Trans People Are Who They Say They Are

Do they differ much from your sex in mind behavior? Are they like a different species?
'No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important. I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one is born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners—almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing...'
Equality is not the general rule, then? Are they mentally inferior?
'I don't know. They don't often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers. But it isn't that they're stupid. Physically they're less muscular, but a little more durable than men. Psychologically—'
After he had stared a long time at the glowing stove, he shook his head. 'Harth,', he said, 'I can't tell you what women are like. I never thought about it much in the abstract, you know, and—God!—by now I've practically forgotten. I've been here two years... You don't know. In a sense, women are more alien to me than you are. With you, I share one sex, anyhow..."
From "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin

We live in a dangerous time for women. And for trans people.

This is not new, of course. It's also (as much as ever) fair to say that we live in a dangerous time for all people. But the danger is particularly true for women, and for trans people, in a way that isn't true for cis men.

Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important.

Recently, as well as always, there has been bitter infighting about how to navigate the dangerous moment we're in for women, queer people, and trans people. How marginalized people and those who support them should best advocate for the expansion of their rights and oppose reactionary forces trying to contract them. Precisely how a struggle for dignity and material survival should be conducted, in other words.

I'm a debate kid at heart, and a reluctant lover of discourse, so I'm drawn to places where this fight gets re-fought time and again. Someone I follow and respect partially for her takes on these sorts of things, but also because she says things that surprise and confuse me sometimes, is Cassie Pritchard, who recently wrote a piece arguing that the trans movement should focus on advocating for material rights instead of philosophical agreement with their claims about gender.

I, someone who presents as a man, always has, and loves to argue, have some thoughts about this piece. I think Cassie makes some solid points about the ways that trans political advocacy hasn't had perfect strategic clarity, material vision, or rhetorical integrity (shocker!)

I also think we need far more than those things, and the politics Cassie presents, while strategically correct and useful, is inadequate for creating the world I want to live in and believe is possible, whether in my lifetime or in several. Cassie's argument is correct in a narrowly focused sense, but meaningfully incomplete, in that when we take her as talking about politics in general, she's essentially saying "we don't have to convince people that we're right about who we are to win".

Call me an idealist, or call me a naive academic who loves discourse, but I do actually believe that trans people, and transfeminists in general, are correct about who trans people are. Not just "valid", not just "deserving of equal protection under the law", not just "technically right in the abstract", but importantly correct on the basic merits about the biological and social reality of the world we live in, what it means to be a certain type of person, and how to make our world better for all people.

I'm under no illusions that the broader society agrees with this transfeminist perspective. The polling Cassie cites is clear, and subjectively, it makes complete sense to me that most cis people don't really believe in slogans like "trans women are women" as factual descriptions of reality, but understand them more as assertions of an abstract ideology that is a little out of touch with reality. I fully believe many cis people are politely playing along because they do think trans people, despite not really being the gender and sex they claim to be, still deserve dignity and human rights. The case I want to make today doesn't rely on people already agreeing with us, even if they say they do. I believe it is very possible, perhaps even inevitable, in the long run, to convince people we are actually correct, and it would be extremely foolish of us to abandon that fight in our politics generally.

Cassie isn't interested in making this case, and that's fine, but I am. I've been that cis liberal politely playing along — but I've been transformed into someone else by the people around me, through this kind of politics. I agree with Sally Rooney that "people really can change one another", and I believe it is worth it to try, not just as a matter of curating "a good social life and secure friendships" as Cassie puts it, but as a matter of political practice, of negotiating my social and physical relationship with the larger world around me.

Winning electoral and legal battles is crucially important, and defending a more free, more equal, and more protected future for trans people in the next few years (yes, it is defense we're mostly playing right now) is essential not just for the good it will bring, but to create the conditions for winning the larger cultural battle for thoroughgoing acceptance. To secure these material victories, we will have to fight in many of the ways Cassie describes.

But to continue building a world in which every person is free to define their own sex and gender and to live the life they want to live, we must continue to make the case that we are correct on the merits, because we are, and it is very possible to win on these grounds too.

