hockey players (ending homophobia is just not as sexy when it’s women fucking, I guess) or, you know, things that impact a much larger number of queer men.

Take, for instance, my earlier mention of rape and abuse being a frequent trope within the BL genre. In 2017, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that queer men in the US experienced rates of sexual violence comparable to straight women. Much of the queer art that I adore addresses this reality head-on; there is no lack of representation regarding this specific issue. But when it comes to queer content, we either see this violence romanticized (such as the plethora of manga where it is used as proof of love and attraction) or side-stepped altogether.

Now, I’m not arguing that every queer story ever has to talk about heavy topics like sexual violence. Rather, I am questioning the cultural landscape we live in where people bristle at honest depictions of dysfunctional -- and even abusive -- dynamics between queer men, such as Lee and Allerton in Queer, but don’t question why queer content either avoids approaching the issue, deals with it in a way that seems like the creators are uncomfortable talking about it themselves, or uncritically upholds it.

As an example, while watching Heated Rivalry, I was thinking about conversations between queer men about down-low (DL) guys -- that is, men who engage in queer sex secretly but identify as straight otherwise. It is quite common to encounter queer men who have had awful experiences with DL guys, as DL guys are often emotionally immature and sometimes dangerous. While neither Ilya nor Shane necessarily qualifies as “down-low” in the same way, there is an obvious disconnect in the way that fujoslop will sometimes romanticize and woobify the DL guy and give him his grand, emotional awakening with no real long-term damage caused along the way. But the fact of the matter is that, uh, being closeted like that really fucks with you! It cuts so deep into your psyche and completely colors the way you interact with everybody for the rest of your life. Being closeted is scary and violent and dangerous and, unfortunately, can make you a worse person for it. No, it’s not guaranteed. No, it’s not permanent, necessarily. But it happens.

But I don’t see queer content about that. I see queer content about hot twinks who are in tune with their emotions and cry and kiss. And it’s isolating, genuinely. As a gay trans man, the queer stories that resonate with me the hardest -- the ones that make me understand myself and other queer men more, the ones that gave me a reason to keep going, to be even queerer -- are the ones that don’t feel… good. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be joy in queer art. Mysterious Skin, for instance, is a deeply upsetting queer story that has a hopeful, sweet ending. Watching it for the first time was one of the most cathartic experiences of my life.

My point, though, is that queer art is supposed to be uncomfortable and challenging because queer life is uncomfortable and challenging. Fluff is okay here and there but you need to challenge yourself at some point. You owe it to your own growth to challenge yourself. You owe it to others to take that which challenged you and fight for their betterment. I don’t want people to believe that watching gay hockey porn is going to end homophobia and the more gay hockey porn they watch, the harder homophobia ends. I want people to watch Mysterious Skin and go, holy shit, queer men experience alarming levels of sexual abuse and violence and I want to know how I can stop that and support survivors. I want people to watch I Saw the TV Glow and feel inflamed about policies that are blocking access to trans healthcare and criminalizing the right to exist as a trans person. I want people to stop feeling defensive over content that they even deem as brainless fluff and start becoming more indignant about how much the media industry doesn’t show you about queer reality and why they refuse to show it you.

That’s why I’m mad about Heated Rivalry. I’m not mad because fluff exists or because people are having fun. I’m mad because we are being placated by the bourgeoisie who invest in this fluff and scolded when we criticize it in any way. When Downs complained about making queer stories palatable for straight acceptance, this is the trend he’s complaining about, whether he realizes it or not. The issues we experience as queer men and our emotional complexities about them are washed away if they are too uncomfortable for non-queer men to stomach. We need to be packaged for mainstream consumption. We need to be sexy and fun and desirable in some way.

To bastardize the ending of Cabaret, we need to stop dancing with Sally Bowles and wake up. Fujoslop isn’t revolutionary, it’s a distraction. Increasing fascist rhetoric requires far more diligence on our parts. No, Heated Rivalry and fujoslop are not responsible for the increasing radicalization of right-wingers, but they absolutely aren’t helping to build a meaningful resistance through their wishy-washy Schrodinger’s politics.

Here’s the simple fact of the matter: fighting injustice -- whether it be homophobia, transphobia, racism, fascism, whatever else -- is uncomfortable. It’s ugly. It’s exhausting. It’s extremely unfair. But we have to do it. And to be strong and savvy enough to do it, we need to part from our Hostess cupcake diet. Or, at the very least, stop pretending like the Hostess cupcake diet is a well-balanced, nutritious diet.

So, can you enjoy Heated Rivalry and other fujoslop? I mean, sure. I’m not particularly interested in policing what people are enjoying because it’s a complete waste of time, if nothing else. I just want political resistance to also be eating proteins and vitamins too.

What is a trans fag?

For the purposes of this article, a trans fag is faggot who is trans. More specifically, a trans individual who:

1. was assigned female at birth,

2. is romantically and/or sexually attracted to men, and

3. generally has a complicated relationship with masculinity and femininity.

While there has undoubtedly always been people who we might classify as trans fags nowadays, the ability to be a trans fag and name it as such is an incredibly recent phenomenon. Historically speaking, trans fags were barred from transitioning. Existing literature on trans and gay identities rarely acknowledge trans fags. Because of this absence, it is often challenging for trans fags to realize that we are, in fact, trans fags.

It is quite common to see trans fag eggs fretting about their sexual and gender identity. In an effort to ease this burden, I present a list of experiences that might indicate that you are a trans fag.

You might be a trans fag if…

• …you inexplicably feel like a trans woman (in that you wish you could transition to male and back to female).

• …“man” doesn’t feel right, but “nonbinary” doesn’t either.

• …terms like FTX/FTNB, bigender, genderqueer, and so on resonate with you.

• …you are apathetic, disgusted, or disturbed by the idea of having a sexual and/or romantic relationship with a man but think about it frequently.

• …that apathy, disgust, or disturbance dissipates when you imagine yourself having a sexual and/or romantic relationship with a man as a man.

• …you like the idea of being feminine but actually being feminine makes you want to die.

• …you’re scared that transitioning means that current and/or potential male partners will stop desiring you.

• …you have delayed or avoided coming out and/or transitioning to remain desirable to current or potential male partners.

• …you’ve thought on more than one occasion that you feel like a gay man.

• …you feel guilt or shame about feeling like a gay man.

• …you are strongly drawn to tender depictions of men in love.

• …you feel guilt or shame about being drawn to those depictions.

• …you worry that your attraction to men is somehow sexually predatory.

• …you feel like an intruder or imposter with every letter and subgroup under the LGBTQ+ umbrella.

• …you would enjoy being a woman if you could take it all off at the end of the day.

• …you simultaneously identify with men and feel completely alienated from them.

How do you know that these experiences mean I’m a trans fag and not something else?

I don’t. But I have plenty of experience as a trans fag who knows dozens of other trans fags. The listed items above are characteristic of someone who is struggling with internalized transphobia and internalized homophobia. What we need to remember is that to be a fag is to be understood as a sexual deviant and gender fuck-up. Now add the extra layer of being trans on top of it and you have an absolute clusterfuck of confusion and neuroticism. It is understandably difficult to clearly articulate to the world, “I want to transition in a way that will have me read as male by society at large, but I do not really feel very masculine because I want to dance in a mesh crop top and make out with hot bears who tell me that I’m a pretty boy.” If that’s not relatable, insert your fantasy there. I’m sure it still checks out.

I think I might be a trans fag. What now?

Welcome, brother! Here’s my advice.

1. Connect with other trans fags. If there’s others in your area, absolutely make contact with them. But if you’re like me, you’re basically one of two trans fags as far as the eye can see. Fortunately, there are so many of us online. Stick around.

2. Connect with other trans people, period. Since transitioning, I have found a lot of camaraderie with trans women, for instance. That has only made my life much better. You’re going to need the support.

3. TRANSITION. Believe me, I understand painfully well that sometimes you just can’t do it. I waited 8 years to start transitioning. But we also live in a world that is already transphobic, becoming more intensely transphobic, and becoming more intensely transphobic to trans men. Anti-transfaggotry is on the rise as well as people realize that we exist. I bring this up to say that the world gives you a million reasons why you shouldn’t transition. Interrogate your reasons why you’re not transitioning and determine if those are really justified. Don’t let them discourage you. It is extremely hard to take that leap of faith. You are going to lose people. People are going to be insensitive, unempathetic, and mean. But you are going to feel so much better in the end. They can’t stomp us out if we refuse to disappear. Channel some German cockroach energy, if you will. And if you absolutely, positively cannot transition now or ever, then the connections with other trans people are going to be your lifeline.

4. Don’t be scared of men. Now, I will say, this is unfortunately easier said than done. In my experience, men are worse to me as a fag than they were to me as a woman. There are always the guys out there who really suck. But there is also so much to gain in just embracing manhood. You’re a fag, after all. Have some pride. Even if the men around you suck, you have the chance to be the shining example of a guy who doesn’t.

5. If you want to date, find a partner who loves you for being a trans fag. Accept nothing less, even if it means being single. Being single is not a death sentence. Being undesired is not a death sentence. Don’t make yourself smaller for someone who will never really respect you or make you happy.

In Conclusion

…be a faggot. You’ll be better off for it.

Content warning for discussions of child abuse, physical and sexual violence, and pregnancy. Names have been changed for the sake of privacy.

i. Trauma Dump

In 2023, I was scared shitless. The state legislature had just passed the first anti-trans law of its kind and nobody had any idea what to expect. We didn’t know if we would be criminalized for using bathrooms or banned from updating our gender documents. For a month, it felt like some terrible fate was looming without any reprieve until, at least, my fiance brought me into a local group planning a response. Our campaign was straightforward: we demanded our city to not just pledge to protect trans people, but to implement new policies that reinforce that pledge. By that point, we had just about a month before the law went into effect.

To get things done as quickly as possible, we invited any and all people to help us accomplish our mission. Soon there emerged a core group of us who attended meetings, organized events, and pasted flyers around town at a moment’s notice. Long story short, we won before the summer was even finished. We were an incredibly efficient group despite how frantic the moment was -- and, of course, despite Anna.

The first interaction I ever had with Anna came through an email chain. There, I scolded her after she made a careless remark that resulted in a trans woman ending her involvement with the campaign. Later, when we were formally introduced, I learned that she apparently had over a decade worth of experience as a queer organizer off in a great big city on the coast. She identified herself as simply gender nonconforming. To anyone, she was easily read as a white woman, albeit one who was not invested in dressing up. She did not deny being a woman for the most part.

As fate would have it, I was not the only person who took issue with Anna. She took a bizarre oppositional approach to everything we agreed upon as a group, so much so that I wondered if she was intentionally following the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Ultimately, the group banded together to remove her from our organizing spaces. But when it came to arguing with Anna prior to that point, nobody did so more than me.

Despite the two years that have since passed, things she said to me still repeat in my mind regularly. Early on in the campaign, when I was particularly upset about the law, she asserted that I was incapable of fully understanding the stakes because I wouldn’t really be impacted by it. When I confronted her for repeatedly sabotaging our efforts, she labeled me a dictator. When I would prepare a public comment, she would drum up allegations that I was erasing people of color and women. When I finally pointed out that she was cis, she accused me of being transphobic and dangerous to trans people. And when, at last, we removed her from the organization, she started leaving random comments here and there online that insinuated that I am an obstacle to trans rights.

I’m still sometimes stunned at how badly her treatment affected me. After years of not having nocturnal panic attacks, I had to resume my SSRIs because of how anxious I felt just knowing that she would pick a fight with me or somebody else in the group at any moment. Even after we completed our campaign and she was gone, I was filled with the constant fear that she would return and turn public sentiment against our organization. And while everyone agreed that she was ultimately in the wrong, while rationally I know that we are so successful that she cannot hurt us, I still dawdled to finish writing this section because what if I really am the bad guy, what if I really am a detriment to trans people, what if she really did know better, what if this will give her the fuel she needs to finally destroy the beautiful community we worked so tirelessly to build.

Nearly a year later, the organization had come to a lull. There were still a few of us doing what we could to keep things active, but the interest had largely died down. People stopped showing up. So when a moment arrived that had the city on alert once again about trans rights, I knew I had to jump at the chance.

While I had organized events with the group before, I had never planned anything entirely on my own. I got to work using the contacts I had and made considerable headway in a day or so. At some point, someone mentioned that another person in town was planning a similar rally. Because I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes -- and because I was eager for new connections to revive our organization -- I reached out to them. Quickly, we agreed to work together.

Soon after, we met in person. They were a femme named Nina, maybe 15 or 20 years older than me. They owned a business downtown that I had heard of before. Towards the end of our lengthy conversation, Nina disclosed that they would like to use they/them pronouns and bond more with other queer people in the city. I was elated after the conversation; this seemed like a great connection.

My initial vision for the rally changed shortly after. I wanted to host it in the biggest park in town for the space and publicity; Nina, on the other hand, wanted to host it in their business venue. The compromise we came up with was to meet at the park, march downtown, and convene at the venue. We made a flyer with all the necessary information that garnered an incredible amount of attention. Dozens of people were set to attend.

On the day of the rally, I arrived early at the park only to discover that Nina had started the event without telling me. Reporters were there, special speakers had already made their remarks, and the march was just beginning -- nearly an entire hour before we had advertised.

I was mortified. People who knew I had planned the event questioned me on this time change and I didn’t have a good answer. As the march commenced, I thought of all the people who would arrive at the park at the correct time only to find that there was nobody else there. This opportunity to revitalize my organization would tank its reputation instead. And as more embarrassing hiccups ensued due to the venue’s awkward location and size, I selfishly decided to let Nina take center stage as the primary organizer while I would just be a supporter. I didn’t want people to remember this as the first rally I had largely planned on my own.

Sometime later, my fiance expressed his frustration with how the event went with me. In response, I was inconsolable. It was like a dam broke, unleashing a frantic stream of frustrations and insecurities. Nina had hijacked the event from me. Nina had humiliated me. I threw Nina under the bus by allowing them to take credit. Everything was ultimately my fault because I allowed Nina to make bad decisions and then avoided accountability. Or maybe it all went wrong because I had incorrectly believed that I should be allowed to make decisions at all. I had no right planning a rally. I was taking up space. I was a dictator.

Contrary to my agonizing, Nina’s reputation only seemed to grow after the rally. I was relieved to still be within Nina’s good graces despite how terrible I thought I had been to them. A little over a month later, when I launched an emergency campaign to stop an anti-trans bill, they offered their business venue as a place to organize. Through the combined efforts of my organization and others like us, we successfully stopped the bill in its tracks. My organization had made a comeback; Nina seemed to be flourishing as well. In the glory of it all, I swallowed my shame and let bygones be bygones.

The first time I ever yelled at someone -- really, truly yelled at them, completely out of my senses like a wild animal had been unleashed -- was shortly after I first met Anna in 2023. It happened during a meeting with the biggest queer organization in town, Q, after they refused to platform our campaign during Pride Month. The betrayal and anguish and dread was so visceral that I couldn’t hold back. I knew that it was only going to get worse for trans people. If the first Pride was a riot, then goddamnit, why shouldn’t grassroots trans activism be prioritized over coddling corporate sponsors?

Later that year, after our campaign had finished, I started doubting myself. One of the leaders of Q -- the one I had yelled at, coincidentally -- had made multiple attempts to amend the relationship with my group. Eventually, I reached out to that person and apologized. When Pride Month arrived the following year, things were far better between our groups. I still had my reservations, of course. But they were openly acknowledging us. I was invited to various events to speak about trans politics. I appreciated that they were promoting the work my group did.

In the aftermath of the 2024 election, hundreds of people in the area flooded to my group. We were at the forefront of reporting on anti-trans legislation at both a federal and state level as 2025 began. As the primary political spokesperson and organizer for my organization, my role kicked into overdrive. In the first three months of the year alone, I spent hundreds of hours creating and writing informational posts, encouraging and guiding hundreds of people to submit written testimonies, traveling to the State Capitol to testify, coordinating with other activists on events, speaking to the news, analyzing bills, tracking legislators, and holding educational presentations.

I absolutely could not have done this alone -- I have a brilliant leadership committee who have similarly put in a staggering amount of work in their respective roles. Additionally, our members are so enthusiastic, reliable, and willing to help. I have never once regretted doing this work for free and without recognition and I never will. We created a sanctuary for trans people in increasingly frightening times. That’s all I ever wanted.

Yet when I learned that I had been nominated for an award given by Q, I couldn’t stop the excitement from welling up within me. The award recognizes someone who contributes considerably to the local queer community. While I have never expected celebration, it also never hurts to be appreciated for your labor, especially when your rights are relentlessly under attack. So when the night of the award came, my fiance and I got dressed up and headed out to the location. We smiled and danced and eagerly waited for an hour until the award ceremony finally arrived.

The Emcee -- one of Q’s leaders -- started by reciting a phrase I frequently use in my public speeches. They shared that the winner was someone that people flocked to for their leadership. They’re a known organizer, the Emcee said, and they mentioned that first rally I had ever planned. But the real thing that set this person over the edge -- the real reason why they deserved this award -- was because of their dedication to small business owners in the community.

When Nina walked on stage with tears of joy on their cheeks and thanked everyone for the honor, they didn’t mention trans people or my organization a single time. In fact, even outside this event, they hadn’t mentioned trans people or my political efforts since Trump’s reelection at all.

I finally exploded the next morning. My fiance held me as I sobbed into my bed. Nina had exploited me for their own profit -- literally. I brought in new customers to their business and lost relevance as soon as that business shut down. And Q didn’t care about my organization or what I did; they only promoted the work I did to avoid having to do any political work of their own. They knew that I couldn’t yell at them again if they had me do all the work for them. Neither Nina nor any leader from Q had ever shown up to a rally or to the Capitol or my informational sessions. Most of them didn’t bother to share my campaigns or information.

My fiance held me while I sobbed because nobody gave a fuck about the trans kids losing their right to transition. They didn’t give a fuck about the fact that all of my gender markers had been forced back to F or that I couldn’t work in schools despite getting a degree to do so because of these laws. They didn’t give a fuck about all the trans adults fleeing to places that may not be safe for long or that I would be following soon. Nobody gave a fuck that I left the event right after that award happened. Nobody reached out, nobody thanked me. Nobody asked me if I was doing okay despite everything. Nobody offered to help.

For days afterward, I lived in a fog, angrier than I had ever been before. I didn’t know it was possible to be so angry. Over and over, I said I wouldn’t ever work with Q again. Ultimately, that was a lie; I’m writing this section hours after delivering another political speech on their behalf. I figured that allowing them to exploit me brings publicity to my organization. And that, at least, gives trans people an actually safe place to go.

