We Need to Talk About Trans Panic
It's about upholding the gender binary and patriarchal power
The first trans people I ever met were at church.
Okay, not just any church. A hippie, liberal church in a hippie, liberal city. There were two trans women married to each other, and they were kind and friendly to a shy and kind of awkward newcomer like myself. I was in my early twenties at the time, and I’d just recently shifted my views on “homosexuality,” as I called it then. It was eye-opening for me to develop an acquaintanceship with these women who were triple my age – who were mostly concerned with their aging bodies, their health, their grandchildren. You know – normal people things. Not some radical trans agenda.
It strikes me how many of the trans people I’ve known have been – well – kinda old. I say that not with any negativity (because I’ve always been the young adult kid who’s hanging out with people far beyond my years), but because people have been trans for…ever. Anti-trans activists like to make it seem like it’s just “Kids these days!” and the liberal left that just made up being trans, but that’s not the case.
Have they ever met a trans person? Have they ever heard them talk about the struggles they’ve experienced – both internally, wrestling with an internal gender identity that’s different than how they present on the outside – and externally, facing a society that often actively discriminates and recently even would attempt to legislate them out of existence?
It is true that more ‘kids these days’ are identifying as trans and non-binary: recent surveys estimate 2% of people under 30 are trans and another 3% are nonbinary. 1.9% of 30- to 49-year-olds are trans or nonbinary, and only .3% of those over 50 are. (Which makes it pretty wild how many of that .3% of the population I’ve met!). So is it just a cultural phenomenon? Much more likely is that our culture is becoming a little more open to difference, and people have a little more freedom to be the person they were all along. And that younger people are tired of playing by the “rules” of the gender binary and see different options for themselves.
Anti-trans as a coordinated political effort
The Right Wing is getting a lot of mileage these days around raising a panic around issues of sexuality, most notably “transgenderism,” as they call it. As
(trans woman and writer of ) points out,"transgenderism" is not, typically, a word that trans people actually use to describe ourselves and our experiences -- and for good reason: the people who do use it do so as a way to frame transgender people not as individuals who happen to be trans, but as reality-detached adherents to an ideology.”
I highly suspect that most of the people freaking out about the existence of trans people have not, in fact, met a trans person in real life – as in, known them, spoken with them, had a friendship with them. Trans people are instead reduced to an ideology to attack, and more importantly, a group they can point at as dangerous while they circle their wagons, fear-monger their followers, and gather more power for themselves.
The efforts are highly coordinated, and many of them emerge from a conservative Christian political agenda. Legal groups like the Alliance for Defending Freedom1 strategize about how to curtail the rights of LGBTQ people and women. They do this under the guise of “protecting girls” (super weird since they weren’t interested in that up until girls were needed as pawns) and “parental rights” (for parents who don’t believe trans kids should exist).
If you grew up evangelical or some other subset of fundamentalist religion, you are probably aware of how coordinated the efforts are. I know names like ADF, the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and the Family Research Council were quite familiar in my own growing up. (When I learned a new perspective on these groups as an adult, it was quite an ‘ohhhh’ moment). They make a lot of noise about defending “family” and “traditional” values.
But what these groups are excellent at actually doing is creating an enormous moral panic over people who are trying to live their lives (“living their lives” gets distorted into “having an agenda”). Because why? Why is it such a threat to the conservative Christian agenda? They’re Christian so it must have something to do with following the ways of Jesus, I’m sure. I’m just sure.
A personal anecdote
I was born a girl into an evangelical family, but one where neither of my parents were highly masculinized or feminized in the stereotypical American way. I would say my gender identity and expression are a little on the feminine side of androgynous. This was normal within my family and I had no reason within our unit to feel like I was wrong or weird. And for what it’s worth, I’m incredibly grateful for this element of growing up.
The religious culture I grew up in, though, had strong beliefs about gender roles. I noticed at church that women seemed to think it was really important to dress up, wear makeup, and curl their hair. I noticed they weren’t allowed to be in leadership at all – not just by chance, but because those were the God-ordained rules. I noticed they were mostly celebrated for their roles as mothers. The one day a year they were allowed to speak from the pulpit was Mother’s Day… to share stories about being mothers.