Maybe I should start this more personally.

When I was a kid, there was this ancient concept called "screen time", and I was only allowed an hour of it a day. My favorite way to spend it was watching Disney movies on our VCR, to date myself even further. Normal kid stuff.

One evening, while my dad was making dinner in the kitchen, I was staring at my reflection in the glass door that opened onto our back porch. I started pretending to be one of the characters from these movies, Mulan. I pretended to hold my curved sword, ready to fight the bad guys. I was probably about 4. I didn't feel ready to go off to war like she had in the movie, but I hoped I would be that brave and powerful one day. One of my favorite songs was Reflection, where Mulan worries that becoming her true self will never be enough to make her family proud.

"Now I see... that if I were truly to be myself... I would break my family's heart...

As I moved around with the sword, looking into my reflection in the glass, that song started playing in my head, and I started mimicking Mulan's graceful jumps over the bridge as she sings that lyric (little kids are suckers for some good parkour). That transitioned into me dancing to the song in my head, imagining I was wearing the dress she'd worn in that scene, moving as gracefully as she did while singing and fighting the bad guys.

"WHAT are you doing?? STOP THAT."

I flinched and froze. That was the voice my dad only ever used if he was really scared I was doing something dangerous, like walking into the street without looking both ways. I stopped, completely jarred and taken out of my silly playtime. That's all I remember. I assume a few minutes later dinner was ready and we sat down, had some delicious pasta, and all was better to my 4-year-old brain.

I was raised in a progressive household. I was taught that both boys and girls can both grow up to be anything they want to be, and that hating people who are different from you is wrong, even though lots of people do it.

I've always been close friends with lots of girls, and found them easy to relate to. Probably watching movies like Mulan, and having parents who didn't make weird jokes (like some people did, and I definitely heard) about two kids of different genders hanging out together surely getting married when they were older helped with that.

But at some point, your identity stops being entirely explainable by your parents' choices and starts to be indicative of the random brain chemistry we all get handed. Your personality becomes yours. I've continued to find it very easy to relate to and become close with women, and they've continued to make up about half or more of my closest relationships for most of my life. It would never occur to me to describe women as "alien" to me like the ambassador Genly Ai does, trying to explain his home culture to an actual alien from a society who reproduce by randomly becoming a different sex once a month.

One thing is for sure though: The future always looks alien to the past.

I don't think anyone back in 1996 when I was born would have guessed that I'd live my entire adult life in a world where young people identify as trans at seven times the rate of my parents' generation (0.4% 35-64 vs. 3% 13-24).

I certainly didn't expect for most of my childhood or adolescence that one day I'd be one of them.

Despite that Mulan story reading as extremely trans coded, growing up I never felt particularly pressed about not being able to do girly things or act in feminine ways. I've always been pretty comfortable with how my body feels, and with what gender norms allow me to be and do. I love sports, I like videogames, and being argumentative and competitive and "rational". I like the idea of stoicism and self-sufficiency, and I've always been exclusively romantically and sexually attracted to women. Yes, I think gender roles are unjust, and women can like and be all of these things too—I'm obviously a feminist, but that's just because being one makes you a decent human. Duh.

As a good male feminist, I decided to take an Intro to Women and Gender Studies class in sophomore year of college. My only really distinct memory from that class was on one of the first days, when our professor drew two big circles on the board: "Men/Boys" and "Women/Girls". They asked us to list out, stereotypically, behaviors, interests, and values that went in each category.

It was not difficult to fill these circles out. Trucks and sports and action figures went in the boys' category, dolls, cooking, and makeup into the girls'. Being loud, being strong and confident and independent, being aggressive and angry, strategic and goal-oriented, protecting the weak and providing for those around you were for men. Being emotionally intelligent, sensitive, caring and nurturing, loyal, soft, and gentle, considering all perspectives, being selfless were for women.

"Obviously, these are all a mix of good and bad things. But let's assume we're describing what you should strive for if you're trying to be a good person in either of these categories."