Nina still hasn’t mentioned any of this year’s anti-trans legislation. I gave up waiting a while ago. I smile and talk to them when I see them.

ii. Schrodinger’s Man

There’s a common sentiment you see in trans men. When you point out that they’re men, especially in response to some kind of supposed or actual privilege they possess or transgression they’ve committed, you’ll hear them say something like, “But I’m not the same as a cis man.” Sometimes, this mutates into other related sentiments: arguments that we’re different because we were “female socialized,” rebuttals that we can’t be cis men because we’re oppressed in x, y, and z ways, or maybe even an outright denial that we’re men at all.

I’m intimately familiar with this tendency. For years, I battled with it myself. Each comparison to being a Man -- the dreaded, terrible, loathsome White Man -- evoked a deep sense of outrage and disgust and confusion and self-loathing. This reaction was particularly strong during the 8 years I spent waiting to be safe enough to start medically transitioning. It felt like a cruel mockery in a way, a complete denial of the alienation and constant disrespect that were so pervasive that they were indistinguishable from my own identity. Even when calling me a man was warranted, even when it was correct, even when it was used in a decidedly non-derogatory manner, it was like someone opening up an old wound to dig around for a bullet that they could never remove.

And yet, at the same time, acknowledging me as anything but a man was hardly better. It hurt differently, though. When you’ve been nothing but misgendered your whole life, you become numb to it. Every so often, that nerve springs to life and makes you scream out in pain, but then it dies again, and you forget. It’s exhausting.

Maybe the fatigue of it all is exactly why we have such a visceral reaction at times to being called men. So often, when we are acknowledged as men directly, it’s to scold us, like when someone points out instances of us being (trans)misogynistic. And while these criticisms absolutely need to be made -- God knows I make them frequently -- I also understand the resistance to them. When nobody ever sees you, when everyone only ever treats you like shit, it just makes you want to scream, for the love of God, shut the fuck up! Look how bad it is for me! Look how mistreated I’ve been my whole life! I’m terrified of men too! Why do you hate me! What did I ever do!

When I struggled with being a Man before, I often found myself resentful of trans women. I couldn’t articulate it well then nor understand why I felt that way. It’s very much the same feeling I had as a child in an abusive family whose abuse was never noticed. The older I got, the more I anxiously hoped that one day, my dad would finally just hit me, that my mom would slip up in front of all the teachers and say something really, really terrible, that I would come to school bloodied and bruised and everyone would notice me at last. The kids who were abused in much more obvious ways didn’t do anything wrong to me, but it was hard to not resent them conceptually. It seemed like they were getting all the attention while I not only suffered in silence, but had my suffering denied and punished whenever I expressed it.

Of course, those same kids live their own uniquely traumatic lives and rarely receive the care and love they need. But that’s no reassurance when you’re a child flailing in the water while all the adults are too busy talking to notice. And so when trans men are Men, it feels like that suffering is being denied again, and when trans women receive any kind of attention, sympathetic or antagonistic, we think to ourselves, if only we had bruises, if only we had busted lips, they would understand how bad it is. What do they know about how bad it is? What did they do to deserve so much attention? Why does nobody care about us? Why does nobody even notice us?

The morning after the award ceremony, when I was sobbing in my bed, I kept saying, over and over, “But they can’t exploit a white man. They can’t exploit a white man.” It came out without thought, the consequence of a series of incidents all crashing down at once. There was Anna criticizing me for taking space away from women and people of color, of not truly understanding what it’s like to be trans; the trans woman in town decrying an article she didn’t read about my participation in stopping an anti-trans bill because she assumed I was pushing an anti-trans position; the numerous bad faith actors who complained about me being too liberal or too radical, whichever is more convenient in the moment, and not focusing enough on other (more important) issues; the people online and in person who dismissed me as privileged and out of touch because I have medically and legally transitioned. In all these cases, in every single one of them, people have used “white man” as a pejorative, as a way to discredit me. I’ve even used it to discredit myself, like with my interactions with Nina, because a femme of color should always be prioritized over me, and the fact that I was willing to let Nina take the fall for the rally revealed how much I didn’t prioritize their safety and wellbeing.

Let me make this clear: I do not believe for a second that I’m being discriminated against because I’m white nor because I’m male. No, what’s happening is transphobia through and through, but White Man is used pejoratively to justify mistreating me. That is, I’m not being exploited as a trans person because I’m a white man. It’s impossible to exploit or mistreat me as a white man. In fact, anything I do should be done for free to atone for my sins. The best thing I can do is shut the fuck up and keep my head down. And I definitely don’t deserve credit for anything because I’m a parasite exploiting others, actually.

The emotional impact of bad faith Man allegations affects more than just me. Last year, for instance, when the leadership committee was myself and two other trans mascs, we had a conversation about what we must be doing wrong to not have any trans women who were as interested as us in steering the direction of our organization, as if we were doing something morally reprehensible for stepping up. This worry plagued me again when I went to the State Capitol earlier this year to testify against an anti-trans bill. When I saw that there were a large number of us trans men there to speak but only one trans woman, I immediately began wondering if our mere presence somehow bullied more deserving trans women out of speaking.

I realize this sounds ridiculous. There’s no evidence at all to prove my concerns. My therapist told me this is called inferential confusion. But even knowing that doesn’t change the fact that this is genuinely how I felt and still continue to feel. For so long, I have operated under the assumption that what I have to say doesn’t matter all that much. That the work I do is hardly worth appreciating because I probably do more harm than good. That I don’t actually have any real authority to talk about the things I have personally lived through, the things I’m currently experiencing. And of course, if anything does go wrong, or at least seems a bit out of the ordinary, it is unquestionably my fault. If only I weren’t a Man. Then I wouldn’t be an ontological black hole.

The night of the award ceremony, I messaged those two other trans mascs on the leadership committee to express my indignation that Nina would receive the award instead of any of us. Their response? Nina deserved it for everything they’ve done. We should be happy for them. They’ve worked so hard. What exactly it is that they did was never really explained; they just deserved it.

We haven’t spoken about it since. We keep our heads down and work quietly. We’re dependable that way. I’m not sure if others know their names despite how much they do.

iii. Seen and Not Heard

The celebrity gossip and weight loss tips touted by the magazines in the Walmart checkout lanes were suddenly interrupted by a bombshell headline: a man had become pregnant. Of all the cover stories that baffled me as a child, this one felt particularly noteworthy because all the adults seemed just as confused as I was. I had a sense that asking my parents would cause trouble, so I tried to bow my head and look away instead. That was no easy feat when every magazine had that same picture.

Sometime later, we were driving home on a dark country road. My sister was asleep; my mother had the radio on for once instead of one of the CDs we always listened to. Once more, there was the pregnant man again, only without the image to accompany it. The talk show hosts explained that he was transgender.

My mother explained to me that being transgender was a sin. You shouldn’t ever want to change your body like that. I was fearfully and wonderfully made and so was Thomas Beattie, but the devil won and he made the wrong decision. For years, he was the only trans man I knew about.

I don’t actually remember when I first learned about trans women. I do have a vivid memory of watching “gender transformations” as a middle schooler and stumbling across an old queen who may or may not have identified as a trans woman. Before that point, though, I can only remember the same cultural tropes that everyone is exposed to: the unserious male crossdresser who drops the act when it’s no longer funny or necessary, or the serious transvestite who is an inherent menace to society. It wasn’t until the seventh grade that a friend explained drag queens to me. At some point that shifted into an awareness of trans women.

The fact that I can’t actually determine where my awareness of male cross-dressers and drag queens ended and where my knowledge of trans women began is a reflection of the way in which society degenders trans women. The degendering of trans women manifests as understanding them not as men or women, but as something different altogether, as a third kind of sex tainted by the worst properties associated with the other two. This process often results in a barrier of empathy that justifies violence and dehumanization. As Talia Bhatt explains:

We thus serve as objects of macabre fascination for cissexuals, either a hypersexualized fantasy with no autonomy or agency of its own, or a monstrous creature whom it is permissible to abhor, violate, and brutalize. Our transgression of gendered strictures, our demonstration of sex’s mutability and unfixity is a capital offense that most react to with an irrational fury. Our existence is itself an abomination to a heterosexual, male-supremacist regime, one that must be stamped out and denied at every turn.

Therefore, we are only ever subconsciously regarded as women. We are womanized in the way everything considered beneath a Man is feminized, yet our womanhood is repudiated, even as those who seek to destroy us bring the full force of misogynistic degradation to bear. We are assaulted and told we invited assault, that our deviancy and perversion and pretensions to womanhood carries implicit permission for deviants and perverts to treat us like women. We are discriminated against in employment and housing, frequently impoverished and turned out onto the streets, pushed disproportionately into survival sex work, and routinely face stringent access barriers to transition technologies.

As the “objects of macabre fascination for cissexuals,” it’s no wonder that I was more familiar with depictions of trans femininity over trans masculinity and yet cannot name the first trans woman I ever knew about. Trans men, conversely, have not been the subject of this fascination -- at least, not until recently. And even then, the current cultural fixation on the ROGD Tumblr girls mutilating their bodies because of social contagion (of which I am a proud poster child) does not derive from the process of degendering. Instead, trans men are subject to the process of regendering, in which we are forced back into womanhood. Bhatt elaborates:

Where transmisogynistic forces marginalize and ostracize the transfeminine from society, rendering us unworthy of any fate outside of being treated like sexual chattel, transemasculative forces deny the transmasculine any possibility of escaping reproductive exploitation and seek to re-gender the transmasculine--viewed as lapsed reproductive assets--back into the confines of womanhood.

…This is also why the most common forms of transemasculative rhetoric beat the drum of the ‘mutilated girl’, itself an echo of the idea of damaged goods. Being a reproductive asset under patriarchy is not an enviable fate, but patriarchy, in the process of dehumanizing the transmasculine, still accords them--no, not humanity, don’t be absurd, but utility. The transmasculine can still be “of use” to a natalist, heterosexual regime and can still be instrumentalized for their gestational capacity and ability to further patrilineality. And so, they are assiduously discouraged from changing their sex or altering their embodiment, lest they jeopardize their precious ‘fertility’ and render themselves ‘undesirable’, unfit for reproductive exploitation.

Regendering was the key to making everything make sense to me: our knee-jerk reaction against being considered the same as cis men despite being, well, men; the way it seems like trans women get so much more attention than us, because degendering requires public humiliation and scorn while regendering necessitates that nobody notice us at all. The manipulation innate to regendering also leaves us ensnared in constant self-doubt and self-loathing because your wellbeing is never taken seriously until others sense they’re about to lose control of you. That’s why my family never cared about the way my father abused me or my mental health in general, for instance, until I came out. It was only then that I was a poor victim, a little girl who never stood a chance, someone who’s sick and can’t help it. So why don’t I confide in them now, why don’t we become best friends now, and oh, by the way, I don’t really want to be a big, hairy man, do I? My dad used subliminal messaging and advanced psychological warfare techniques to make me think that but it’s a lie. I’m just traumatized and I’ll be healed once I let the silly trans thing go. No, they never abused me, they have nothing to account for, not back then, not now. All of this is the tragic outcome of an evil man who called himself my father exploiting my precious, feminine body.

I also think of regendering as a trans masc-specific manifestation of compulsory heterosexuality because of the way it instills within us a deep fear of being sexually undesirable to men specifically. Bhatt touches on this point:

There is, sometimes, a point of no return, past which the transmasculine are no longer as heavily subject to regendering, having committed the cardinal sin of exercising autonomy over their own sex…. If they are recognized as transmasculine, even if they can navigate the world as men, transmasculine individuals become subject to degendering, vilification, and monsterization. The goods have been damaged, and the heterosexual regime seeks to discard them as it discards all of us who do not fit into its vision of ‘natural’ reproduction.

This is why I considered never transitioning at all when I began dating my fiance. Even though he had always known me as a trans man, even though he had always reassured me that he would be attracted to me even after I transitioned, the part of me that had been told over and over and over that my only value was the value I could have as a wife and mother continually outweighed the reality of the situation. If I transitioned, my body would disgust him and he would leave me. With him would go the most love I had ever received from anyone, and nobody would ever, ever love me in any capacity ever again. My life would be empty. It would be meaningless. I would be nothing.

If the fact that he is now my fiance didn’t make it obvious, my anxieties were completely unfounded. Time and time again he’s told me that he’s more attracted to me now then when we first met, back when I was mostly closeted for safety reasons. Transitioning with him by my side has opened up a world of possibilities that I never dreamed were possible. But I also know that I am lucky; many trans men do lose their partners and often struggle to identify self-worth outside of having proof that somebody else -- frequently a man -- sexually desires them.

So when trans men retreat into Being Female, when we close the biological sex trap around us and surrender to this gender fatalism, it makes sense in a way. As much as being a woman sucks, it feels like the lesser of two evils. It seems better to shut up and deal with the cards you’ve been dealt instead of trying to sneak a new hand. And when the only sympathy you ever seem to receive is because of your apparent femaleness -- regardless of whether or not that sympathy is sincere -- then there is something of an emotional incentive to return to that. Being a man is a dog eat dog kind of world. Being a trans man only makes it harder.

Regendering can be sneaky, I think. Even though all those magazines referred to Thomas Beattie as a man, it says something that he was the first trans person I ever learned about. He was notable because he was pregnant. Since then, when I see trans men in the news, the stories are commonly about their pregnancies, too. And to be absolutely clear, the conversation about trans men and pregnancy is incredibly important to have for the sake of their health and the health of their babies. But it says something that trans men are notable when they are pregnant. They are a spectacle to gasp at and condemn. And yet, the trans men who don’t have babies are spectacles in our own way. So much of the anti-trans hysteria at the moment has latched onto the supposed tragedy of supposed little girls supposedly sterilizing themselves for no reason.

When we’re not talking about whether or not we’re pregnant, though, when do we actually appear? The question of “historical representation” as some would call it has always been difficult to answer. You can find a trans man here and there, but there is a gaping hole for the most part. And when trans men do appear in queer history posts, it’s the same trans men over and over. None of them are ever known for their trans activism; essentially all of them were stealth their entire lives and either forcibly outed while living or right after they died.

In my years of reading about queer history, I have found some trans men who were well-known organizers and activists -- people like Lou Sullivan, Marcelle Cook-Daniels, and Rupert Raj. And yet I have never seen any of them mentioned in public celebrations of queer history. The work we do for ourselves and for each other out of a love for our own community goes unrecognized. This, unfortunately, isn’t new. In fact, in 1987, Rupert Raj discussed this in his essay Burn-Out: Unsung Heroes And Heroines In The Transgender World:

I have been serving the transgender community in a variety of capacities (administrator, educator, researcher, counselor, peer supporter, social convenor, public relations/liaison officer, networker, editor, writer, chairman of the Board - you name it, I’ve been it) for the past 15 ½ years without any form of monetary remuneration whatsoever. In fact, my preoccupation with the welfare of the transgender community is the reason why today I am without a paying career or steady source of income. Don’t get me wrong, this was my choice and mine alone (my mission or calling in life) to serve this neglected, misunderstood, and even today, stigmatized class of people - rare victims of what Kim Stuart has so aptly termed “the uninvited dilemma”. Afterall, I am a post-op F-M TS myself and I guess I want to “take care of my own”.

Still the fact remains: resource people in this area - many of whom have spent years trying to fill the widening gap left by gender clinicians and other helping professions - not only deserve a measure of gratitude and recognition that the people they are helping could never begin to express, but they also desperately need a well-deserved rest (or, in some cases, retirement) from “the scene”. And contingently, they need successors - who will be as dedicated and as competent as they have been - to fill their shoes and take up the slack left by the medical community, the professions of psychology and sexology, individual counselors and therapists, social service agencies, the schools, the Church, the law, the State, the media.

…I/we desperately need resources (money, people and time) in order that I [and other activists and organizations]... might survive. So, it’s now up to you, Brothers and Sisters, to work together - to take up the torch and keep the flame of faith burning bright…

It’s easy to performatively praise Marsha P. Johnson when she’s dead. But it’s suddenly a different story when there’s actually trans people doing the same tasks she and Raj and everyone else was doing in your area. To be a “voluntary gender worker,” as Raj calls it, is to be underappreciated and exploited until you can’t take it anymore, no matter how much you love your trans siblings.

Raj is clear that both trans fems and trans mascs experience this phenomenon. But when it comes to trans mascs specifically, I wonder if this is also a part of regendering. That is, if women are meant to be seen and not heard, if women are meant to perform labor for everyone else without the expectation of gratitude or acknowledgement, then what does it mean when you’re a trans masc working your ass off to keep your community together and politically engaged and have nobody ever thank you for it? To have people even accuse you of having overtly nefarious intentions when you assume leadership, take a stand for what’s right, or express anger? To have people endlessly criticize what you do while never offering their help to do it better? To have people expect you to nurture the trans community while also dismissing you as ineffective, inept, or insincere?

Why are the only notable trans men the ones who give birth or keep their transness a secret?

In The Independent’s Pride List 2025, the only trans man, Jake Graf, makes an appearance at #44 out of 50 entries. He doesn’t even get a spot to himself; instead, he shares the entry with his wife, a trans woman named Hannah. The two are known for a BBC documentary chronicling their journey to parenthood using a surrogate mother. Despite the fact that he’s a filmmaker, there’s no mention of any of the films he’s made about being trans.

iv. Male Privilege

Basically everything I know about organizing comes from my fiance. He was in a socialist party for years before he moved across the country and met me. When he first came out here, he tried to keep organizing, but eventually had to give it up. In a city where opportunists use identity politics like spears, he couldn’t ever adequately fight back. There was always something wrong. It didn’t matter that he’s bisexual, Mexican, or that his grandmother belongs to one of the indigenous communities there. Nor did it matter that he grew up impoverished. There’s always something about him that’s just too innately oppressive. No, they’re not just saying this because he is engaging earnestly and because his earnestness gets in the way of a grifter’s greed. It’s because he’s, uh, a cis man! Or because he’s not really qualified enough to talk about being racialized, or because there’s no way he could possibly understand what it’s like to be poor and subject to abuse and violence!

This is the game you play when you see “liberation” as synonymous with “clout.” The same thing happened to my meta. Her sin, though, is that she’s white and cis, and because she’s white and cis, it becomes completely fair to ignore the amount of time she’s spent promoting Black feminists, writers, and academics, or the fact that she was the one who initially started the campaign that turned into my trans organization. Shortly before she was essentially fired for being a disabled, anti-Zionist communist, her supervisors had tacitly threatened to end her position under the guise that she had not done enough to serve people of color.