Several years ago, when we first moved to our small town, kind churchgoers who wanted to help me get connected thought I might like to meet other pastor’s wives. (In case you missed it, yes, my spouse, who is a man, is a pastor). False. I do not want to meet pastors’ wives because most of the time I find that shit boring. I’ve told my husband numerous times I’d rather meet with his pastor group (there’s a small handful of not-super-conservative pastors in town that he gathers with regularly), where we could talk about interesting things like theology or society.
In what I’m about to say, I’m not suggesting that people who present as more feminized, or who are more wholeheartedly devoted to their role as mothers, or who in other ways adhere to the gender binary can’t do the same things I’m doing here2.
But also: it’s because I say ‘fuck off’ to gender roles that I allow myself time and mental space to devote to writing and thinking instead of focusing entirely on my kids. It’s because I truly don’t care about the time-consuming appearance stuff and feminized self-care that I carve out enough time to read and write and network instead. It’s because I try, in as many ways as I can, to say ‘screw you’ to the patriarchy that I feel able to make space for conversations like this one.
Even as I write that, I wonder what else I might have done with my life. What other choices I might have made if I had felt that the entire array of options were available to me, instead of being unconsciously guided towards service and care work and heterosexual expectations?
If you can tell a woman what she should be, you can control her. If you limit her choices, you can control her. If you can separate all of humanity into two tidy boxes labeled “male” and “female” and put certain characteristics into each of those boxes, you can create a world where one of those boxes holds the official power and the other box gets to do the often silent and unpaid work of holding up the system3.
The Christians who want the gender binary with firmly defined roles to exist will pretend it’s God’s will: “sorry, don’t shoot the messenger!” “Male and female ‘He’ created them.” Well, there are plenty of queer, feminist, womanist, and other theologians who would have plenty of pushback to those ideas – I won’t dive into it here. Growing up, I only knew about one kind of acceptable theology, and that was of white men. Fortunately, once you poke your head outside those boundaries, you discover a whole new world of thinking.
I don’t want to be limited by the gender roles that someone else has prescribed for me – and most definitely not that the Christian Right has prescribed for me.
It’s interesting to observe how in the writing of the previous paragraphs, how cool and empowering it is to articulate my gender identity and expression and say “hey, this is me.” And if I feel that way — as a cis-gender person who uses the pronouns assigned to me—how much more empowering would it feel for someone who gets to claim that for maybe the first time? I have seen the relief and joy that comes across my trans and other gender-bending clients when they can express themselves on the outside the way they feel on the inside.
Why would we not want that for everyone?
[P.S. What do you think: Do we need a Part 2 about trans panic and purity culture / sexuality, not just the gender binary and patriarchy??]
If you liked today’s post, would you press the “heart” button, leave a comment, or share it with a friend? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. What messages - implicit or explicit - did you receive about the trans community growing up? What have you done to broaden your education? What are your thoughts and personal experiences with gender roles and the gender binary, as it currently (or historically!) stands in our society?
I don’t want to link to these groups - you can Google - but when I looked up ADF, their home page featured a young female soccer player, because as we all know, most trans girls are becoming girls just so they can dominate the girls’ sports teams, and therefore, we need to protect our cis girls. (*dripping with sarcasm*)
For instance,
is one of my favorite Substack writers, and she writes a newsletter called . It's about everything home-related, which is often coded as feminized, and she makes the case that these are essential parts of our collective lives that need to be appreciated more. She writes about lots of other topics, too. Please check her out!One more Substack writer recommendation:
writes the newsletter where she deeply explores patriarchy, misogyny, and the roles that women in our society are often forced to play.
This was a fantastic essay! I feel so seen! I really related to what you said about wanting to have “interesting” conversations with the men instead of being shuffled off to the wives. My husband is a PhD student and I think I similarly feel a sense of 1) fear that I’ll be shunted into dishes, childcare, and entertaining instead of getting to talk about ethics and art and so on and 2) a sense of entitlement that counteracts that fear and that makes me assert my right to exist in those intellectual spaces. I also really appreciated your thought about trans people not having an agenda other than to exist as themselves.
When I feel my inability to feel at home in my gender’s expectations, I waver between thinking that the box for female is too narrow and thinking that maybe I don’t fit squarely in that box. Maybe it’s some of both. But I would love to hear more of your thoughts about your female-leaning androgynous presentation and how you process that!
I am so here for a part 2.
Thanks for writing this - I'm sure there's a lot more to say, especially about how gendered expectations are a burden on all of us to some extent: for example, I was always the quiet boy who would rather be reading than kicking a ball around.