Our professor circled the traits and values that generally had positive connotations: Confidence. Being selfless. Being loyal. Protecting the weak. Being strong and independent. Being emotionally intelligent. Being caring and nurturing.

"If we're trying to define "good masculinity" or "good femininity", which of these traits do we want to exclude from either category? Clearly there must be a difference if we're saying there are two distinct categories, but we also believe it's possible to be a good person in either of them. Should a good woman not be strong and independent? Should a good man not be loyal or caring?"

I don't remember what was said that day, but I do know that I wasn't satisfied with any of the answers, and still haven't heard a satisfactory answer to this day. What makes me not just a good person, but a good man, specifically?

A few years later, at my first job out of college, I became friends with one of my coworkers, Megan. She was nonbinary and despite being one million years older than me (26 vs 22), seemed to be really keen to be friends. She constantly made jokes about gender that I could tell our other coworkers reluctantly put up with, and vented about things like the head of our department sending out emails that said "this isn't a 40-hour-a-week job". Her willingness to be herself, and what I saw it cost her, made me feel like I wasn't crazy for wanting to get away from that place. Megan left a few months before I did, and it just so happened that we both ended up in New York and looking for an apartment around the same time. Mora, Derek and I moved in with them and one of their friends, a woman named Maia, and we lived together for the first year I was in NYC. She still lives in my neighborhood and I see her occasionally!

Megan mostly presented as a woman and was comfortable with she/her pronouns, but was also comfortable reminding everyone that they weren't a woman. They would say things people make fun of queer kids on tik tok for saying like "nonbinary people don't owe anyone androgyny", and generally joked about convincing all of us that we were trans too. Seeing someone so simply and proudly renounce their assigned sex at birth without making apologies for it or trying to pre-control how people saw her but instead just telling them directly how to treat her, how to talk about her, how to view her, was eye-opening for me. This was the first time I really started thinking that maybe I was actually something other than a cis man. Maybe those kids on tik tok were onto something, actually.

Over the next few years I started following some very smart trans people online, started liking what they had to say about these things, and just found them interesting and kind and brave and thoughtful in general. I began to think of myself as "probably nonbinary".

In my next serious relationship, I told my partner after we'd started officially dating that I was comfortable being seen as a man by most people, but preferred terms like 'partner' to 'boyfriend', and wanted people close to me to see me as a person before seeing me as a man. She was incredibly game for that.

When I had first spent the night in her room, I'd noticed a pride flag on her wall, and was surprised since she'd never mentioned anything about being queer. "I usually don't tell people until I'm comfortable with them because I never know how they'll react".

Earlier that same night, after we'd started making out for the first time, she'd expressed confusion as to why I hadn't made any kind of "moves" to initiate physical affection, and confessed to wondering if I was attracted to her or just continuing to agree to dates to be nice. I pointed out that I hadn't really had any indication that she was into me, beyond her continuing to agree to dates and also never making any "moves". She was one of the kindest and most caring partners I've ever had.

A few years into living in NYC, I downloaded Grindr one night out of curiosity, and filtered it to 'trans'. It was hard to find that many women on there, but living where I did, there were enough that very occasionally I'd find someone who was into me too. I was still dating on apps like Bumble and Feeld, but Grindr was much better culturally about direct communication and lower pressure hookups (Does this make me a "chaser"? If you want to decide it does, go right ahead). I've had some awful experiences on there for sure, but also some really good ones. One in particular stands out.

I had just finished hosting a wonderful friendsgiving potluck at our apartment, and was, unusually for me, still buzzing with social energy and feeling like I wanted someone to be sweet to. As I was going to bed I opened the app, saw an extremely conventionally attractive woman, and messaged her, fully expecting no response:

She came over. I made tea, and we chatted about our lives.

She told me about her polycule in [city], and I told her about my gender and how it had made it hard to figure out how to navigate hetero dating. She asked me "would being called a butch lesbian feel right, do you think?" I said yeah, I'd definitely answer to that. My roommate walked in and I introduced her to Mora. Then we went to my room and had a great time. We still talk.

When I qualified for the Arena Championships, I asked coverage to use they/them pronouns for me. It just felt more right to imagine myself as a player on coverage, not a man.