Are any of us oppressed for being white, or cis, or men? No, of course not. That’s just what happens when you encounter opportunists and reactionaries who want to keep their prejudices quiet. They bastardize concepts to gain control. That’s why you’ll see people sometimes accuse people of color of being white, of queer people being straight, of trans people being cis. I’ve even been angrily accused of being a trans woman when speaking about my experiences as a trans man! It’s a way to avoid genuine criticism and critical thinking, to short-circuit an actual debate, to shirk accountability by claiming moral superiority via identity alone. Instead of engaging with the actual dynamics at play, it’s easier to leverage someone’s perceived exemptions from marginalization and hardship to deny that they’re doing any harm to them.

This act of denying people authority over their own lived experiences and positioning them as too privileged to listen to an act of denying epistemic authority, as Ajmani, Bhatt, and Devito describe it. While it may dress itself up as progressive, it ultimately isn’t. It’s there to preserve the hierarchies in place and remove any culpability in upholding them. Whatever it takes to shut down actual movements. Whatever it takes to climb to the top and remain there.

A decade ago, back when Everyday Feminism was a hot thing, they posted an article about how trans men understand what it’s like to experience both misogyny and male privilege. This article and others similar to it made me expect that there was going to be some grand moment where I transitioned and my life would suddenly improve because I was a Man now. I was on the lookout to see when my male privilege would kick in. After three and a half years, though, I’ve come to a shocking conclusion: my life seems more dangerous now, actually?

While I’ve had frustrations with the concept of privilege in general for a while now, male privilege in particular has fallen apart for me. That isn’t because I believe that men are oppressed and women aren’t; no, it’s quite the opposite. It’s just that the idea of male privilege is incredibly oversimplified. For example, when I worked as a cashier prior to transitioning, I once had a customer hit on me for a bit and offer to be my sugar daddy. It was uncomfortable, but it was brief. Since I’ve been perceived as male, though, I’ve had a stranger threaten to kill me, another corner me for nearly an hour and try to get me to fuck him, a group of men jeeringly catcall me on the street, and yet another stranger try to get me to make borderline pornographic content for him while I was working.

It was jarring to have so many people try to convince me that I was trans because I was sexually violated, and that being sexually violated was an innately female experience, only to discover that the sexual harassment and violence escalated when I started living as a man. It should be noted that none of the strangers I mentioned before knew that I was trans. They pinned me as a faggot, though, and that’s all they really need.

Many trans men who retreat to Being Female never address this reality. It complicates matters too much to mention that gay and bi men experience sexual violence at rates similar to heterosexual women, including child sexual abuse. This is a fact that I was also oblivious to until my fiance started opening up to me. He had been repeatedly molested as a child; assaulted as an adult; stalked and harassed for rejecting the advances of another man, which also contributed to him leaving the political organizing scene. His experience with his sexuality is so intertwined with violence that he views being queer as an inherently violent thing because the straight men will beat you (his back is still scarred from all the times his father whipped him for being too effeminate) and the queer men often cross too many boundaries too fast. Nobody who has ever accused him of being suspicious or overbearing simply for being a man in a political space seems to consider that maybe he knows what it’s like to be exploited and abused.

And, to be fair, neither did I until I let go of the Female Trap and just started being a guy. Now I wonder how many men have actually been beaten and threatened and abused and molested and raped. I wonder how many men sit with that and never tell anyone because it doesn’t really matter because men are not supposed to be the victims.

Many people don’t like the adage, “hurt people hurt people.” But it’s true. It doesn’t mean that everyone who has ever suffered is doomed to be a terrible person for the rest of time. But it does mean that people who have suffered are going to struggle more with interpersonal relationships. When the only sorts of relationships modeled for you are violent and uncaring, then it’s only natural to mimic that model.

I had a professor who was a social worker for 50 years. For a long time, he worked in prisons. His main population: men convicted of domestic abuse and sexual violence. Of all the sex offenders he worked with, he estimated that up to half of them had been sexually abused as children. This is not just an anecdote; numerous researchers have found similar patterns (1, 2, 3, 4). This does not mean that people with histories of sexual abuse are likely to be sexually violent. But it does create questions about the nature of violence and social conditioning.

I’ve noticed this odd idea that some people get into their heads about violence, particularly systemic violence. For instance, back when I was more of a Tumblr SJW sort, there was an idea a lot of us subscribed to -- consciously or not -- that to be a victim was to be intellectually and/or morally superior. The underlying belief here is that violence happens because the aggressor simply cannot empathize with the victim nor cares to do so. So when we talked about something like gendered violence, then, there was an attitude that men are far more likely to be sexually violent because they just don’t understand what it means to be sexually violated. Likewise, because women are more likely to be sexually violated, they are ultimately far less likely to be sexually violent, because they know what it’s like. From here, the belief became more and more generalized, until it turned into “to be male is to be innately capable of violence, and to be female is to be innately capable of being victimized” -- hardly a revolutionary thought under patriarchy. This is something gender essentialists would likely agree with, after all; it naturalizes the unjust social order and absolves participants of intentionality.

But if it’s not true that men are innately more likely to be violent by virtue of being men, then what explains the fact that they are disproportionately more likely to be violent? You could come up with a number of explanations -- biological, psychological, social, whatever else -- but I want to turn back to my professor’s experience here. Shockingly, as it turns out, to be violent and to be victimized are not mutually exclusive, as he illustrated -- especially in a society that normalizes abuse. So what if men are more violent not because they are never victimized, but because they are incentivized to be violent in order to avoid victimization?

What if the capacity for violence is actually how one maintains their place in the hierarchy?

This doesn’t mean that everyone who experienced violence or abuse at the hands of a man posed a threat to them first. No, what it means is that men are conditioned to be violent because the violence that men face is generally understood as violence that is justified. Think, for instance, of the millions -- if not billions -- of men who have died during combat. Their lives are expendable, just a tool to be used in the name of some greater cause. Maybe the Belgian families mourned the losses of their loved ones in the Battle of Liege in 1914, and yet Germany and France and the United Kingdom responded with even more fervor, sending millions of men to die in flooded trenches, in snowy mountains, in oceans, in fields, in deserts. And the deaths of these men were justified either because they were fighting for an abstract concept that may or may not matter to the masses in a matter of decades or because they did not fight hard enough. They are nothing but fodder for nationalist violence; the proof of their manhood and the proof of their stake in the nation are intertwined, and they must have the capacity to commit violence to provide this proof.

When I said earlier that being a man is a dog eat dog kind of world, this is what I meant. If you don’t prove your capability to take charge -- your capability to be violent -- it will happen to you first. And if this is the kind of culture we live within, is it really so surprising that men become desensitized to the violence they do to each other? Is it a surprise that they start jeering at and attacking and sexually assaulting each other at a young age? Boys learn early on that they are expendable, that they are a dime a dozen, that they have to prove themselves worthy of the manhood they are expected to embody one day. They learn this first-hand when they hurt each other in the locker room and in the school hallways and in the park on weekends. When people say boys will be boys, that’s what they’re referring to: that boys will be, should be, must be violent, and that they can direct this violence at acceptable targets. Those who fail to live up to this expectation become one of those targets themselves.

Ultimately, discussion of gendered violence boils down to the fact that it’s considered such because the violence is in itself an act of gendering. The misinformed idea I had earlier on -- that to be male is to be innately capable of violence, and to be female is to be innately capable of being victimized -- is partly true in a way. It’s not that women can never be the aggressors and that men can never be the victims. But to be a victim as a man is to ultimately be emasculated. You’re weak, a sissy, a faggot, whatever else. So, as a man, you keep the hurt you experience to yourself and nobody assumes otherwise. There’s a good number of men who would feel insulted if you did assume differently.

Professionally, I connect people with disabilities with necessary resources. Two of my clients are remarkably similar: they were born within months of each other, come from a nearly identical social background, have similar substance abuse and criminal histories, struggle with inadequately treated neurodevelopmental disorders, and have experienced some pretty profound trauma as children and as adults. The biggest difference between them is that one is a man and the other is a woman. Another notable difference is that he is a convicted felon while she is not.

If you were to interact with him, you would probably be shocked to learn about his criminal history. In my experience, he is level-headed, reasonable, and deeply honest. If anything, you would probably assume that my female client, who is generally bubbly and affable but struggles considerably with emotional regulation, would be the one to have the felony. And yet, despite her admitting to being violent with loved ones repeatedly in the past, he is the registered violent offender.

The more I learned about him, though, the more I understood why he snapped the way he did. That is absolutely not to say that what he did was justified by any means -- he would be quick to tell you that it wasn’t. It’s more so that it makes sense how he arrived at that point. His disabilities resulted in constant victimization throughout his life -- intense bullying as a child, leading into friendships and romantic relationships as an adult that were so abusive it’s a wonder he’s still alive. Yet hardly anybody even noticed, let alone intervened. He told me once that the first time he ever felt like someone noticed him was when his junior year English teacher actively intervened to help him pass the class. Because of this, he explained, he learned pretty early on that he had to strike first to keep bullies at bay, because no adult really cared to help. The incident that got him convicted of a felony was just that -- a first strike during a particularly emotionally vulnerable moment.

Of course, it’s worth mentioning that my female client did not develop the same mindset despite having a similar background. When she becomes violent, it’s far more reactive, more defensive, an explosion of fear and anger and confusion that she just cannot articulate or express in a healthy way after she’s been pushed too far. I think that’s also why she’s never been violent to the same extent that he’s been violent -- she pushes, hits, and throws things instead of attacking someone with a weapon. The difference here also reveals what people are trying to get at when they talk about gender socialization: Man is more likely to be violent because he is culturally understood as an agent, Woman is less likely because she is culturally understood as an object. As the agent, my male client feels empowered to take an offensive position while my female client, as the object, generally operates from a more defensive sort of mindset. Though they are both prone to violence, they have experienced different upbringings and justifications for that violence and don’t have the same relationship to it -- or to the enabling of it. That is, when she tips over the edge, it’s to protect herself against perceived criticism, disappointment, and so on, whether or not her perception is correct. But when he lashed out the way he did, it was to prove a point, to scare another man off, to get the “upper hand” before the other man could.

Waiting to be a victim is always dangerous, but for men it’s dangerous and emasculating, which adds an entire other dimension. For example, I think of how my female client’s parents are quick to accept the idea of their daughter as someone who has been victimized while my male client’s parents -- and his father in particular -- agonize over how unmanly he is, as if that’s the biggest problem in his life. He’s unmanly despite being a registered violent offender, unmanly despite being an ostensibly masculine man with a long beard and distance from effeminacy. It’s embarrassing that he can’t just be more like his dad. They’ve never mentioned how much he’s struggled in life, while my female client’s parents are quick to explain all the ways in which she’s been harmed by others.

When I talk with him, he vents a lot about his parents. It feels like nobody has ever really taken him seriously before.

I want to make this extremely clear: I am not a men’s rights activist. I do not mean to imply or assert that women are taken more seriously than men because this is absolutely not the case. My female client is also generally disregarded by others, and this is true for all the other women I work with -- women are expected to put up with this sort of abuse. Likewise, there are plenty of instances where women are the aggressor and go on the offensive. What I’m trying to get at, though, is that there are social roots for patterns of violence, and that being victimized and dismissed is not an innately female experience. Both men and women experience violence -- and men are more likely to be violent -- because it is a function of maintaining control and domination under patriarchy. Despite the fact that patriarchy refers to a system of male control, men do not actually all get treated the same under patriarchy -- hierarchies are generally going to have a small group of people at the top, which necessarily excludes most men! Patriarchy is a form of socioeconomic organization, not a prescriptive standard for how every single person is treated based solely on gender.

If this is confusing, I’ll put it this way: a father might beat his only son and never lay a finger on his daughters, but the son will eventually grow up to inherit the estate. Patriarchy doesn’t mean that fathers would never abuse their sons -- no, beating his son serves as a way to maintain power over him, to remind him who’s really in charge, to “teach” him what is expected of him as a man. But patriarchy does mean that this same father, the one who was far kinder to his daughters, might never even consider willing his estate to any of them. Patriarchy means that the son will materially benefit here even if he is physically and emotionally harmed in the process. Meanwhile, the male workers of the estate don’t benefit either way, but maybe, theoretically, one day, they could be an estate owner too, and maybe they go home to their wives and children and have final say over the family finances. It’s all a rat race, a proto-American Dream that concentrates the power in the hands of a few men while the rest fantasize about becoming those men.

So when trans mascs retreat into the Female Trap, when we argue that being victimized, dismissed, mistreated, ignored, abused, whatever else is proof of that femaleness, all I have to say in response is: no, actually, this is an extremely male experience, too. In a way, there is sort of an inherent violence to being a man, but it’s more so that men are constantly waiting for someone to be violent to them first, and that they’re expected to guard and maintain their status violently. After all, there’s a reason why men are far more likely to be murdered, physically assaulted, and killed in accidents. But to take men’s pain seriously would require fundamentally undermining the mechanisms of patriarchy. Without the violence, you can’t stay on top, you can’t coerce your wife and children into following your will, you can’t drag the country into war for your own benefit. We are all Isaac waiting to be slaughtered when the will of God calls for it. We’re always looking for the ram in the bushes.

v. Synthesis

So what? What was the point of all of this?

Normally, I plan what I want to write in advance. This essay, though, is the rare case where I just sat down and poured out whatever came into mind. It is the outcome of over a decade simmering on what it means exactly to be a trans man and all the arguments I’ve had about it along the way.

Ultimately, this is my attempt to put into words what I think a lot of us are feeling and experiencing -- and my attempt to think about it more critically. In the name of keeping things simple, here are the conclusions I’ve come to along the way:

1) Trans men are men. We are not the same as cis men because we are trans. But that does not mean we are not men. Men are not a homogenous group with identical experiences.

2) Being a man absolutely does not invalidate any of the experiences we’ve had with mistreatment, discrimination, violence, or abuse. Statistically speaking, men are more likely to be victims of violence, anyway. We have that in common.

3) Experiencing mistreatment does not mean it is impossible for you to mistreat others. Likewise, those who mistreat you have likely experienced mistreatment themselves. Being victimized does not result in an intellectual and/or moral enlightenment.

4) When I am mistreated, it’s not because I’m a white man specifically or a man generally. In the examples I gave with my organizing experience, being anything but a white man absolutely would not have done anything to improve the situation, and would not have secured me any further cache. The issue is that these people are reactionaries -- they do not want progress to be made, and are acting purely from self-interest. There are plenty of members in the organization who aren’t trans masc and who aren’t white. I know similar criticism would be leveled at them if they were in my place.

5) Because we live in a cissexist society, we have historically lacked the language and framework to make sense of our experiences. As a result, we start feeling resentment towards the wrong people. For instance, we become upset with trans women for making sense of their life experiences, especially when the framework they developed seems to contradict what we’ve been through.

6) Instead of attempting to build upon existing trans-specific frameworks, we often feel like we have to choose between no framework at all and forcing ourselves into cissexist feminist frameworks. Oftentimes, we do the latter -- this is where that Female Trap comes from, that urge to understand ourselves as innately Female because of x, y, and z experiences. I think a lot of this just comes from historical and sociological ignorance, which is not the fault of anyone, really. Many people don’t really understand what it means for something to be a social construct and instead lean on essentialist and deterministic ideas of gender. They understand society and culture to be the consequence of ideas or inherent ways of being instead of external realities, like economics, access to resources, historically significant events, and so on. If you want to better understand what I am talking about, I highly recommend reading at least the introduction of Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy.

7) The tendency to resort to an idealist understanding of social relations -- that is, reality is the consequence of our ideas, beliefs, and consciousness as opposed to external forces that influence how we think and act -- gives credence to identity politics. This isn’t to say that there’s no use in identifying how certain categories of people are treated differently within society, but to say that people become more focused on the identity in and of itself as opposed to the forces that create and shape that identity. So instead of understanding Man and Woman as descriptors related to property relations and kinship, for instance, we understand them as some kind of fixed, eternal concepts that you are simply born with, like they’re encoded in your DNA. And if that’s the case, it is far easier to make the argument that somebody is innately oppressive for this or that reason. It’s not just politically left people that do this -- right-wingers have been doing this for centuries. What do you think race science was about?

8) Because the idealist concept of identity politics is so easy to weaponize, reactionaries utilize this to obscure the real conflict at hand. Nina exploiting me for their profit is not a matter of them as a femme of color vs me as a white man -- this was a matter of them as a small business owner, a member of the petty bourgeois, versus myself, a member of the working class, a proletarian. Just like Rupert Raj, I do what I do completely for free because I care about my community of trans people and want to take care of us. Nina is not in community with us; we’re just customers and free, positive publicity.

And so, with all that said, after this beast of an essay, I come to my ultimate, final conclusion, the one that I really want any trans mascs reading this to take with them: the reason you hate yourself, the reason you want to distance yourself from being a Man, the reason why it feels like everyone hates you for being a man, is because the world does not want you to be a trans man. They’re driving you crazy on purpose because they hate you for being a trans man. You are disgusted with yourself and you wish you were dead because society hates trans men and it’s really fucking hard to be one.

No, you are not innately female, no, you are not so different from cis men that you cannot be considered a man in any sense, no, feminism is not lying to you and men are not really the oppressed ones (even though it can feel like it because so many feminists produce god-awful analyses).

With that said, though, people are absolutely undermining and downplaying your feelings and experiences because you are a trans man. Gaslighting is an overused pop psychology term at this point but that’s kind of what’s happening here. What you are experiencing is real and fucked up and is probably traumatizing you to some extent and it’s because you are trans.

At this point, you’ve probably realized that the title of this essay was to bait you into reading this. There is no trans male privilege. It doesn’t exist. You can experience male privilege interpersonally, maybe, like someone taking you more seriously or giving your input more weight than a female colleague’s, but there’s no specific, systemic privileges to being a trans man. It’s similar to how other kinds of marginalized men are still men but also experience the consequences of racialization, queerness, disability, whatever else. Consequently, we are oftentimes alienated from hegemonic manhood and have our experiences delegitimized.

Likewise, there is no ‘transmisandry’, or whatever you want to call it, because it identifies manhood as the root of our oppression when manhood is fundamentally not marginalized under patriarchy. Transmisogyny, which transmisandry is mimicking, refers to a specific kind of misogyny that impacts trans women; there is no such institutional “misandry” for us to refer to here. Men are systemically devalued in a way under patriarchy -- I think I’ve done plenty to explain this in this essay -- but the devaluing of men is a double edged sword that derives from men being treated as agents in a way that women are not. Men devalue each other to maintain control; women may participate but they generally don’t wield the same power. Maybe the wife of the man who beats his son doesn’t do anything to stop him, or perhaps even encourages it. But when her husband passes away, her son is now in charge of the estate, and she is now reliant on him. The material relation just isn’t the same. The violence of patriarchy chews up and swallows men and women alike because it is a violence to determine who has the right to access, inherit and control property. Women are included in this system as property, as their role is to provide sexual and reproductive labor. There is power in this; men have to control them for a reason. As such, if any discussion about transphobia specific to trans men has to occur, then Nsambu Za Suekama’s concept of anti-transmasculinity more accurately identifies the targeting of trans men based upon our transness instead of our manhood.

In the end, we are left with this simple truth: to be a trans man specifically is to be systemically erased. While many marginalized groups experience epistemicide -- the silencing, devaluing, or annihilation of a knowledge system -- trans mascs are very acutely impacted by this. We do not exist because we are not supposed to exist. The world at large will do everything in their power to force us to be women.

My word of advice? Don’t give them that satisfaction. Don’t retreat into gender essentialism, don’t allow others to bully you into silence and submission by disguising their transphobia as something else. Be a trans man and force them to witness it. Be a trans man and refuse to shut up.

I extend my sincere gratitude to Talia, Emma, Alice, and my fiance, Miguel, for providing me feedback while I was writing this essay.

This is the second article in my Anti-Trans Tipping Point series. In this series, I interrogate the state of trans rights in the United States, how we arrived here, and what we should do next to advance trans liberation. You can find the introduction here.

Discussing politics without discussing policy is a pointless endeavor. Yes, policy can be a dry, tedious subject. But policy not only dictates how society works but sets precedents and legitimizes cultural attitudes and norms. Because of this, we cannot fully understand the anti-trans backlash without an in-depth investigation into trans policies first. It’s so important that I specifically listed the Policy Crisis as the first of three major issues facing trans rights activists within the United States in my previous article.

In this installment of the Anti-Trans Tipping Point, I will elaborate further on the Policy Crisis through an exploration of trans policies across the country. Because searching through policy is a herculean effort, I will focus on the evolution of state-level policies between 2004, a decade before the Trans Tipping Point, and 2024, a decade after. Policies from Washington, DC and the US territories are not included due to unique factors associated with them. Federal-level policies are also not included for one simple reason: as far as I can tell, the first anti-trans federal law passed in 2024. Trans rights -- and, more broadly, LGBTQ+ rights as a whole -- have historically been more of a states rights issue than a federal one, a phenomenon I will discuss further in a future article. While it is definitely possible for this to change in the very near future, federal policies are exempt from this analysis for the time being.

Please note that this installment will be particularly numbers-heavy. In order to make the information easier to process, I have created a number of interactive graphs to visualize the data presented.

An Overview of LGBTQ+ Legislation

When I started this project, I was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of policies to sort through and identify. Fortunately, I am far from the first person to consider documenting the development of LGBTQ-related policies in the United States. Funnily enough, the Human Rights Campaign actually began issuing their yearly State Equality Index (SEI) in 2004 -- a particularly helpful coincidence. The SEI looks at the number of LGBTQ-related bills introduced and passed in state legislatures and classifies them as pro-LGBTQ+ or anti-LGBTQ+. Through information from the SEI, we can get an initial glimpse into the evolution of LGBTQ+ legislation within the country.

From this data we can make a couple noteworthy observations. Firstly, there are two peaks when it comes to pro-LGBTQ+ legislation: 2016, which had the highest number of pro-LGBTQ+ bills introduced (506), and 2019, which had the highest number of pro-LGBTQ+ bills passed (82). For anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, 2023 marked the year where the US saw the highest number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced and passed (571 and 77, respectively).

Secondly, and perhaps surprisingly, pro-LGBTQ+ legislation was generally more popular than anti-LGBTQ+ legislation prior to 2021. Between 2004 and 2020, pro-LGBTQ+ legislation was over 2.5 times more likely to be introduced and 2 times as likely to become law. After 2020, however, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation was nearly 2 times as likely to be introduced. Although pro-LGBTQ+ bills were still more likely to become law, they were only 1.5 times more likely.

This is undoubtedly a disturbing trend. It’s also a trend that reflects my previous argument that 2021 marked the Anti-Trans Tipping Point. However, this information, while useful, does not necessarily reveal to what extent trans people are being targeted explicitly. For all we know, the sudden uptick in anti-LGBTQ+ bills could have been a delayed reaction to the peak in 2016, or the year after Obergefell v. Hodges happened. In order to get better insight into trans-specific policies, we have to look elsewhere.

Quantifying the Equality Map

For almost two decades, the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) has tracked LGBTQ+ policies across the country. MAP has presented their findings since at least 2011 through the Equality Map, an easy-to-use resource that presents LGBTQ-related policies active in every state. All policy areas covered by the Equality Map are accompanied by a list of citations that explains when each policy was adopted and provides links to relevant documents.

Using information provided by the Equality Map as a guide, I tracked the development of dozens of policies across the country. Based on these policies, I developed a scoring method and assigned each state three separate annual scores between -100 and 100. The first score is the Gender Identity (GI) Score for policies specific to trans people. As the history of trans rights is inseparable from the history of gay rights, each state also received a Sexual Orientation (SO) Score for policies that impact LGBQ+ people, cis or trans. When these two scores are combined, they form the third score, or the Total Score. For more information about my methodology, please consult the Methodology section at the end of this article.

When the scores from all 50 states are added together, we find the following results.

On this chart, I’ve marked three pivotal years and shaded the area in between with pink. The first year is 2014, the Trans Tipping Point. At that point, LGBTQ+ rights as a whole were gradually increasing, although the SO Score was over 1.5 times higher than the GI Score. 2019 is our next notable year for two reasons: firstly, the GI Score jumped up by 7 points, the biggest gain of any category in the past two decades; and secondly, the GI Score officially surpassed the SO Score by a slight margin. This jump in 2019 matches the peak that we previously saw in the SEI’s legislation scores. Finally, in 2021, all three scores peaked at 28.00. Three years later, the GI Score plummeted down to 19.46, a 30% decrease, while the SO Score sat at 27.56.

Thanks to the Equality Map, we have finally clarified that the recent barrage of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation as highlighted by the SEI primarily targets trans people. From here, we can ask another critical question: how evenly distributed are trans policies among the 50 states? Are there some areas that are particularly better or worse than others?

A Nation Divided

The United States Census divides the country up into four regions: the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West & Pacific states. When policy scores are divided upon Census regions, the anti-trans political trend becomes much clearer -- and more alarming.

Between 2021 and 2024, the only region that saw an improvement in its GI score was the Northeast, which increased by 3.85 points (about 6%). The other regions fared far worse: the West and Pacific decreased by 7.03 (16%); the Midwest by 10.65 (56%); and the South, whose GI score has never been higher than 0, by an astounding 13.84 points (nearly 800%).

This staggering decline could be enough to declare a policy crisis on its own, but there is yet another crucial piece of the puzzle missing. The scores above are the results when all policies are included -- that is, laws, executive orders, agency policies, and court rulings -- as opposed to laws on their own. While all four policy types hold equal weight when it comes to dictating daily operations and procedures, it’s a far different story when it comes to implementing and repealing them.

Executive orders, agency policies, and court rulings similar to one another: generally, they are decisions made by at least one official. Oftentimes, these officials are appointed rather than elected, such as judges or the secretaries of state agencies. Laws, on the other hand, require the collaboration of dozens to hundreds of elected officials and countless hours to be passed. This process is so grueling that the vast majority of introduced bills don’t even make it past the first step of the legislative process.

When it comes to policy change, then, it’s often quicker and more efficient to bypass the legislature. For instance, if trans activists wanted to make it easier to amend the sex marker on a birth certificate, then it could be advantageous to work directly with the Secretary of Health in their state. After all, the Secretary of Health might be able to change agency rules before a bill doing the same thing even left committee. Additionally, if the state legislature is apathetic or hostile to the idea, then having the support of the Secretary of Health would be the most plausible way of implementing that change.

Although executive orders, agency policies, and court rulings can be tremendously helpful, there is also a significant downside: they are far easier to overturn. If one governor implements an executive order, for instance, the next one can repeal it with an executive order of their own. A change in agency leadership can result in sudden regulatory and procedural upheaval. A victorious court ruling can be overruled if a determined party takes the case to another judge. But a legislature that passed a law is far less likely to replace it with another law in the near future. Ironically, it is the difficulty inherent to the legislative process that makes laws far more stable than all other policies.

With this in mind, I re-examined the policies from before but with a new caveat: only laws would be counted this time. This includes laws that are still on the books even if a court ruling is currently preventing it from being enforced, such as same-sex marriage bans that are unenforceable due to Obergefell v. Hodges. With all non-laws excluded, we find a far more dire portrait of LGBTQ+ rights in the US.

While the trend we observed earlier remains, the scores are far worse. For instance, when comparing the 2024 GI Scores from both graphs, the Northeast dropped by 24.32 points (33%); the West and Pacific by 13.31 (35%); the Midwest by 22.01 (264%); and the South by 0.72 (5%). SO Scores did not fare much better, like in the Midwest, where the SO score tumbled by nearly 30 points (140%).

The dip that occurs when shifting the focus from all policies to laws only is so severe that some scores -- like every score category in the Midwest -- become negative. This means that while there are generally more pro-LGBTQ+ policies than anti-LGBTQ+ policies in place, the gap between pro- and anti-LGBTQ+ laws is much smaller. To be more precise, approximately 2 in 3 pro-LGBTQ+ policies are law as compared to 9 in 10 anti-LGBTQ+ policies.

Even worse, the percentage of pro-LGBTQ+ laws has significantly decreased: in 2006, 89.37% of pro-LGBTQ+ policies were law, while in 2021, only 65.73% were law. That means that of the nearly 300 pro-LGBTQ+ policies that went into effect during that time frame, nearly half of them were not laws. Meanwhile, the percentage of anti-LGBQ+ policies that are laws has remained at or near 100% for 20 years.

When it comes to trans-specific policies, however, we see a different story. Interestingly enough, pro-trans policies were more likely to be law than anti-trans policies until 2014. The sudden 7% drop that year resulted from a flurry of policy changes led by governors and state agencies across the nation. Meanwhile, the proportion of anti-trans laws increased by 5% between 2014 and 2016. While much of this increase was undoubtedly related to the wave of religious exemption laws passed in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, the anti-trans backlash had officially begun. 2014 was indeed the Transgender Tipping Point, although perhaps not in the way Time magazine might have suspected.

It’s this discrepancy in the proportion of pro-LGBTQ+ and anti-LGBTQ+ laws that I am calling the Policy Crisis. Succinctly put, policies that protect LGBTQ+ rights are far more vulnerable than policies that erode them. The significant progress made throughout the 2010s were victories that ultimately existed on a shaky foundation. As soon as reactionaries knew what to look for -- as soon as they knew to make a concentrated political effort against trans people -- the winning streak came to a very abrupt end. In the next installment of this series, I’ll explore the failures and limitations of pro-trans rhetoric against this backlash more in depth.

Disproportionate Impacts

As the biggest region of the United States, it isn’t necessarily surprising to know that the South has the most anti-trans policies in the country. Approximately one-third of US states are classified as Southern states; it should follow that, if anti-trans policies were evenly distributed, the same amount would appear in the South. In reality, we find that over 50% of anti-trans policies have been implemented in Southern states.

When it comes to pro-trans policies, the situation is even worse. Again, over 50% of pro-trans policies are located in one region. This time, though, they’re located in the Northeast -- the smallest region of the country, encompassing just under a fifth of all states.

Certainly, the fact that the most anti-trans region of the country happens to be the largest region of the country is alarming. Yet despite discussion about which states are the safest and most dangerous for trans people, much less has been said about where trans Americans actually live. This is essential information to know; how else can we gauge the actual level of risk experienced by the millions of trans people across the nation?

Unfortunately, information on this question is limited. Thankfully, the Williams Institute provided estimates in 2022 about the number of trans people in the United States. When combining these estimates with the 2020 United States Census, we can create a rough picture of the trans demographics in the United States.

Based on current estimates, the South is unsurprisingly the most populated of any region of the US. More unexpected, though, is that trans people are actually 20% more likely to live in the South when compared to their cis counterparts. This means that nearly half of trans people in the United States live in the region that is the most hostile to them by a large margin.

While this number is sobering on its own, accounting for other factors, such as race and ethnicity, only worsens the situation: the South not only has the largest population of trans people, but the largest population of Black trans people.

Black trans adults are 1.5 times more likely than other trans adults to live in the South. Once again, this is not necessarily surprising; a similar number of Black cis people are found in the South, as well. However, this means that Black trans people disproportionately suffer the effects of anti-trans policies. Meanwhile, the only racial/demographic of trans adults overrepresented in the Northeast are white people.

This distribution is, of course, an outcome of the deeply entrenched racism within the United States. The history of slavery, genocide, segregation, policies around immigration and movement, labor, and trade plays a large role in shaping the human geography of the country. What is crucial to note, though, is how the increased policing of trans people will compound upon other forms of policing.

Take, for instance, Executive Order 14168 signed by Donald Trump in January of 2025. Part of this executive order mandates that trans women incarcerated in federal prisons must be placed in male facilities and bans the use of federal dollars to pay for any kind of gender-affirming care within correctional facilities. While this is a bad policy for all trans people, it ultimately only affects those who are in federal prisons. Even without the stipulation targeting trans women specifically, a 2011 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality (now Advocates for Trans Equality, or A4TE for short) found that 1 in 5 trans feminine individuals reported a previous history of incarceration as compared to 1 in 10 trans masculine individuals. Additionally, trans feminine respondents were 4 times as likely to serve over six months in prison. The same report also found that about 1 in 8 white trans people had experienced incarceration as opposed to 1 in 2 Black trans people. A 2017 report confirmed this discrepancy with the finding that Black trans women were 3 times more likely to be incarcerated than white trans women. Indigenous, multiracial, and Latine trans people also experienced exacerbated rates of incarceration.

This is to say that while Executive Order 14168 is bad for all trans people, trans women of color are the most likely to suffer from its implementation. The astounding levels of incarceration facing trans women of color are no doubt related to elevated rates of poverty and racist policing practices in addition to transmisogyny. Similarly, if anti-trans policies become bolder in their aim to criminalize transness itself, and if these policies are far more likely to be implemented in Southern states, then the Policy Crisis will only further intensify the marginalization of not just trans people as a whole, but of racialized trans people especially. These policies will also impact the impoverished and working class the most and worsen wealth inequalities experienced by trans people as the denial of employment opportunities, housing options, and access to public accommodations is enshrined in state statutes.

The Policy Crisis, then, becomes a matter of life and death. The overreliance on state-level executive and judicial actions in place of building a sustainable, grassroots political movement that can advocate successfully for and against laws ironically leaves trans people even more vulnerable than they were before. Over and over, a positive policy in one state inspires anti-trans laws in a different state -- and the latter state usually has a larger trans population. All the while, trans people and allies are politically alienated from one another by both city limits and state borders. While much of this is not necessarily the fault of trans rights activists, the failure to manifest a cohesive, national political movement leaves trans people with very few avenues to improve their situation.

TL;DR.

If all of that was too much to digest, here is a short and sweet summary:

1. Based on my methodology, the trans rights score for all US states peaked in 2021.

2. Between 2021 and 2024, the trans rights score for all US states dropped by 30%.

3. Anti-LGBTQ+ policies are 1.35 times more likely to be law than pro-LGBTQ+ policies, as opposed to being executive orders, agency regulations, or court rulings.

4. Over half of anti-trans policies are implemented in the Southern states while the same amount of pro-trans politics are implemented in the Northeastern states.

5. Nearly half of trans people live in the South, including 60% of Black trans people. Less than a quarter of trans people live in the Northeast and are disproportionately white.

Closing Thoughts

I am hesitant to offer solutions at the moment. There is a good reason for this: I simply have not finished providing my analysis of the three central problems facing the trans rights movement outside of rampant transphobia itself and their historical context. My suggestions will come at the end of this series when everything is ready to be synthesized.

With that said, there are still a few opportunities and optimistic points to keep in mind as we move forward. The first one is that the anti-trans backlash will come to an inevitable peak soon enough. This does not mean that anti-trans policies will disappear or that there will never be any new policies introduced. Instead, we can understand peaks as the end of a trend. The anti-trans backlash will remain but it won’t be so passionate. It could always return one day in the future when the circumstances allow it to re-emerge. But it will calm down. There is still plenty to live for, fight for, and accomplish within our lifetimes. At the very least, giving up will do absolutely nothing to stop it.

Secondly, despite my criticism about relying on policy-making outside of the legislative branch, those options are still beneficial for trans people. A good number of the most viciously anti-trans laws have been successfully challenged in court. In fact, some of the policies that counted towards anti-trans scores in my analysis are not actually implemented in practice due to the intervention of courts. While some states are appealing these rulings -- and some have also been successful in their appeals -- courts continue to play a tremendous role in protecting trans rights.

Thirdly -- and perhaps most importantly -- activists in states that are friendlier to trans rights need to start working immediately to establish more pro-trans laws. Provided below is a visualization of the total number of trans policies per state. I encourage you to look at it and get an idea of how active each state is when it comes to trans policies and the stance it generally takes towards them. In the Additional Information section of this article, I also share a link to the list of policies I used in my analysis to offer an idea of what areas could be improved in a particular state. You can find it under the subheading “Chart Links.”

Finally, we must remember that electoral politics and legislative change within a liberal system will never be enough to fully liberate trans people, or any other oppressed group for that matter. The bourgeois democracy of the United States is built upon the very same principles and mechanisms that rob trans people of our right to autonomy and dignity. This does not mean that fighting for policy change is not worth our time or energy. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: fighting for policy change prevents us from being politically marginalized any further. Additionally, through effective and intelligent leadership, we can amass and educate a political power so great that when that moment of revolution comes at last, trans people and our allies will be ready to answer the call.

I do what I do for free because I believe it’s important. With that said, I did put hundreds of hours of work into this. If you feel so inclined to tip, you can do so here. Your readership is immensely appreciated, with or without a tip.