After I got second at that AC and qualified for Worlds, Ethan Saks, who I'd worked very closely with, suggested I reach out to Sanctum, who he'd worked with for his first Pro Tour as one of their limited "cis guy who we think is cool" slots. Here's how I reached out to Noor:

and Noor responded in a way that made me know Sanctum was a place I was welcome:

Sanctum's culture made it easy to experiment with pronouns. I asked folks to start using he, they, and she interchangeably, and my new friends did so easily and enthusiastically without ever needing to be reminded. They had fun with it. It felt natural and right to me.

Okay, enough personal stuff for now. (I promise it's relevant). It's time to discourse. Here's how Cassie puts her argument:

"The core of my contention is that we need to move away from airy, philosophical debates about the ontology of sex and gender and instead ground our advocacy in common values and clear moral narratives. After years of slogans like “trans women are women” functioning as progressive shibboleths — so rarely explained, so rarely justified through persuasion — it’s time to sideline them from our mass politics. That would mean fewer condescending explainer videos about what gender really is and more straightforward appeals to individual liberty, pluralism, tolerance, care for the disenfranchised, and parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children (including the right to choose youth gender medicine!)."

I agree that there is a time and a place for "airy, philosophical debates", and that electoral politics, in general, is a place to battle over material demands, legal rights, and make coalitional sacrifices anchored to the present moment. But I think Cassie's piece misses that there are other kinds of 'mass politics', ones that seek to transform our world through means other than who we choose to put in office or how we write legislation that will pass today. To confine these forms of politics to 'personal life' is to abandon extremely important tools for ensuring that the playing field of electoral politics remains favorable to advocates for human dignity in the long run.

"I am not interested in policing what cis people think about me. Many think of me as a man. Others think of me as some strange liminal creature between male and female, a “secret third thing,” as the meme goes. A few (I tend to believe very few, but I’m a bit pessimistic by nature) genuinely think of me as a woman, and that’s lovely! I prioritize those people as friends or partners, as human beings generally seek out those who validate our self-conception, who respect our capacity for self-realization.
That said, what makes for a good social life and secure friendships is not necessarily what builds the kind of popular coalitions needed to secure political and material rights, like access to health care.

Look — Cassie, as a trans woman, has it much, much, much (I could say "much" a thousand more times here) harder than me. I believe her that it's a useful framework, for her, to separate the public and political from the private and personal. She gets to choose to be uninterested in policing what cis people think about her, because doing so is, for her and many trans people, a losing personal battle.

But I don't agree with the claim that fighting this battle is merely "what makes for a good social life and secure friendships" (though obviously, those things are as important as anything else).

I don't think the people who helped me on my journey to recognizing my queer identity were engaging in "airy, philosophical debates", and I do think their actions were political ones, even the kinds of actions that can build effective mass politics. "The personal is political" is not a meaningless slogan, it is a strategic fact. The divide in Cassie's essay between "mass politics" and "private beliefs about the ontology of gender" is a false one.

Trans people have secured the rights they have today in part because they have, to some degree, convinced a meaningful enough portion of cis people that they really are who they say they are, and deserve access to things like gender affirming care in order to make their existence livable. They did not secure these rights because they said things like "I personally believe I'm a man, but I understand that you will never see me that way. Nevertheless, you must respect my right to live my life how I wish in private, which includes surgery to change my sex, access to hormones, and being referred to by pronouns that reflect my beliefs about my own gender, even if you disagree, which I know you do and expect you forever will".

The reasons for this are somewhat obvious: There is no such thing as a fully "private" life, particularly when it comes to gender. Gender and sex are performative and socially constructed, not in the "they're fake concepts that aren't real and you can ignore them" sense, but in the "they are constituted by the behaviors people engage in between each other and the ways our bodies are shaped and labeled by both ourselves and by the people around us" sense.

This isn't airy philosophy, despite how it's often portrayed. It's common sense that people grasp on an intuitive level way before they can put words to it. When you ask someone to use particular pronouns when referring to you, you aren't really asking them to "politely respect your private ontology of gender", you're unavoidably affecting how they gender you, an action that has real and measurable social and material consequences. The reason people bristle at this is easy to understand—it forces them to behave in a way that acknowledges how we gender people is both important and flexible, no matter how they react. That's not a philosophical stance, it's a fact about how our social world works — if we treat someone in a particular gendered way, the actions between us and them constitute that person's gender. If we refuse, that doesn't undo their action, it merely responds to it. Cis women are women by accepting the way they are gendered, and trans women are women by changing it. One choice is allowed to be passive, the other forced to be active, but both are the same choice.

People who disagree with this are incorrect about what gender and sex are, and this can be seen by the fact that they make frequent empirical predictions about the world based in their own understandings of these concepts that turn out to be false. These statements include things like "we can always tell when someone is trans", "no straight women would ever be attracted to a trans guy", and "it should be easy to create rules that segregate sports by sex".

Cassie is right, of course, that trying to argue with an antagonistic conservative by saying gender is socially performative and trans women are women is unproductive and rhetorically doomed. But her piece also makes broader claims than that — that the trans rights movement, as it engages in "mass politics", must ground its arguments in personal liberty and civil rights, and must not attempt to challenge popular conceptions of gender.

These strong pro-civil-rights majorities point to the way forward: It’s not merely that we can secure some protections while giving up our (presently) losing issues as lost causes. Almost the entire pro-trans platform can be defended in the moral language of civil rights and American pluralism, rather than via the epistemics of gender identity.

Again, these are important strategic considerations in a particular way. If politics were only what can be accomplished with public sentiment as it is currently reflected in opinion polling, Cassie would be unambiguously correct and there would be nothing more to the story.

But that's simply not all that politics, even 'mass politics', is.

The people who helped me discover my own relationship with gender and sex understood this. Their actions were a complicated mix of public and private, just like all of ours are.

My college professor was teaching a course that presumably was approved by my school, a major and credible academic institution. My coworker was making her identity, one that contradicted her presentation, known publicly to everyone at her place of employment. The trans people I followed on twitter were to varying degrees public figures, sharing intimate details about their lives and how they understood those details to directly contradict commonly held conceptions about sex and gender. My partner agreed to gender me correctly to her parents and to the public at large. My hookup agreed to meet up with a male-presenting stranger who seemed to be on Grindr trying to exclusively find women, and suggested a taboo gender and sexuality label to that stranger. Noor was the official point of contact for a team that competes at professional Magic the Gathering tournaments, a team that had a public facing policy about who was allowed to join based on their gender.

None of that was private — it's the kind of action that constitutes the public world we all share.

The public opinion polling Cassie cites in her piece shows 27% of people supporting gender surgery for minors when deemed medically necessary by doctors, with parental consent. 27% is not 75%, and as a fan of numerical literacy, I agree with Cassie that this is important!

What do we think this number would have been, if it had been polled, back when I was dancing in the kitchen pretending to be Mulan? I certainly think my parents, good liberals who believed boys and girls, though they were fundamentally different types of beings, could both grow up to be anything they wanted to be, wouldn't have been in the (this number is a hypothetical guess!!) 5% who said yes, even if they would be in the 27% today.

Cassie compares her proposed political strategy to arguments for religious liberty:

"I analogize it to the bedrock American principle of religious freedom: Most Muslim or Mormon Americans don’t premise their rights and dignity on everyone necessarily sharing their religious convictions, but on a mutual ethic of noninterference and nondiscrimination. If trans people can make the same kinds of arguments—that we have a common interest in mutual respect despite different beliefs about gender—-we stand a chance at rebuilding the coalitions we need for our security."

The vast majority of Americans do not agree that parents have a right to marry their child off to someone much older—even if doing so is a part of their religious belief system, the child seems okay with it, and their priest signs off on it. This is because we, as a mass society, believe that regardless of the parents' beliefs, this kind of parenting is irreparably harmful to the child's wellbeing.