Additional Information

Methodology

For this project, I analyzed 58 policy categories. These categories include family law, healthcare, discrimination, criminal justice, identity documents, the education system, and public accommodations. My method of recordkeeping was simple: if a state implemented a policy, I documented the year it was adopted and assigned it a point value for each year it was in place. If that policy was removed, then the state would stop earning points based on that policy from that year forward.

To gather the necessary data, I utilized the Wayback Machine to look at archived versions of the Equality Map. This allowed me to collect the bulk of the information I needed. If I was uncertain about the year that a certain policy went into effect, I often looked at the references section for the Wikipedia page regarding LGBTQ+ rights in that specific state or other resources provided by organizations like A4TE. For policies related to HIV/AIDS, I used information provided by the HIV Justice Network and a paper published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Justice. For sodomy laws, I relied on William Eskridge’s Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet for the timelines of many states.

After collecting my data, I divided each policy based on whether it contributed to the SO Score or the GI Score. Given the overlap between gay rights and trans rights, many policies impacted both scores. However, I ultimately chose to score them separately as some policies did impact one and not the other. Additionally, some policies initially covered sexual orientation and only added gender identity years after the fact. To account for these differences, the SO and GI components of a policy were counted separately.

When it came to scoring, I adhered to the following conditions:

1. Each policy that advanced LGBTQ+ rights earned 1 point. Those that worsened LGBTQ+ rights earned -1 point.

2. Only the initial implementation of a policy counted. For instance, if a state passed two laws in two different years that protect trans people from discrimination in public accommodations, then it would only earn points from the first law.

3. Policies that significantly expanded on a category earned more than one point. For example, if a state requires surgery to change the gender marker on a driver’s license, it would earn -1 point. If it banned the ability to change a gender marker altogether, it would earn -2 points since that policy is more severe than the former. Similarly, a state that banned same-sex marriage in both its statutes and its constitution earned a point for each ban since the latter is much more serious than the former.

4. Policies that are being challenged in court but have not been officially repealed or revoked still count as active policies that earn points. For instance, while same-sex marriage is legal in all 50 states, states that have not officially removed their anti-same sex marriage laws continued earning negative points for them even after 2015.

5. If a policy was officially rescinded but then re-implemented, then the state would earn points on all years the policy was in effect. Let’s say that a state had an anti-discrimination policy in effect from 2004 to 2007, when it was repealed. That policy returned in 2012 and was repealed again in 2022. It would earn a total of 13 points overall from that policy.

Once a year received all its points, they were added together to get the Raw Score.

In order to determine the final score, I had to turn the Raw Score into percentages. To do this, I first had to calculate the maximum possible score and the minimum possible score based on which policies it was possible for states to have. My usage of the word “possible” refers to the fact that some policies only began appearing in response to other policies. Case in point, many states have passed trans-specific “shield laws” in response to gender-affirming care bans. As these shield laws only began appearing in 2022, it would be unfair to expect states to have this policy in place prior to that point. Therefore, when calculating the maximum score before 2022, shield laws did not contribute to this total.

After finding the maximum and minimum possible scores, it was time to calculate the percentage. Any Raw Score that was greater than or equal to zero was divided by the maximum score while Raw Scores that were less than zero were divided by the minimum score. The resulting quotient was then multiplied by 100. I chose this method as opposed to another method like min-max scaling as I wanted to make it clear when a state had more anti-LGBTQ+ policies in place than pro-LGBTQ+ policies -- that is, states that were more pro-LGBTQ+ had positive scores while anti-LGBTQ+ states had negative scores. This method also better demonstrates the proportion of pro-LGBTQ+ policies vs anti-LGBTQ+ policies since the former generally outnumbers the latter by a significant amount each year. For instance, if there were 10 possible pro-LGBTQ+ policies and only 4 possible anti-LGBTQ+ policies, then 2 out of 10 is a much smaller ratio than 2 out of 4. A 20% score would reveal that a state is more likely to be pro-LGBTQ+ but had a significant distance left to go, while a -50% score would reveal that this state is very likely to be anti-LGBTQ+.

To demonstrate how this process worked, here is an example: in 2014, the maximum score for the entire United States was 3,100 while the minimum score was -1,700. It scored 411 that year, resulting in a Total Score of 13.26 ((411/3100)*100). This score tells us two things. Firstly, because it is positive, we know that there were generally more pro-LGBTQ+ policies than negative ones in 2014. Secondly, given that it scored 13.26 out of 100, we also know that there was substantial room for growth.

After calculating the score with all policies included, I then removed every policy that wasn’t a law and ran my calculations again. The Law Only calculation is done exactly the same as the All Policies calculation.

When it came to calculating the percentage of policies that are laws, I did make one notable change: all policies were worth one point only. Take, for instance, the case I provided earlier about gender marker changes on driver’s licenses. While one received -2 points in the initial calculation, both policies were given the same value of -1 for this calculation. This was done to better reflect the actual number of policies and laws in place as opposed to the severity of specific policies. These values were also used for the Distribution of Trans Policies and State-Level Trans Policies charts.

Chart Links

Below are links to all the charts I made as well as the list of policies I surveyed for this article.

• List of policies

• Trans policy score by state

• All policies scores for all 50 states

• All policies scores by region

• Laws only scores by region

• Percent of policies that are laws

• Gender identity policy distribution by region

• Population distribution by region

• Racial/ethnic distribution by region

• State-level trans policies

Useful Tools for Policy Tracking

• Trans Legislation Tracker

• ACLU Tracker

• The Equality Map

• LegiScan

• BillTrack50

References

Eskridge, William N. Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet. Harvard University Press, 1999. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjz82vn.

HRC Foundation. “Equality from State to State & State Equality Index Archives.” Human Rights Campaign, n.d. https://www.hrc.org/resources/equality-from-state-to-state.

Herman, Jody L., Andrew R. Flores, and Kathryn K. O’Neill. How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States? Williams Institute, 2022. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf.

HIV Justice Network. “USA.” HIV Justice Network, n.d. https://www.hivjustice.net/country/us/?.

Ghandnoosh, Nazgol and Celeste Barry. One in Five: Disparities in Crime and Policing. The Sentencing Project, 2023. https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/one-in-five-disparities-in-crime-and-policing/.

Grant, Jaime M., Lisa A. Mottet, Justin Tanis, Jack Harrison, Jody L. Herman, and Mara Keisling. Injustice at Every Turn. National Center for Transgender Equality, 2011. https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/resources/NTDS_Report.pdf.

Lehman, J. Stan, Simon C. Gray, Jonathan H. Mermin, Meredith H. Carr, Allison J. Nichol, Alberto Ruisanchez, David W. Knight, and Anne E. Langford. “Prevalence and Public Health Implications of State Laws that Criminalize Potential HIV Exposure in the United States,” AIDS and Behavior 18, no. 6 (2014): 997 - 1006. https://archive.ada.gov/hiv/HIV-criminalization-paper.htm.

Movement Advancement Project. “Snapshot: LGBTQ Equality By State.” Movement Advancement Project, 2025. https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps.

Reisner, Sari L., Zinzi Bailey, and Jae Sevelius. “Racial/Ethnic Disparities in History of Incarceration, Experiences of Victimization, and Associated Health Indicators Among Transgender Women in the U.S,” Women Health 54, no.86 (2014): 750 - 767. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5441521/pdf/nihms857476.pdf.

U.S. Census Bureau, “AGE AND SEX,” 2020. American Community Survey, ACS 5-Year Estimates Subject Tables, Table S0101, 2020, accessed on January 31, 2025, https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST5Y2020.S0101?g=010XX00US$0400000&y=2020.

U.S. Census Bureau, “HISPANIC OR LATINO, AND NOT HISPANIC OR LATINO BY RACE,” 2020. Decennial Census, DEC 118th Congressional District Summary File, Table P9, 2020, accessed on January 31, 2025, https://data.census.gov/table/DECENNIALCD1182020.P9?q=race&g=010XX00US$0400000&y=2020.

U.S. Census Bureau, “TOTAL POPULATION,” 2020. Decennial Census, DEC 118th Congressional District Summary File, Table P1, 2020, accessed on May 6, 2025, https://data.census.gov/table/DECENNIALCD1182020.P1?g=010XX00US$0400000&y=2020.

Wilson, Bianca D.M., Lauren J.A. Bouton, M. V. Lee Badgett, and Moriah L. Macklin. LGBT Poverty in the United States. Williams Institute, 2023. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/LGBT-Poverty-COVID-Feb-2023.pdf.

…[E]ven though the question “where from?” presents no problems, the question “where to?” is a rich source of confusion… [T]here can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be.

- Karl Marx, 1844

In 2014, the Gloucester County School Board banned 15-year-old Gavin Grimm from using the boy’s bathroom at his high school. For two months, Grimm, who had recently come out as trans, used the boy’s bathroom without issue. It was only when the parents of Grimm’s peers learned about this arrangement that the backlash began.

Despite the public outcry, Grimm did not silently capitulate. Instead, he sued the school board the following year. While this was not the first lawsuit of its kind, his case made national headlines in 2016 when the US Court of Appeals ruled that the ban violated Grimm’s Title IX protections. This marked the first time that a federal court determined that anti-trans discrimination counted as sex discrimination.

Unfortunately for Grimm and the trans people and allies celebrating across the nation, G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board was not yet over. The school board refused to give up and pushed the case through three more courts. In 2021, four years after Grimm graduated high school, a settlement was reached. The school board agreed to pay $1.3 million for Grimm’s attorney fees. As for Grimm himself, he only received $1 in damages.

In 2024, Grimm was 25, disabled by the PTSD he developed from the ordeal, and facing homelessness. The precedent his case set is now long gone, shattered by the barrage of bathroom bans sweeping through state legislatures. The final nail in the coffin came in January 2025 when President Trump revoked Title IX protections for trans people with Executive Order 14168.

The worst part of it all, however, is that Grimm’s story is not a one-off case. Actually, it’s an unsettling representation of the evolution of trans rights in the United States. The similarities begin in 2014: the year that Grimm was banned from the boy’s bathroom was the same year that Time boldly declared that the US had reached the “Transgender Tipping Point” on the cover of its June issue. According to author Katy Steinmetz, trans rights were “America’s next civil rights frontier.” To prove her point, Steinmetz noted the recent successes of Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, two Black trans women known for their acting and writing, respectively. “The result [of their fame],” she concluded, “has been a radical increase of trans consciousness.”

Certainly, that seemed to be the case in the years following the article. During Obama’s second term as president, for instance, multiple federal agencies implemented pro-trans policies, the military ended its ban on trans service members, and Medicare and Federal Employee Health Benefits required coverage of gender-affirming care (GAC). Additionally, when North Carolina passed HB 2, the first ever bathroom ban, in March 2016, the backlash was so significant that the ban was repealed the following year. As for Grimm, his initial legal victory occurred only five months after HB 2 was passed.

In 2017, Grimm graduated high school while a new federal administration began under Donald Trump. That year, Trump banned trans people from the military again and overturned guidance from Obama that had urged schools to permit trans students to use the bathroom of their choice. Despite these changes and growing pushback to trans rights, federal policy was largely unchanged while state governments implemented far more pro-trans policies than anti-trans policies for the remainder of Trump’s presidential term. When Biden took office in 2021, the same year that Grimm’s case came to a close, trans rights were stronger than they had ever been.

And then, suddenly, they weren’t.

The conclusion of G. G. v. Gloucester County School Board and Grimm’s subsequent troubles were ultimately an omen for trans Americans as a whole. By the end of Biden’s term in office, at least 180 anti-LGBTQ+ laws went into effect in 28 states and at a federal level. Of these, the vast majority targeted trans people specifically. The onslaught was so severe that 2022 marked the first time in 18 years that more anti-LGBTQ+ laws were passed than pro-LGBTQ+ laws. That Gavin Grimm, a hero of trans youth, was all but forgotten and left struggling to fulfill his basic needs is not a coincidence.

Why, then, was 2021 such a watershed moment for the anti-trans movement? Although activists like Alphonso David, former president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), lauded Biden’s presidency as an advancement for LGBTQ+ rights as a whole, rights for trans people have eroded significantly in only four years. How could the fight for “full equality,” as David puts it, go so wrong?

The state of trans rights in the United States is dire. Our basic rights to bodily autonomy, legal recognition, and basic accommodations are increasingly jeopardized while state-sanctioned violence escalates. Although violence and discrimination are not unfamiliar experiences for trans people, the mainstream attention we’ve received in recent years -- as highlighted by the Transgender Tipping Point -- has intensified anti-trans backlash to an astronomical degree.

For over a decade, I’ve joined countless other trans people and allies in criticizing the powers that be for their refusal to recognize the dignity and humanity of trans people. While I don’t intend on giving that up any time soon, at some point we have to question our role in current affairs. In order to fight against increasing transphobia, we have to engage not only in the ruthless criticism of all that surrounds us, but in the ruthless criticism of our own approach and tactics as well. We have to ask: what opportunities have we missed? What mistakes have we made? What could we currently be doing better? What can we expect to happen now?

This article marks the start of my Anti-Trans Tipping Point series. With this series, I seek to answer these questions and to provide an idea for what trans people and allies should do next. Although the situation often feels hopeless, I urge you to understand the current assault on trans people not as the consequence of a cultural drive beyond our control, but as the consequence of the failure of liberal institutions to protect the marginalized and achieve liberation. For too long, we have counted on these institutions to save us from an ill-defined and poorly understood reactionary force. What trans people and allies need now more than ever is a better understanding of our power and our limitations. To that end, this series will also explore the political and historical context of the current moment in addition to potential changes in future rhetoric and tactics.

But to begin the conversation, we must understand the three key factors driving the current anti-trans backlash. The first of these is what I’m calling the Policy Crisis. In short, there has been an over-reliance on implementing pro-trans policies through executive orders and court rulings as opposed to changes to state and federal statutes. While executive orders, agency policies, and legal battles can result in rapid change for the better, they are also incredibly unstable and can be overturned just as quickly. Additionally, policy change through the executive and judicial branches are often met with policy change through the legislative branch. Although laws are harder to pass, they are also much more difficult to overturn. As I will explain in a later article, anti-trans policies are nearly 1.5 times more likely to be law than pro-trans policies. The number for pro-gay and anti-gay policies is hardly an improvement.

The second factor is what I consider to be Identity Reductionism: or, the disconnect between trans rights and rights that broadly apply to cis and trans people alike. For instance, the conversation around access to gender-affirming care (GAC) could have easily been used to further demands for healthcare for all. This connection, however, has failed to materialize within mainstream calls to action. Likewise, cis people fail to understand how attacks on GAC are inseparable from attacks on healthcare for all people.

Related to this issue is the exploitation of trans issues by anti-trans reactionaries and “pro-trans” liberals. Both groups have been incentivized in their own ways to dismiss and ignore pressing issues facing trans people in favor of more trivial issues that either do not concern the majority of trans people or have minimal impact in the grand scheme of things, such as the intense focus on women’s sports or pronouns. The pro-trans faction has not been effective enough in challenging reactionaries’ control over mainstream narratives and topics of debate nor in pushing liberals to provide more than the bare minimum for trans people. While there are definitely material limitations to how much we are able to counter the will of those in power, there are still instances of complacency, passivity, and lack of focus to critique within the pro-trans faction.

With that said, however, let me make one thing clear: my decision to call issues like the women’s sports debate “trivial” does not mean I believe it is unimportant. Rather, I’m critical of the time and energy spent taking anti-trans rhetoric at face value. Similarly, I don’t mean to imply that increased public awareness of trans issues is undesirable. Instead, I’m critical of the ways in which American liberals -- who became strongly associated with the professional managerial class in the 2010s -- weaponized “social justice” issues to beat down nascent leftist political movements and maintain the very institutions responsible for socioeconomic inequities.

The third -- and arguably most important -- factor is the lack of sustainable political power. Following the shift to neoliberal policies in the 1980s and 1990s, gay rights activism lost its radical, grassroots nature and became more integrated in the realm of nonprofits, the professional managerial class, and reformist politics. Following the conclusion of the same-sex marriage fight with Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, the apparatus for gay rights activism was now open to a new battle. Understandably, in the aftermath of the Transgender Tipping Point, the cause for trans rights was predominantly taken up by well-established nonprofits. This, however, occurred at the expense of a widespread grassroot movement with a radical political platform. Consequently, trans activism failed to drum up the same national attention in the way that organizations like the Black Panthers or ACT UP did before it. The trans rights movement instead relied on the hope that a change in social attitudes and grace from cis government officials was enough to secure access to necessary resources and protection from discrimination and violence. Passivity, ultimately, was valued over proactivity. Any urgency was easily satisfied by insecure achievements.

The failure of trans rights -- the failure of liberalism -- becomes more and more apparent as we rapidly hurtle towards a Trans Dark Age. In order to brace for the impact and prepare for the future fight, we must start the difficult task of self-evaluation immediately. Taking these three factors and the historical precedent into account, we can synthesize a realistic political strategy for trans rights activists to pursue. While the path ahead appears bleak, it is only the ruthless criticism of ourselves and all that surrounds us that will deliver us to victory.

If you would like to support Gavin Grimm, there is a GoFundMe to help him with living expenses. You can find it here.

References

Acosta, Lucas. “The HRC Blueprint for LGBTQ Equality Under Biden.” Human Rights Campaign. Nov 11, 2020. https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-charts-bold-path-for-equality-under-biden-administration.

Battle, Sandra and T. E. Wheeler, II. Sandra Battle and T. E. Wheeler, II to U. S. Department of Justice and U. S. Department of Education. February 22, 2017. https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-201702-title-ix.pdf

Carter, Ash. “Remarks on Ending the Ban on Transgender Service in the U.S. Military.” Speech, Washington, DC, June 30, 2016. U.S. Department of Defense. https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/821833/remarks-on-ending-the-ban-on-transgender-service-in-the-us-military.

Esseks, James. “Federal Court: Trans Kids Can’t Be Kicked out of the Restroom: ACLU.” American Civil Liberties Union, April 20, 2016. https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/federal-court-trans-kids-cant-be-kicked-out-restroom.

HRC Foundation. “2022 State Equality Index.” Human Rights Campaign, 2023. https://reports.hrc.org/2022-state-equality-index?_ga=2.181441895.195174743.1704917335-170867165.1704383834.

HRC Foundation. “Equality from State to State & State Equality Index Archives.” Human Rights Campaign, n.d. https://www.hrc.org/resources/equality-from-state-to-state.