The reasoning behind many people's opposition to allowing gender surgery for minors with parental and medical consent 25 years ago would have been similar to their opposition to child marriage—even if the child, parent, and doctor all consent, we as a society should step in, because changing someone's sex before they are an adult does them an irreparable harm. We don't accept autonomy arguments if we believe a child is being harmed. Winning these political battles requires changing where people believe the harm lies.

So how was that change in public opinion actually driven?

I don't think it can be explained solely by broad-based appeals to civil rights and bodily autonomy, though the increased visibility these things have granted trans people has certainly been a major part of the shift.

Long before I was born, trans people were fighting tooth and nail, not just to survive and to secure material rights, but to convince others who were not easily convinced that the pain they experienced at being gendered incorrectly was real. That they really were trapped in the wrong body, that the experience of living as the gender they were being forced to live as was, in many cases, worse than death. That the ability to transition was survival.

Understanding this fact changes one's perception of the appropriateness of surgery that changes a child's biological sex characteristics, done with the consent of the child, their parents, and a doctor who has diagnosed them with a medical category we now have: Gender Dysphoria.

At least 27% of people polled today understand at a basic level that living with severe gender dysphoria and being forced to go through a puberty that doesn't align with the way your brain relates to your body is something that some kids kill themselves to avoid experiencing.

This term reflects our understanding of a real, material, non-philosophical way some people's brains function. This understanding was bought with the blood, sweat and tears of countless trans folks who never lived to see such surgeries even be possible. It helps people who otherwise have no way to relate to such an experience understand that such a surgery may in some cases not be an irreparable harm, but actually prevent one.

Arguments based in bodily autonomy and civil rights are insufficient to bring about this understanding. They would have failed to, as Cassie puts it, "build the kind of popular coalitions needed to secure political and material rights, like access to healthcare". To move 5% to 27%, trans people needed to shift cis people's understanding of what gender actually is to something that can be misaligned with one's sex. They didn't do this by seeking to create "a good social life and secure friendships", they did it through political struggle.

Despite Cassie's essay being the catalyst for my writing this piece, I don't want it to be exclusively a response to her.

More broadly, I have seen online trans, queer, and feminist communities, at least the ones I am adjacent to, reacting to the current moment in ways that are understandable and predictable, but counterproductive.

Obviously, some of this can always be chalked up to the nature of online discourse, which skews younger, and is based in short-form communication and feeds dangerously on human psychological tendencies to engage with content that angers them and create community through othering. This is always going to be true — I am specifically talking about the nature of this current political moment, where trans rights and feminist theory more broadly are contending with a politically successful reactionary backlash that has exacerbated and worsened these dynamics.

To put it as bluntly as I can, the pressure of this political moment has exacerbated this (always-present) unproductive splintering along lines of identity and incentivized capitulation to normative conservative ideology that is incoherent on an intellectual level, but deeply driven on an emotional level.

A particularly obvious example of this is the rise in TERFism — mainly cis women who call themselves "radical feminists" and believe that patriarchy is explainable solely along the lines of biology, that trans women are dangerous men attempting to invade women's spaces, and trans men are innocent victims of "trans ideology".

Another is the increasingly pessimistic cishetero dating wars, where men and women are constantly reacting to and creating content meant to convince us that it's impossible for men and women to have healthy, loving relationships based in ethics of equality.

Another is the insistence that "assigned sex at birth" is metaphysically descriptive of one's life experiences beyond having been, well, assigned a certain sex by the society they live in.

Another is a belief in the importance of drawing coherent linguistic lines around terms like "lesbian" or "transsexual", as if we need to prepare answers for antagonistic conservative questions about these terms like we need to prepare an answer for "what is a woman?".

The feeling that conservative cultural values are on the rise leads to a self-perpetuating (and self-harming) cycle among various marginalized communities, where every person, consciously or not, tries to secure a place in the ever-looming reactionary new world order for their own identity groups. The logic of conservatism requires a protected ingroup and a reviled outgroup, which leads these negotiations towards infighting between those already on the margins. This infighting then gets reprocessed by marginalized people as both evidence of the coming doom and justification for it.

What are we to do about this?