Levin, Sam. “Gavin Grimm Won a Landmark Victory for US Trans Youth. He Now Struggles to Survive.” The Guardian, October 12, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2024/oct/12/gavin-grimm-trans-youth-rights.

O’Brien, John. John O’Brien to Federal Employee Health Benefits Carriers. June 23, 2015. https://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/carriers/fehb/2015/2015-12.pdf

Press, Alex. “On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich.” Dissent, October 22, 2019. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/on-the-origins-of-the-professional-managerial-class-an-interview-with-barbara-ehrenreich/.

Ronan, Wyatt. “2021 Officially Becomes Worst Year in Recent History for LGBTQ State Legislative Attacks as Unprecedented Number of States Enact Record-Shattering Number of Anti-LGBTQ Measures Into Law.” Human Rights Campaign, May 7, 2021. https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/2021-officially-becomes-worst-year-in-recent-history-for-lgbtq-state-legislative-attacks-as-unprecedented-number-of-states-enact-record-shattering-number-of-anti-lgbtq-measures-into-law.

Steinmetz, Katy. “The Transgender Tipping Point.” Time, May 29, 2014. https://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/.

Trans Legislation Tracker. Last modified 2025. https://translegislation.com/.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Departmental Appeals Board. Appellate Division. NCD 140.3, Transsexual Surgery. Decision No. 2576, Docket No. A-13-87. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/static/dab/decisions/board-decisions/2014/dab2576.pdf.

The White House. “Obama Administration’s Record and the LGBT Community.” Press release. June 9, 2016. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/09/fact-sheet-obama-administrations-record-and-lgbt-community.

For the past year, I’ve unintentionally become something of an expert when it comes to the very niche subject of trans rights in the state of Kansas. This is partly because of my obsessive need to create detailed spreadsheets, an urge which propelled me to create a scorecard for every elected official in the Kansas Legislature and their record on trans rights.

While I don’t generally like to talk highly for myself, I feel confident in saying this: my scorecard is way better than every other scorecard. I’ve spent an unholy amount of hours working on this so I think I’ve earned the right to say that.

You see, most scorecards only track how legislators vote in Committee of the Whole votes. That is, when the entire House or Senate votes on a bill, the vote a legislator casts in that moment is tracked… and absolutely nothing else. This is a largely unsatisfactory and unhelpful metric; the Committee of the Whole vote is simply one part of a much longer and more complicated process. It doesn’t actually tell you who in the legislature is committed to your cause — and who vehemently opposes it.

What’s so different about this scorecard?

In the name of being as thorough as possible, I’ve developed a scorecard that tracks the following:

1. Committee votes

2. Committee of the Whole votes

3. Veto votes

4. House/Senate votes (in odd cases where one chamber has to vote twice while the other doesn’t; it’s happened at least three times in Kansas in relation to LGBTQ+ bills, so it’s a real thing)

5. Who’s introducing/sponsoring bills

6. Who’s amending bills

7. Who’s testifying & what they’re saying

In addition, I have three different ways of calculating scores based on weighted value (i.e., how important you think a bill is compared to others) and how recent the bill is.

Despite the political chaos that 2025 has brought so far, updating my spreadsheet has brought me a sense of joy and calm that nothing else quite matches. Maybe it’ll do the same for you. Who knows.

Why does a scorecard even matter?

Scorecards aren’t just for devout believers of American democracy or whatever they’re calling it. Even if you are a jaded, grassroots organizer (ask me how I know), having an idea of who in power is responsible for laws that are making your life worse — and who could potentially stand in their way — can help you identify trends and prepare for the future. For example, because I’ve spent way too long looking at all of this, I was able to:

1. Identify legislators to target for a veto vote. We were able to successfully convince two of them to change their vote which prevented a bill from becoming law.

2. Predict what would become law this year, which gave us the opportunity to start preparing in advance.

3. Quickly rally people to submit hundreds of pages of testimony. Even though the House won’t admit it, it’s all this testimony that most likely helped us stop another really terrible anti-trans bill from reaching the Governor’s desk this year.

Once again: if you are engaged in any kind of political organizing, understanding who’s in power, what they’re doing, and what strategies they’re using is absolutely essential to help keep your community resilient.

What are you waiting for?! Come download my template!

While I continue working on a monster of a project related to trans politics, I thought I would at least stop by to share my template so that you can use it for whatever purpose you so desire. Not only are you allowed to edit it but I actively encouraged to do so — the political process of Kansas is unique to Kansas, after all!

Additionally, I’m uploading my current Kansas trans bill scorecard so you can see an example of what a fully developed scorecard can look like.

Feel free to share! Make sure to HAVE FUN and YELL AT SOME POLITICIANS!!! 😊😊😊

Scorecard Template

2025 Kansas Trans Scorecard (example)

When a friend sent me TERFs, Trans Mascs, & Two Steve Feminism, I knew that I finally had the avenue I needed to speak. This piece is a personal essay written by Jude Doyle, a well-established feminist writer who came out and transitioned a number of years ago. A large source of inspiration for this essay can be found in a dispute that occurred between himself and Moira Donegan, another feminist writer who is cis, four days before it was published.

On New Year’s Eve, Donegan posted a thread that apparently included a criticism of transfeminist author Julia Serano. I say apparently since the thread has been deleted; all I’ve been able to see of the debacle is the aftermath. From what I can gather, the criticism was related to Serano’s concept of the subconscious sex, a term she coined to explain why some people are trans. While Donegan’s exact position is unknown to me, my best guess is that she argued against the idea of womanhood as an innate identity that one is naturally drawn to. Rather, womanhood is a socially constructed category of individuals oppressed within patriarchy. In the ensuing conflict, multiple individuals, including Serano herself, disagreed with both Donegan’s position and her characterization of Serano’s argument.

Doyle responded to this thread and was consequently blocked. Shortly after, he posted about this incident with a screenshot of his response to her attached and then implied that Donegan is a “crypto-TERF.”

Sometime after this, Donegan unblocked him. They exchanged at least two more comments -- Doyle refuted her point once more, Donegan explained her reason for blocking him -- before she blocked him again. And, once more, Doyle shared a screenshot of this interaction.

I have no connection to either Donegan nor Doyle, only vague awareness of both individuals. Upon learning about this disagreement later that day, I initially did not care much. However, Doyle publishing TERFs, Trans Mascs, & Two Steve Feminism has compelled me into speaking out on the matter.

This response is not a personal attack but rather a tool to critique a line of thought I see trans mascs repeat over and over. Although I am empathetic to it -- I was similarly disgruntled when I was younger -- I find myself growing less and less patient with it, especially when it receives attention and praise. The line of thought I’m describing is what I am calling transmasc liberalism (purposely spelled without a space between “trans” and “masc” to highlight the specificity of this ideology to trans masculinity). It’s the outcome of trans mascs who have realized the failures of cisnormative ideologies to explain our unique position within patriarchy but have not yet fully unlearned gender essentialism. Unable to resolve this conflict, trans mascs will often turn on feminist thinking and rhetoric and take the position of the victimized. Depending on the context, our victimization is construed as the result of being trans mascs specifically, while other times it is because of our assigned sex at birth.

Instead of seeking out a material explanation for the mechanisms at play with transphobia and anti-transmasc sentiment, transmasc liberalism is drawn to idealism. There is an over reliance on the belief that our subjective experiences -- that is, the emotions we feel and our immediate perception of ourselves as related to our gender -- are external, objective realities. The dissonance that emerges from this unsustainable belief, such as complications that arise when factoring in race, class, and so on, unfortunately results in frustration, insecurity, and anxiety that eventually comes to a boiling point. Oftentimes, these feelings explode in the face of whichever woman or other trans masc has the misfortune of disagreeing.

I bring up transmasc liberalism because Doyle’s essay is a perfect encapsulation of the rhetoric and behavior associated with it. And I will not mince words: I do find Doyle’s behavior in this article abhorrent. Throughout the essay, he makes assumptions about Donegan’s beliefs that border on libelous and weaponizes personal hardships to paint himself as a victim of crimes that Donegan did not commit. Although my response is more about the ideas in his essay, his conduct is very much a symptom of transmasc liberalism that needs to be addressed. For example, I would be remiss to not point out the instance in the essay where Doyle, who is white, compares Donegan blocking him on Bluesky to the May 2020 incident when Amy Cooper, a white woman, called the police to falsely accuse Christian Cooper, a Black man, of threatening her life after he requested that she leash her dog in Central Park. Doyle’s apparent lack of awareness of how inappropriate this comparison is hopefully demonstrates the necessity of a response that challenges the politics of this essay.

Ultimately, my intention with this response is to generate a dialogue that propels us away from transmasc liberalism and towards an understanding of ourselves that considers historical context and current material realities. Oppression, after all, is not imaginary. To counter real attacks and ramifications that come with being trans, we must actively strive to understand how and why cissexism works the way it does. It’s only from an in-depth grasp of our socioeconomic position that we will be able to fight for our liberation.

Social Constructionism: Fact or Fiction?

TERFs, Trans Mascs, & Two Steve Feminism positions itself as an exploration of feminism’s failures to consider the realities of trans masculine existence under patriarchy. This exploration is initially framed through the conflict between Doyle and Donegan, although it expands in such a way that it can be assumed that Doyle is drawing on other experiences he has had with other feminists. My reason for saying this is based on the fact that much of this essay responds to transphobic talking points from feminists that were not made by Donegan nor could be reasonably intuited from any point she did make.

At the end of the introductory section of this piece, Doyle quite clearly states his thesis:

First, your experience of gendered oppression is not necessarily about who you are. It’s about what people think you are, or what people have been primed to see when they look at you. Second: What cis people tell themselves they are doing, in regard to a trans person’s gender, is often very different than what they’ve done.

While Doyle connects his conflict with Donegan to this second point in particular, both arguments are much broader than this squabble. I doubt Doyle himself would disagree with the assertion that this essay ultimately transcends Donegan’s thread and therefore should not be limited to it. Hopefully, the contents of my response are also interpreted beyond this conflict.

Following the introduction, Doyle recounts his Bluesky interaction with Donegan. Immediately, he critiques her view on gender, specifically stating that Donegan views womanhood “as a fiction created by the patriarchal hierarchy of gender.” Although he does agree that “gender is a political construction,” he clarifies his objection to Donegan’s argument:

However, if social enforcement were all-powerful, and we all just embodied whatever genders we’re assigned by the dominant culture, there would not be a single trans person on the face of the planet. Nor would there be feminists, because feminism is a rebellion against socially constructed and enforced gender stereotypes.

This paragraph is followed by an explanation of Serano’s subconscious sex and gender dysphoria that ultimately ends with Doyle asserting: “This point — that your assigned gender and your gender identity are not the same thing, and that they can conflict with each other — is literally the mildest, most Trans 101 take you can possibly have.”

Already, there are a number of problems that are only worsened by the game of telephone at play here. Based on this essay, Doyle presents Donegan as holding a social constructionist view on gender -- that is, that gender is not something innate and unchanging but rather comprehensible only through the context of society and interpersonal interactions. The first mistake Doyle makes is the assertion that a social constructionist view on gender sees womanhood as fictional. While this is a common misconception that people have about social constructs, it is a glaring error nonetheless. Social constructionism does not view social constructs as fake or fictional; rather, the point is that social constructs could not exist without human socialization. Man and Woman are not metaphysical concepts but labels that only receive meaning through social context.

I suspect that Donegan’s apparent critique of subconscious sex is ultimately a critique of this metaphysical approach to gender. The concept that trans people are inherently the wrong gender presupposes that there is some sort of fixed category of gendered existence that supersedes human existence altogether. And if gender is purely metaphysical -- that is, if one can be a man or a woman without any tangible or observable connection to the reality we live in -- then what does that mean for the liberation of women, trans people, and queer people as a whole? For instance, are men naturally more motivated to dominate and oppress women? Must we actively resist unsavory inclinations that our inborn genders might instill within us?

Ironically, it’s this metaphysical approach to gender that leads to the very talking points that Doyle critiques in this essay as examples of feminist transphobia. The belief that men or women are inherently good or evil, or superior or inferior, is not based on any analysis of cultural conditions or infrastructure but rather subjective moral judgements. Similarly, the idea that men and women simply are broadly ignores the historical processes that have impacted the development and social perceptions of those concepts over time. Although many transphobes will pretend that they are taking a materialist view of the situation, their complete dismissal of trans realities and insistence on naturalizing their own specific experiences of gender easily pokes gaping holes into their claims.

The rebuttal to this view on gender is, ultimately, the position that Donegan supposedly takes: that is, that gender cannot be understood in any meaningful way without taking the social, economic, and political realities of patriarchy into account. This does not mean that trans people cannot exist. Actually, we can conclude the opposite: transness is itself a social construct. And transness being a social construct does not negate gender dysphoria any more than the social model of disability negates a person’s symptoms or their struggle with them, nor does race as a social construct erase the color of our skin.

All of this is to say that, while trans people cannot choose to have or rid ourselves of dysphoria about our bodies, our dysphoria is only legible through our social context and interactions. I am a trans man not because I have some inner, timeless essence that is innately male, but because I have modified my body in such a way that people interpret me as male upon meeting me. I am not not a woman because there is an inherent quality to womanhood that repulses me, but because the social context and physical features that give me dysphoria are associated with womanhood. In fact, being read as male has made it more comfortable for me than ever before to present as a woman. Why? Because the general social context of my daily life has changed. Whereas I would be read as a woman regardless of what I wore before transitioning, I now have more control over how people perceive me based on how I dress and behave. Thus, my internal desires may exist independently of what others think about or want for me, but they only receive a value judgement and label once framed within the context of interpersonal interactions.

Regardless of what her original thread stated, Donegan demonstrated shortly after the Bluesky ordeal that she understands how trans people fit into this social constructionist view very well.

But perhaps Doyle also understands this. After all, he did begin his essay by discussing the difference between his internal gender identity and the process of gendering. He also agreed that gender is a social construct enforced by patriarchy. So, looking at his rebuttal again, we can see a second characterization of Donegan’s argument: that “we all just embod[y] whatever genders we’re assigned by the dominant culture.” This could potentially be read in two different ways: one, that under social constructionism, our internal perception of our gender is solely dictated by what the world tells us our gender is, which I have already shown is an incorrect understanding of the concept; or two, that under patriarchy, there is an oppressor class and an oppressed class, and anyone who is oppressed due to their gender is categorically a woman.

The former understanding aligns with his assertion that the existence of trans people and feminism disproves social constructionism. If this is the case, I would argue that Doyle’s understanding of feminism demonstrates how much feminism as a political movement has failed miserably. Admittedly, my immediate reaction was to say that feminism is not “a rebellion against socially constructed and enforced gender stereotypes,” but perhaps this is exactly what feminism is to many people. Rather than a project to raise awareness of the material causes and consequences of patriarchy and further women’s liberation through political organization, feminism is conceptualized as a performative rejection of social norms. While refusing to fall in line with other’s expectations can be a cathartic and even life-changing experience for many, we have yet to see teenage angst and counter-cultural movements lead to revolutions and infrastructural changes.

However, given the path the rest of the essay follows, the latter interpretation could be correct as well. Thus, Donegan is criticized as transphobic based on two lines of thought that Doyle accuses her of holding: firstly, that it is impossible for anybody to “feel” trans and therefore identify as such; and secondly, that regardless of how you identify, you are either the Oppressive Man or the Oppressed Woman, an outcome which either misgenders or erases the existence of a trans masc like Doyle.

Third-Gendering & Misgendering

The next section of the essay begins with Doyle very briefly explaining the “radical feminist view of gender” on Woman as the gender-oppressed class. He writes:

I think this is correct, to an extent… It does, as previously noted, fail to account for people’s agency and internally felt identities. It also fails to account for the fact that people use the singular word “gender” to mean several different structures or realities: The patriarchal binary, the “subconscious sex” or internally felt identity, the social norms and visual signifiers of gender within a culture, and so on.

The issues he takes with this perspective, however, falls apart on closer inspection. During this section, he names transfeminist writer, Talia Bhatt, as a proponent of this view and expresses respect for her contributions. I point this out since it is peculiar for him to reference her as her work expands on this viewpoint in a way that leaves these criticisms feeling misplaced and unnecessary. He seems to avoid this obvious issue with a statement on how Donegan “cites” cis feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Monique Wittig while also ignoring the fact that Bhatt and Donegan have been acquainted for quite sometime. The chances that Donegan is aware of Bhatt’s explicitly transfeminist spin on this perspective and agrees with it to some extent seem very high.

From here, Doyle continues:

Failing to disentangle these layers causes massive fights. It’s as if you and I were throwing a party, and I said “Steve is in the kitchen,” and you said “no, Steve is in the living room,” and before long, we’re at each other’s throats about where exactly Steve is, without either of us realizing that we invited two guys named Steve. Multiple Steves can be in multiple locations. Neither of us is lying, but we’re each telling only part of the truth.

For the duration of this essay, I will ask you to entertain the Two Steves theory: "Gender" is many overlapping things, not just one thing. We’re forced to use the same word for all of them, because the patriarchal binary is deeply impoverished when it comes to ways of describing, naming, or thinking about gender.

The Singular Steve approach taken by some cis feminists insists that gender is only the patriarchal superstructure. There is no “real” gender to be found beneath it, just a heap of cultural conditioning. There are a few immediate and obvious problems with that worldview. The first is that it leaves no room for non-binary people to exist. If our genders are completely due to social construction, and our society only constructs two genders, then why are there all these people who don’t identify as either one?

Immediately, I must question Doyle’s characterization of the social constructionist view on gender as a “One Steve Feminism,” as he puts it. Certainly there are some feminists out there who believe that one’s sense of gender is strictly instilled within us by society at large, but Donegan demonstrated clearly that this is not what she believes. Furthermore, his assertion that nonbinary gender identity contradicts social constructionism is not only troubling but incorrect. While we may not have well-established terms in English that describe accepted gender categories outside of Man and Woman, this does not mean that we have no concept for them at all.

In Whipping Girl, Julia Serano coined a variety of terms that are still in use today. One of such terms is subconscious sex, as previously discussed. Another one is third-gendering. Serano says:

Cissexual people who are in the earliest stages of accepting transsexuality… will often come to see trans people as inhabiting our own unique gender category that is separate from “woman” and “man.” I call this act third-gendering (or third-sexing). While some attempts at third-gendering trans people are clearly meant to be derogatory or sensationalistic… other less offensive ones occur regularly in discussions about transsexuals… While “MTF” may be useful as an adjective… using it as a noun… completely negates the fact that I identify and live as a woman.