Well, it turns out that these are not new problems, and many brave and smart thinkers have already articulated the ways that we can see and move past them. The future is already here, it's just not widely known.

Welcome to "radical transfeminism 101 as explained by Ryan":

Patriarchy is a social, political, and economic system that draws lines around human variation in biology and behavior, creating a dominant "male/man" category and a subordinate "female/woman" category
Patriarchy reinforces itself by asserting the existence of grand metaphysical differences between these categories, differences it maintains are "natural and innate"
While there are coherent and describable patterns within human biology, psychology, and behavior that tend to cluster around two general poles, patriarchy as a system drastically fails to account for the true potential range of human biology and behavior, and must constantly contend with this reality
To maintain its existence, patriarchy attempts to enforce its sacred boundaries through social conditioning, violence, and oppression.
- This includes things like forcibly sexing all bodies into male and female categories, attempting to prevent anyone from transitioning between these categories either socially or biologically, and prescribing the roles one can occupy by one's assigned sex and gender
We are not in a position to know which patterns are truly "natural and innate", and which are in fact produced and maintained by this powerful and deadly social, political, and economic system

These concepts are often portrayed as academic and inaccessible, but I very firmly believe they are not. Understanding these concepts doesn't remove you from our gendered world, it grounds you in it. It lets you see that trans people really are who they say they are, and that radical feminists are not crazy when they talk about every form of oppression in our society flowing, in some way or another, through patriarchy. The trans women I know act like women, think like women, are oppressed as women, and I also happen to be able to confirm that they feel like women and love like women too. "Trans women are women" isn't an ideological assertion, it's an accurate statement about the world, and we can communicate it to each other in simple ways.

The movie Mulan communicates, to children, that violating gender norms can be dangerous (to the point of endangering your own life and the lives of your family), but it can also lead to important self-actualization and better outcomes for all involved, from individual to family to society, if things go well.

My dad, when he used his fearful and forceful tone in response to my visibly out-of-confined-gender-norms behavior, communicated to me "what you are doing is dangerous in the world we live in, and I fear for your safety if you continue to do it". In doing so, he unintentionally also communicated "If being constrained in this way is stifling to your individuality, I want you to accept that stifling because I fear my child being exposed to such danger, and this is not something I'm willing to negotiate about".

My professor (okay, this was admittedly and definitionally an academic interaction), communicated to us that the binary we've been trained to see as natural and innate is importantly incoherent with the characteristics we profess to value in all people.

Megan, by living as an openly nonbinary person in her workplace, demonstrated that it is possible to negotiate in explicit terms about how others in your life treat you, even if your perceived sex and gender presentation doesn't align with the categories they carry internally.

My partner, who accepted my identity without letting it change how she viewed me as a person, showed me that the safety and support of nonjudgmental love is possible to build between two people who don't always communicate perfectly and neither of whom fit exactly within the roles and categories we've been assigned.

My hookup showed me that true intimacy and radical acceptance is possible even between strangers meeting up to have "casual" sex, and it really doesn't have to be all that difficult to find at all.

Noor and the rest of Sanctum communicated in no uncertain terms that I was welcome in their space, a space that was meant for people marginalized by the gender system, and I was allowed to let myself be transformed by that space just as much as I was allowed to stay exactly who I already was (maybe even both).

My life has been beautifully altered and enriched by people who practiced radical transfeminist politics as an entirely unremarkable way of living. People who didn't see a clean divide between their personal identities and the way they related to those around them, even strangers, even people they knew might not see eye-to-eye with them on everything. Some of them were told they were women from the moment they were born, and some were told they were men. All of them realized that the system that gave them this assignment wanted to define who they were and what they could be. They chose to believe they could defy it, in ways that were dangerous, and in ways that were as ordinary and simple as anything we choose to do.

The politics they practiced, though it is often criticized as abstruse, individualistic, and indulgent, was a broadly appealing one of openness, autonomy, and inclusivity. It was a politics that recognized each person is far more than the words we use to describe them or the categories many believe contain them, and that by living authentically and attempting to connect with each other across seemingly great divides, we can transform the world we live in.