…I believe that this propensity for third-gendering others is simply a by-product of the assumptive and noncensual process of gendering. In other words, we are so compelled to gender people as women and men that when we come across someone who is not easily categorised that way… we tend to isolate and distinguish them from the other two genders. There is a long history of the terms “third gender” and “third sex” being applied to homosexuals, intersex people, and transgender people… (174-176).

Here, Serano demonstrates that even if the average cis individual within Western society is not consciously aware of genders outside of Man or Woman, those who violate cisheterosexist norms are treated quite differently from those who do not. As she mentions, the history of the terms “third gender” and “third sex” predate Whipping Girl and even the English language, such as the French writer Willy publishing Le Troisième Sexe, a book about gay European life, in 1927.

Talia Bhatt’s writing expands on this concept further. In Bhatt’s article, The Third Sex, she draws upon Serena Nanda’s ethnography Neither Man Nor Woman to demonstrate how hijras in India have been forcibly third-gendered. Despite the popular conception that the Western world is resistant to the idea that there are more than two genders, she reveals that it’s often far easier for society to accept that trans women are a separate category of gender as opposed to simply women. Bhatt points out:

It is Nanda’s attempt to rhetorically distance hijras from womanhood, however, that proves to be the most revealing. Ignoring her own reporting of how hijras travel in “ladies” compartments on the trains and “periodically demand” to be counted as women in the census, she begins Hijras As “Not Women” by affirming that hijras behave in manners “in opposition to the Hindu ideal of demure and restrained femininity”. What follows is an amusing account of all the behaviors that set hijra apart from True Womanhood: “dancing in public”, “coarse and abusive speech or gestures”, smoking hookah or cigarettes, and openly exhibiting a “shameless” vulgarity that no “real” Hindu woman would indulge. No doubt many Indian housewives would be edified to learn how trivial it is to change sex, or how frequently they’ve done so in the process of haggling for cheaper vegetables.

This isn’t to say that Western society has a clear concept of how we refer to nonbinary genders, nor is it to say that it is primed to accept nonbinary identities over trans people who may simply identify as male or female. Rather, as Serano described, individuals who appear to fall outside the realm of a cisheterosexist idea of gender are relegated into a category of their own regardless of how they might identify. As Bhatt puts it, “The Enlightened West, in all its wisdom, already has a Third Sex: the tranny.”

Thus, to argue that social constructionism would render it impossible for anyone to identify as nonbinary ignores that our construction of gender has already accounted for “third genders.” Nonbinary as a term has only gained significant attention and popularity within the past 20 or so years; those attracted to it would have most likely used different terms to describe themselves beforehand.

Perhaps the argument could be made that people are intrinsically nonbinary and any term they used before nonbinary existed was inaccurate and only used because our language -- also a social construction -- failed them. Even then, however, there still lies a troubling issue at the heart of nonbinary identity. Nonbinary gender can only be understood in relation to the binary genders; this is the “binary” that is being referenced within the word nonbinary itself. And before blame can be assigned to the limits of the English language and Western society, historical and current examples of other genders have only been located within cultures where male and female also exist. If there is a culture where male and/or female as concepts did not exist but other genders did, then it is exceptionally rare.

Thus, nonbinary and “third genders” are predicated on the existence of male and female genders, specifically. This does not disprove their existence or deny the “agency” of individuals to identify however they chose. Once again, this is about gender as a social construct. That means that, in order to be nonbinary, you first need a system of binary gender as “nonbinary” defines your relationship with it. If this seems puzzling, then imagine a world that was only comprised of women. But if this was the case, then how sensical would it be for them to identify themselves as women if that’s what every person in existence is? What would be the purpose of identifying as such? Woman (or Man) as a gender could not exist without another gender since it is ultimately a relational identity. Similarly, nonbinary and “third genders” could not exist without Woman and Man.

Do not interpret this as me doubting the genuineness of “feelings” of being nonbinary. Since my first day identifying as trans, I have always identified with various nonbinary genders. But my sense of nonbinary-ness only gains that meaning when I consider how I fit into society at large. And despite how I may identify myself, the perception that others have of me always wins in the end, whether that means reading me as a cis woman, as a cis man, or as a gendered other.

What I’m explaining is not anything foreign to Doyle. He begins his essay by discussing how the process of gendering means that he is treated as a woman in the small town where he lives but perceived as a man when he travels elsewhere. The mistake he makes, however, is through the assumption that his stable internal sense of gender regardless of how he is being gendered disproves a social constructionist view of gender as a whole. Again, social constructionism doesn’t mean that society creates your internal sense of your gender identity, but rather makes it (il)legible.

When I am misgendered as a woman, it does not render me a woman -- or at least, not in the way a cis woman is a woman, since my misattributed womanhood either exists on incredibly shaky grounds or out of spiteful malice. The dysphoria that arises with misgendering does not indicate that a trans person is functionally the same as a cis person of the same assigned sex at birth. Rather, what misgendering indicates to me is a confirmation that I am treated differently than a cis man would be treated because I am trans. “Not a Cis Man,” however, does not mean “Is a Woman,” as women do not generally alter their body, social presentation, and legal documents to be perceived as anything but that. The illegibility of my transness within cisnormativity is the function behind third-gendering and also a large reason why I have never identified as “binary.”

But it is not enough to point to third-gendering as a process to prove a social constructionist theory on gender. I am concerned that the fixation on labels in and of themselves has hindered our ability to critically analyze how gender impacts our relationship with others and the social infrastructure that envelops us. Thus, we must ask: what is the function of gender? Why does it exist?

The shortest answer I can give is that gender is a form of social organization. In her book The Creation of Patriarchy, historian Gerda Lerner argues that the oppression of women is inseparable from the creation of private property -- in fact, she asserts that women themselves were the original form of private property. In prehistoric human society, childbirth was the most essential piece of a tribe’s survival; as such, controlling the sexuality of those who could give birth was critical to maintaining order and power. The hierarchy established by this subjugation is ultimately the foundation of gender. Through the course of The Creation of Patriarchy, Lerner documents the development of Ancient Near East civilizations and their evolving laws over thousands of years to demonstrate how the status and perception of women gradually deteriorated over time.

Although the role of reproduction has always been essential to the oppression of women, this does not mean that trans women are men and that trans men are women. The continued development of civilization and technology results in sociological changes that complicate how we understand ourselves and others. Thus, as gender becomes reified through various social cues and cultural myths, it is possible for different kinds of gendered existences to occur. In fact, Lerner makes note of “transvestites” that served as prostitutes in Ancient Babylon (131). Given that the vast majority of prostitutes have always been women, so much so that misogynistic slurs are often words used to refer to prostitutes, it’s noteworthy that the only time cross-dressing is mentioned in this book is in reference to “male” prostitution.

To summarize what we gather from Lerner’s work, Womanhood is defined ultimately by a lack of agency over one’s sexuality and the intense repercussions that come from violating sexual norms. As an example, Lerner makes note of various laws that gave permission to men to mutilate and murder their wives for committing adultery, but the same permission was not granted to the wife of an adulterous man (114-115).

The lopsided restrictions, punishments, and social ostracization imposed on women serve to uphold the patriarchal social order. From this, we see the development of cisheternormativity which then leads to Serano’s concept of third gendering. This is why, as Serano mentioned, queer people as a whole and intersex individuals have been denoted as being a third sex alongside trans people. Here, we can see the intimate connection between misogyny and third-gendering: both are necessary to uphold patriarchy which, by definition, is ruled by Man. The purpose of this control over sexuality and gender is to ensure the continued existence of private property and the production of capital through the act of reproduction.

Because third gendering is ultimately born out of patriarchy and sexism, it is impossible to unlink “third genders” from Womanhood. In Degendering and Regendering, Bhatt writes:

Where transmisogynistic forces marginalize and ostracize the transfeminine from society, rendering us unworthy of any fate outside of being treated like sexual chattel, transemasculative forces deny the transmasculine any possibility of escaping reproductive exploitation and seek to re-gender the transmasculine--viewed as lapsed reproductive assets--back into the confines of womanhood.

In a sense, then, trans men and women are relegated into a sort of Womanhood: trans women become Disparaged Women who cannot provide any reproductive value and thus can only exist for the sexual gratification of men, while trans men are Failed Women who must be corrected back into the nuclear family structure at all costs.

To say that trans masculinity as a whole is viewed as Failed Womanhood does not mean that we are women. We failed for a reason! Just as Doyle suggested that there are perhaps multiple definitions of the word gender at play, I would suggest not interpreting the term Woman within a transfeminist social constructionist theory so literally.

A Brief Word on Gender Dysphoria

The second issue of Single Steve Feminism, according to Doyle,

is that it leaves no rational explanation for gender dysphoria. If gender is purely an oppressive hierarchy, and embodiment or internally felt identity has nothing to do with it, then trans people who experience intense discomfort with their bodies are delusional — they’ve bought into the gender hierarchy so hard that they’ve concocted some hallucinatory sense of “being” the gender whose experience they wish to share.

There are incredible leaps of logic being made here based on inaccurate framing. Although Doyle is ultimately describing a position I have witnessed from some transphobes, I must object to this section on two bases: firstly, because he is collapsing an explicitly pro-trans and materialist understanding of gender with anti-trans positions; and secondly, because he does not attempt to provide his own rational explanation for the existence of gender dysphoria.

One might say that the subconscious sex idea is the rational explanation… except that it is not. If one’s internal sense of gender is predetermined by the mind or soul, then could we say that the same rationally explains other things we hold true about ourselves? For instance, is there something innate to my existence that predetermined that I would prefer chocolate ice cream over vanilla? Perhaps you could get pedantic and argue that my brain is configured in such a way that it does dictate my tastes and interests, but even then, the human brain did not come into existence knowing what chocolate and vanilla ice cream taste like. Human beings created ice cream, just like we created gender.

The point I really want to make, however, is that gender dysphoria -- or physical dysphoria, at least -- is irrational, and that’s okay. Human emotions and desires are often irrational. I do not know why I have never been able to picture myself as a woman. I do not know why my chest dysphoria is so intense that I was essentially unable to refer to breasts at all even when I was a prepubescent child. There isn’t really a rational explanation for any of that and there doesn’t need to be one, just as there isn’t a rational explanation for why I started dying my hair or why my sister has pierced both of her ears half a dozen times each or why some people love caring for pets or engaging in high-risk hobbies.

I am not trans because of a subconscious sex or because of a delusion, as Doyle puts it. For some inexplicable reason, I have always felt dysphoric about my body and how the world gendered me. That dysphoria and the ensuing actions I took to alleviate it is considered “trans” by society. The resulting gendered experience from those actions means that people now generally view me as “male.”

Ultimately, the battle over trans rights is a battle of bodily autonomy. I don’t need to prove some logical chain of events to have the right to take testosterone shots just like I wouldn’t need to prove anything to get a tattoo. It’s just because I want to do it and it improves my quality of life. As such, I won’t allow people to disguise their desire to control others with phony appeals to rationality.

If anything, in my personal experience, many people have tried to over-rationalize my dysphoria and attribute it to childhood trauma. This does not mean that transphobes all take an overly rational approach. The point here is that, in the mind of the transphobe, trans people are always incorrect, whether it’s because our dysphoria defies explanation or because there is a perfectly reasonable explanation that could be solved through therapy -- conversion therapy, that is. Furthermore, I am skeptical of the idea that the subconscious sex explanation for dysphoria is doing much to counter transphobes who see trans people as psychotic (nor is it doing much to fight for the autonomy of psychotic individuals, cis and trans, for that matter).

Trans Masc Mirror World

At the beginning of Doyle’s essay, he made it clear that he strives to address the failures of cis feminism to account for trans masc realities. Similarly, at the beginning of my response, I made it clear that I am addressing the failure of trans mascs to grapple with those very failures.

Here, over halfway into his essay, we finally arrive at his charge against cis feminism. Specifically, he targets those feminists who believe they’re trans-inclusive and will include trans women into their feminism but treat trans mascs poorly. It is difficult not to read this following section as a swipe at Donegan, but we will set that conflict aside for the moment as we read the following:

Let’s imagine that you’re this feminist. You know you’re not supposed to be transphobic, but you’re also enlightened enough to know that “dysphoria” is really just a social construct. How do you reconcile yourself to the idea that trans women “want to be women?” Well, you can tell yourself that they’re heroically giving up their Male Privilege. You can conclude that they are sensitive enough to side with the truly oppressed… and should be rewarded for it. You can feel flattered… You can Welcome Them to Womanhood, and thrill in their gratitude and the self-esteem boost you get from being a benevolent gatekeeper.

None of this involves thinking of trans women as your equals — none of it involves thinking of trans women as women, in fact — but you can tell yourself it’s tolerant, because you’re deploying pity and condescension rather than hate and fear. However, now that you’ve gone down this road, you also have to explain why trans men “want to be men.” This is where your attempts at tolerance will fail you.

Why would someone who is “really” a woman “want to be” a man? Easy: She’s experiencing sexism, and she wants out. So do you, but you are fighting sexism the right way, by being a feminist. This other person… [is] trying to become the oppressor rather than fighting the oppression. Why would anyone be a trans man? Because they’re a bad, sexist person. That’s the only possible answer. After all: It's not like they will literally die if they don't transition. Right?

I am not being paranoid or attributing malice here so much as I am summing up something that occurs throughout the feminist canon. Janice Raymond wrote (inaccurately) that there were almost no trans men in the world because “the surgery" is intended as "a way out of rigid gender roles," and "women have had a political outlet, that is, feminism, which has helped change the distribution of power for women in society and challenge sex role rigidification.” J. K. Rowling says that, if she grew up in this century, her feminist rage would have been misdirected into transitioning. In my twenties, the biggest RETVRN-to-the-Second-Wave text was Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, which had a whole chapter about how young women are internalizing misogyny so deeply that they’re transitioning into young men. The idea that the transmasculine person is a failed feminist is deeply embedded in particular strains of feminist theory.

So, to recap: Doyle opens this critique of cis feminism by singling out cis feminists who include trans women but exclude trans men. He explains the underlying belief at play and then provides three prominent examples of women who take this position. What he does not mention, however, is that two out of his three examples are renowned transmisogynists. Raymond and Rowling are both notorious for their intense hatred of trans women. Although I am more unfamiliar with Ariel Levy, I cannot find any proof that she is accepting of trans women.

I want to make it clear that there are indeed a number of cis people who mistake patronizing pity as proof that they are not transphobic. But outside of a few random trans women and nonbinary people that I’ve run into online, I am hard pressed to provide evidence that this is a notable trend, especially among cis feminists. What I can do, however, is prove that the exact opposite is true.

There is a wave of anti-transmasculine sentiment sweeping both the US and UK, but it is not one that views trans mascs as failed feminists for the most part. It’s the stance taken by Abigail Shrier in her infamous book, Irreversible Damage: that trans men are confused, pittable little girls and hysterical women who must be stopped before we mutilate our bodies. This is ultimately the belief that underpins the anti-transmasculine arguments made by Raymond, Rowling, and Levy. Once we alter our bodies, once we unleash that “irreversible damage” unto ourselves, we are ideologically lost and socially worthless.

A particularly important note is that this anti-transmasculine sentiment always coexists with vicious transmisogyny. Trans women are generally conceived of as predators; as such, they are the predators that are grooming trans boys or traumatizing them into being trans. And once trans boys transition, they are third-gendered into a similar predatory role. But why are trans mascs given more grace than trans fems? In Degendering and Regendering, Talia Bhatt writes:

…[T]he reason that transfemininity has been more visible across both time and cultures is that the veneration of manhood is highly central to patriarchal modes of organization. The idea that manhood can be failed, that an individual can fail to live up to its mantle and be stripped of manhood's privileges and protections is a useful schema to ensure ideological investment in patriarchal society. The transfeminized serve as examples of what happens to gender traitors. The transmasculine, by contrast, are ignored or treated as little more than delusional, as people who reach above their station and are doomed to never succeed.

…The transmasculine can still be "of use" to a natalist, heterosexual regime and can still be instrumentalized for their gestational capacity and ability to further patrilineality. And so, they are assiduously discouraged from changing their sex or altering their embodiment, lest they jeopardize their precious 'fertility' and render themselves 'undesirable', unfit for reproductive exploitation.

Within a gendered hierarchy, trans men have never been on top. Our autonomy is denied the way it is denied to women, both cis and trans. But we are also distinctly infantilized. The TERFs I used to spend all day arguing with and my conservative Christian family both attempted to appeal to me with faux sympathy, cooing to me about how my father’s abuse had led me to falsely believe I couldn’t ever be a woman, a wife, a mother. Yes, I was physically assaulted as a child for expressing my dysphoria; I had rumors spread about me in high school; I’ve been called slurs and harassed. But it is this approach, the pseudo-compassionate approach, the one that treats me as a victim in a state of arrested development, that is the most prominent. It’s the approach that nearly convinced me to desist. It’s the approach that made me believe that transitioning would cause my boyfriend to stop loving and desiring me. Even though this had never been true, the thought plagued and terrified me because we have been conditioned into believing that we mean nothing if we are not wives and mothers.

This condescending sympathy, this appeal to womanhood, is a toxic rhetoric that seeks to strangle you in the cradle before you ever begin to explore a reality outside the life forced upon you by patriarchy. It is also a rhetoric that evaporates the moment you do take that leap of faith as I learned when my grandfather disowned me not after I came out, but after I started testosterone.

Transphobic feminists may claim to be anti-patriarchy but the truth is that you cannot be anti-patriarchy and anti-trans at the same time. Transphobia is necessary to maintain patriarchy. Thus, TERFs have a vested interest in appealing to anyone who was assigned female at birth, even if the approach they take is insincere and manipulative. In fact, the term TERF was coined in response to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival -- an event that allowed trans mascs but explicitly banned trans fems from attending. Of course, this does not indicate that trans mascs are being treated well by any means. But the point I want to stress is that there is virtually no physical, virtual, or philosophical space dominated by cis women that tolerates trans women but is actively antagonistic to trans men. The fact that Doyle singles out this largely hypothetical transphobic cis feminist who is kinder to trans women than trans men instead of identifying how TERFs manipulate, abuse, and weaponize trans men against trans women is concerning, to say the least.

However, let’s pretend for a moment that such a feminist exists. How, then, does she treat us trans mascs? According to Doyle:

Now, some transmasculine people will tell you… that no matter how feminist they were, and no matter how feminist they are now, nothing actually alleviated their dysphoria but transition — but you, a Woman of Lived Experience, have no need to listen to this kind of mansplaining. If they want to be men, why, you’ll treat them like men! But with a particular, angry emphasis, because you view their manhood as a betrayal! And this is not only feminist, it is trans-inclusive, because you’re treating them the same way you would any other guy!

They aren’t “any other guy.” They’re trans guys, and you’re a cis person, and as such, you hold social and political power over them, which you are ignoring in order to assume total authority over an experience you do not share, and (this seems pertinent) to get away with treating somebody like crap because they are transgender. You're not treating them the way you treat "any other guy," you're treating them the way you treat trans guys, and the way you treat trans guys is: Bad.

Notice how Doyle does not actually provide any examples of what he is talking about. We could presume that he is referencing Donegan’s treatment of him. If this is the case, then we can return to the earlier screenshots and conclude that this is an egregious mischaracterization of the situation. Additionally -- ironically -- the indignation Doyle displays here echoes the same sort of indignation that women are quite familiar with receiving from men they have upset.

Nonetheless, he continues to explain how the

"enlightened" feminist transphobia that can seem benign and pity-based when it comes to trans women tends to be overt when it comes to trans men: Transitioning makes you bad, untrustworthy, anti-feminist, scheming, selfish, etc. (This gets reversed in the dominant culture, where trans women are openly demonized and trans men are ignored — and, obviously, it is counterbalanced by a whole lot of feminist transmisogyny. Again, I'm discussing a specific, pseudo-tolerant approach.)

His note at the end is amusing, to say the least. Describing specific examples normally requires concrete evidence. I have yet to even see a personal anecdote.

Trans Mascs v. Patriarchy

In the next section of his essay, Doyle muses on why trans mascs appear to take more issue with Donegan’s social constructionist view on gender than trans fems. He restates his (mistaken) belief once more: because people like Donegan allegedly believe that “woman” is synonymous with “gender oppressed” which, in turn, erases trans masc experiences. He writes:

The patriarchal binary divides the world into two tiers: “Men” and “women,” people who get stomped on and people who do the stomping. That’s objectively true. However, it gets complicated when you realize that not everyone sorted into the “woman” tier actually belongs there. This is the uncomfortable reality presented by trans guys: One can actually experience sexism, misogyny, gender-based pay discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual violence, reproductive coercion, the pink tax, and every other form of degradation dealt out to people perceived as “women,” and still be a man. The two Steves, operating independently, work at cross purposes to each other, and in the battle between Culturally Imposed Steve and Personal Steve, culture often wins.

His explanation of patriarchy is puzzling. Doyle states that it is “objectively true” that men “do the stomping” while women “get stomped on.” Trans men, he concludes, throws a wrench in this perception as trans men are assumedly the ones being “stomped on” despite not being women.

The main issue I take with his description of patriarchy is not the concept that trans men are Not-Women while also Not-Cis-Men, but that it is incredibly reductive and overly simplistic in its understanding of power. While patriarchy is a hierarchy of power rooted in gender, it does not exist on gender lines alone. For instance, in The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner makes ample commentary on the importance of class. In fact, class is so important to patriarchy that it is perhaps the main reason that women adhere to its norms as adherence results in better socioeconomic outcomes. As she explains, the wife, concubine, and female slaves may all have their social status defined in relation to men, but the wife still exercises considerable power over the concubine and all slaves, both male and female, while the female slaves are absolutely powerless compared to both the wife and the concubine.

Age is also a key factor in patriarchal power, as patriarchy is ultimately a system that values the decisions of elders over the lives of the young. We can see this happen when young men are drafted to die in wars that aging politicians and military officials started or when mothers, aunts, and grandmothers bully, shame, and assault the girls in their families for failing to uphold to expectations. There is a reason why the stereotypical patriarch is generally imagined as an elderly man as opposed to a young one. There is also a reason why anti-transmasculine rhetoric tends to conceptualize us naive teenagers.

We can further see the complications of how gender and power manifests under patriarchy when we consider the creation of race. In her influential piece Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe, Black feminist Hortense Spillers argues that “‘gendering’ takes place within the confines of the domestic” (452) and is intimately related to kinship structures. As such, because slavery turned Africans into property and disrupted their kinship structures, the process of gendering could not apply to enslaved Africans in the US the same way that it applied to white settlers. Rather, we get the ungendered male and female, as Spillers puts it, whose gendered existence is not defined solely by sexual relations, but by racial ones, as well. After sharing an excerpt from a woman who recounted being sexually assaulted by her female owner, Spiller states:

Since the gendered female exists for the male, we might suggest that the ungendered female—in an amazing stroke of pansexual potential—might be invaded/raided by another woman or man (458).

More specifically, enslaved Black people, male and female, were vulnerable to physical and sexual violence from not just white men, but white women as well. The legacy of this relationship continues to echo into the present. As such, we must consider the weight of race when discussing the gendered hierarchy of who is “doing the stomping” and who is “getting stomped on.”

Spillers’ work has proven to be hugely influential in the development of Black trans thought which further expands on a social constructionist perspective of gender. While I cannot do an exhaustive summary of these works, I will provide examples of these writings for anyone interested at the end of this essay. The main thing to grasp is that our understanding of gender -- both for ourselves and for others -- is rooted in our relationship to class hierarchy, production, and kinship structures. Man and Woman, then, are not clear cut boxes, but rather fuzzy blotches that crudely describe the way a person is expected to sexually relate to others. When Doyle describes Culturally Imposed Steve triumphing over Personal Steve, this is what he’s referring to, whether he realizes it or not.

So, what does it look like when Doyle speaks out on Culturally Imposed Steve? According to him:

In practice, when I disagree with a woman about feminism, things get charged and uncomfortable very quickly. There’s a sense that I shouldn’t be able to hold strong opinions about this topic… because I’m a… you know, a guy.

Where does “guy” derive from, in that conversation? It doesn’t derive from me having the exact same life experiences as a cis man… occupying a dominant position within patriarchy… [or] from me being seen as a man in my everyday social interactions… It’s based on the fact that I use the word “man” to identify myself… My internal identification as a man remains relevant, even if we’re having a conversation about how internal identifications aren’t real.

…Yet Singular Steve theory — a “man” is an oppressor and an oppressor is a man — means that even saying transmasculine people face misogyny or gendered oppression makes some people uncomfortable. Power and dominance are so integral to how the patriarchy defines “manhood” that we literally can’t imagine a man without them. Thus, it’s common to dismiss or downplay the violence that transmasculine people face…

It is just never safe to be trans, no matter how you slice it. It is never safe to be any kind of gender-marginalized person within a patriarchy, and it never will be. That is why it’s imperative for cis feminists to reckon with transmasculinity: People are being exposed to sexist oppression, but left out of the circle of feminist soldarity [sic] and concern. You “affirm” our genders by not giving a shit about us, which is not affirming, but, pretty explicitly, punishing somebody for being transgender.

There is an irony embedded in this excerpt: when Doyle discusses violence against trans mascs as something of an oddity for a man to experience, he consequently ignores that men are more likely to experience violence in general (Lauritsen & Heimer, 2012). I mention this not to dismiss or downplay the violence that trans mascs experience, but rather to point out that patriarchy does not, in fact, protect men from violence. Rather, men experience violence more frequently because of patriarchy. Of course, it is other men assaulting them, murdering them, or setting the stage for them to be injured or die in war or workplace accidents for the most part, but patriarchy does not mean that men are all on the same team, especially not when age, class, nationality, race, and sexuality continually divide them.

However, contrary to what men’s rights activists might say, the fact that men experience such realities does not mean that patriarchy is not real. Patriarchy is simply a form of social organization developed over thousands of years that placed social power primarily in the hands of men, conceptualized in its very earliest days as those who could impregnate. Power struggles between men and their ensuing violence do not disrupt this system of social organization but rather serve to keep men in line. Manhood is so firmly wrapped into patriarchy that men often instinctively protect the interests of patriarchy rather than ever considering their own individual best interests. After all, failing to uphold patriarchal expectations and interests results in ostracization and material repercussions.

Take, for instance, how military service so frequently devastates the minds, bodies, and lives of men, and yet the Soldier has been mythologized into the primary example of exemplary masculinity. Relatedly, the US military essentially bribes men into enlistment by providing them financial, educational, and health care benefits that may otherwise be inaccessible. We must ask, then, how many men have only been able to gain and support a wife and children because of this bargain with the military -- and how many men have destroyed this same family because of the inherent destructiveness of this bargain.

In a sense, Doyle is right to talk about the erasure of violence against trans mascs as problem within cis feminism. Cis feminism often doesn’t discuss violence against men at all. However, society as a whole generally ignores patriarchal violence. And there is a reason for this: patriarchy and its incentives are so normalized and alluring that men and women alike strive to uphold it -- not because it makes the most sense, but because to do anything different requires a profound struggle that would completely upend the only type of life we have ever known. Patriarchy may not be the best option, but it is far more comfortable than to take up the task to abolish it entirely.

Of course, any feminist that sincerely believes that men as a group of people (as opposed to Manhood as a concept under patriarchy) are ontologically evil and exempt from hardship would benefit from an actual material analysis of the situation. I have attempted to provide starting points for such an exploration. But Doyle, on the other hand, fails to provide any alternative perspective. Rather, he appears to accept the Single Steve premise and utilizes violence against trans mascs as proof that we are categorically different from cis men in such a way that our specific experiences warrant inclusion within a discussion of patriarchal violence whereas cis men are always exempt. This, too, ignores how cis queer men often experience rates of sexual and intimate partner violence similar to or higher than the rates of straight women (CDC 2023; Xu & Yeng, 2017).

What is the point of me saying all this? While it can indeed hurt to have your experiences with patriarchal violence as a trans masc downplayed and ignored, framing this issue as one where we try to disidentify ourselves with men as a whole and frame men as invulnerable to harm and abuse only further normalizes patriarchal violence. That is, to say that experiencing patriarchal violence is an experience so alien to Manhood as a concept that it deserves special consideration further normalizes and invisiblizes the violence that cis men experience because of patriarchy. If anything, trans mascs are in an interesting position where we can better expose and articulate the violence done to men and women within patriarchy than cis people might otherwise be able to.

With that all said, I do strongly agree with the premise that any feminist analysis that does not take trans mascs into account is ultimately an incomplete and ineffective analysis. Such an inclusion also necessitates sincerely engaging with us as human beings with complex experiences and emotions instead of tacking us on as a footnote. Unfortunately, Doyle’s essay does not do much to steer feminist discourse in any helpful direction.

Bringing It All Together

So far, I’ve highlighted a number of sections of Doyle’s essay that are representative of the ideology I call transmasc liberalism. In short, it is an adherence to a transgender essentialism: that is, our souls are inherently transmasc. It is also gender essentialist in that it internalizes the belief that men hold power purely because they are men, and that holding gendered power means that you are exempt from gendered disempowerment. However, the conflict that emerges between this belief and the reality of trans masc existence leads to a new sort of essentialism, one that creates a wedge between ourselves, men, and all women, both cis and trans. Instead of interrogating this conflict, transmasc liberalism becomes ensnared by it with little motivation to break out. Any sort of rebuttal to this viewpoint is viewed with suspicion as the assumption is that alternative perspectives only continue to erase and misgender trans mascs.

At the end of this essay, Doyle provides us some insight into his distrust with a candid section about his feelings about cis feminists.

This episode has unsettled me, obviously. I have been trying to articulate to myself why it was so deeply hurtful to be treated as an enemy of feminism… It was the sense that I didn’t count, that I didn’t matter, that I wasn’t a peer, a colleague, a feminist, a person; I was just some obstacle to be done away with because I was trans.

It was the feeling — and I’ve had it for years, this feeling — that I have no human worth to anyone around me, and that none of the cis people I built my life with ever saw me or cared about me at all. My only worth resided in my “womanhood,” in being a fighter “for women,” and so, even if trying to be a woman was killing me, I had to keep it up, because the only other option was to become The Enemy. I feel, sometimes, that my fellow feminists would rather have me die young of my own misery than participate in feminism as my full self. And it hurts. I would like you to think, for a minute, about what it would be like to… give your life to a cause, to put absolutely everything you have into it, and to be told that your work is worthless because you didn’t die.

Although I have been rather snarky throughout my response, I’ll also put my cards on the table here. I deeply understand what Doyle means. Before I was aware that I was trans, feminism was a reprieve not just from misogyny, but specifically from the forces in my life that attempted to correct the way I experienced my gender. It was the one thing that didn’t force me to go dress shopping even when I broke down in tears at each dress store, that didn’t judge me when I became physically nauseated at the idea of having sex with men as a woman, that offered some sort of empathy when I was constantly suicidal.

There is genuinely something to be said about the shock that comes when you start identifying as trans masc, especially when people in spaces that seemed so radical on the position of gender can no longer find room for you. A lot of transphobia, or at least in my experience, is not so much direct and overt, but rather exists like a noxious gas. It’s silent, invisible, slowly burning your lungs from the inside out, leaving you with symptoms of a condition with no identifiable cause that nobody is particularly interested in remedying.

Doyle’s honesty confirms a hunch I’ve had for quite some time: that transmasc liberalism is something of an instinctual reaction. It is not born from serious contemplation but is the emotional reaction from someone who is disturbed by the reality of being third-gendered and cannot make sense of it. The fact that we are moving away from being female as opposed to moving towards it particularly complicates matters. Doyle is not incorrect in the least bit to criticize the transphobia of cis feminism, both overt and subtle; the fact that it has been almost exclusively the product of cis women makes it exceptionally challenging to map our experiences as Not-Women-but-Not-Cis-Men onto it.

However, the resulting distrust of feminism -- something I completely understand to the extent that I used to explicitly keep an anti-radfem statement in my Twitter bio to avoid any more heartache -- creates a misdirected anger. Most frequently, I see trans women, such as Bhatt, be lambasted as specifically anti-transmasculine, even when they are quite persistent on including trans men in both their theoretical understandings of gender and within their social circles. Sometimes, we see episodes like the Doyle-Donegan dispute, where Donegan becomes a blank slate to be distorted in such a way that Doyle can unload all his otherwise legitimate grievances onto her.

The fixation Doyle demonstrated earlier with a feminism that tolerated trans women but loathed trans men is a glimpse into this misdirected anger that I often see from the transmasc liberals. Much of the time, there is a resentment that trans mascs hold towards trans fems. Sometimes, they are able to harbor this resentment so that it isn’t immediately obvious, while other times it manifests in constant, overt attacks on trans women for being untrustworthy and traitors to trans men. I suspect that this resentment comes from the insecurity we feel about our relationship with gender and patriarchy. It can feel quite simple to be a trans woman in a sense; you are both trans and a woman, so there is theoretically no dispute about your status as a victim or oppressed. However, because gender essentialism is so ingrained in public consciousness and is challenging to unlearn, trans mascs may also feel a sense of guilt or despair over the idea of assuming the role of the Oppressor or confusion and rage when it becomes obvious that being a man does not necessarily protect you from violence.

Thus, transmasc liberalism often tries to bargain with gender essentialist beliefs, arguing that we’re not really men, that sometimes we’re actually more substantially Not-Men than trans women are and therefore trump the contributions that trans women make. The transmasc liberal is vaguely aware that we are somehow different from cis men and cis women but becomes upset if we’re not treated as men, or we’re not treated as women, or we’re not treated as some other kind of gender category. We’re gendered chameleons, unable to find a home, unable to understand that shared experiences with others does not negate our own gendered experience.

The waffling between how we understand our gender also appears in the aftermath of conflicts and transmasc liberalism-induced fits. Cis people are painted as violently transphobic; trans women are painted as “male-socialized”, as predators, as too triggering for someone with male-induced trauma. In the latter situation, it generally comes off as a game of projection, a way to cope with the weight of being trans by dumping it on a group who is more vulnerable, generally speaking. Once again, as Bhatt says in Degendering and Regendering, “The transfeminized serve as examples of what happens to gender traitors.”

In the final paragraph of TERFs, Trans Mascs, and Two Steve Feminism, Doyle asks: “Is your feminism about uplifting ‘women’ and putting them on the same level as ‘men’ on some imaginary playing field? Or is it about ending patriarchal oppression?” I’m sure Doyle and I would both agree that we’re interested in the latter. But transmasc liberalism -- Faux Steve Feminism -- does not expand our knowledge of patriarchy, nor does it provide a way out.

Related Readings

Black Trans Writers

Please note: the purpose of this section is to promote perspectives of Black trans writers as related to my earlier section on Hortense Spillers. This does not mean all these writers necessarily agree with each other or even with what I have written. However, I want to promote perspectives related to the intersection between anti-Blackness, race, gender, and transness from individuals who are knowledgeable and write about it more in-depth.

• For Those Seeking or in Flight: Black Trans*feminist Nihilism by g

• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton

• Writing from Nsámbu Za Suékama

• Writing from Marquis Bey

Additional Readings

• Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body - first chapter of Queering the Color Line by Siobhan Somerville

References

Bhatt, T. (2024, Sep 1). The third sex. Substack.

Trans/Rad/Fem

The Third Sex

Introduction: This Machine Builds Fascists…

Read more

2 years ago · 190 likes · Talia Bhatt

Bhatt, T. (2024, October 8). Degendering and regendering. Substack.

Trans/Rad/Fem

The Third Sex

Introduction: This Machine Builds Fascists…

Read more

2 years ago · 190 likes · Talia Bhatt

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). The national intimate partner and sexual violence survey: 2016/2017 Report on victimization by sexual identity. https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/documentation/nisvsreportonsexualidentity.pdf

Doyle, J. (2025, Jan 4). TERFs, trans mascs, and two steve feminism. Jude Doyle. Ghost. https://jude-doyle.ghost.io/terfs-trans-mascs-and-two-steve-feminism/

Lauritsen, J, and Heimer, K. (2012). Gender and Violent Victimization, 1973-2005 [United States] (ICPSR 27082) [Data set]. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36966.v1

Lerner, G (1987). The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford University Press.

Serano, J. (2016). Whipping Girl: A Transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity (2nd ed.). Seal press.

Spillers, H.J. (1987). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. In Warhl-Down, R. & Herndl, D.P. (Eds.), Feminisms REDUX: An anthology of literary theory and criticism. (pp. 443 - 464). Rutgers University Press.

Xu, Y., & Zheng, Y. (2017). Does Sexual Orientation Precede Childhood Sexual Abuse? Childhood Gender Nonconformity as a Risk Factor and Instrumental Variable Analysis. Sexual Abuse, 29(8), 786-802. https://doi.org/10.1177/1079063215618378

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