That world is already transforming more than most of us dare to believe.

The kids still have the same problems adults always accuse kids of having. They're stupid, immature, and overconfident, prone to being fooled by the same dumb arguments that have fooled humans for decades, and value a bunch of stupid things to value — fame, wealth, status, material possessions, and intellectual shortcuts. They don't know who they are yet and they don't know enough to realize it.

But adults cling to these ways kids are stupid to distract themselves from the ways kids know their world better than they do. These kids have grown up in a much different world from the one my parents grew up in — one where the nature of sex and gender are contentious, where what we should do about the existence of trans people is a live debate, but their existence is just a basic fact.

There's been some backsliding in recent years even in young people's views on how much trans people should be believed and protected in society, but younger people's views on these issues are still quite far from those of previous generations. A huge part of this is that access to medical care and legal protections has made it easier for trans people to live their lives freely in public, but it's also a cultural shift towards understanding gender as a matter of individual identity that can be viewed in different ways by different people. When the kids talk about "chads", "sigma males", "looksmaxxing" and "serving", they're expressing a basic worldview that understands gender and even biological characteristics as identity and performance, even in the cases where that worldview is tainted with toxic ideology at the same time.

Oddly (to some), while the rates of younger people identifying as trans and going through extensive social and medical transitions are still quite low, the rates of young people identifying as nonbinary are pretty high. Some (still brutally marginalized and fearful for their security in the world) trans people view these non-or-minimally-transitioning folks (like me!) as fake trans people who are hurting their legitimacy and shallowly appropriating their struggles in the name of attention-seeking or cultural affiliation. To be sure, being nonbinary doesn't remotely exempt anyone from participating in the social forces that continue to marginalize those of us who desperately need to change how the gender system categorizes them — but I think it would be foolish to see this dramatic shift in how young people conceive of their own genders as irrelevant or harmful to the broader transfeminist project.

For those who don't know, my mom is an adolescent psychiatrist who often treats trans kids. She believes gender dysphoria is real, that hormones and even surgery are medically correct and important for some kids, and is generally an amazing and caring clinician from everything I can tell.

She also is deeply unsure about how far the medical system, at least in progressive strongholds, has gone towards approving gender-affirming care for minors. This is something we've argued about many times.

To be clear, I think my mom's concerns are coming from an extremely good place and are based in her professional ethics more than any conservative leanings. It is true that we don't have high quality long-term studies about the medical effects of childhood puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender affirming surgery across the whole span of a human life, even if regret rates are low. It is true that "do no harm" is a core tenet of medical ethics, and for good reason: the bar for medical treatment for kids that can potentially have permanent, lifelong effects should be decently high, and there are always things that we simply don't know, especially about relatively new forms of medicine.

That being said, I often find her concerns about bone density and fertility, and her beliefs that many of the kids who come to her wanting gender affirming care now, not when they turn 18, to be frustratingly conservative, in both a literal and ideological sense.

Things got pretty real a few Christmases ago when she brought up a Boston Globe interview with a former research director at the Boston Children's Hospital gender clinic. I was refusing to concede that the concerns expressed in the piece were important enough to slow down children's access to gender affirming care, and the rest of my family was confused why I was so adamantly denying what they were saying. Wasn't it just reasonable to make sure the kids who came into the clinic really were in need of this specific kind of care, instead of first needing help with mental health struggles or family issues?

I tried to explain that I just didn't believe, couldn't believe, that getting this gender affirming care was so dangerous as to require "being sure" that the kid "really was one of the ones that needed it", but I couldn't articulate why. I pointed vaguely to my "many friends" who have complicated relationships with their own gender that can't easily be explained to doctors, but it was pointed out that those friends were adults and everyone in my family believed they should get whatever medical treatment they wanted.

I started crying. I knew I wasn't going to be able to explain myself without explaining myself. Not "all my trans friends", but me, my experiences, and why I so personally related to these kids who didn't know what was wrong, couldn't express it in ways that made sense to the systems they were in, but still knew what they wanted. I told them about my memory of dancing to Mulan, and how scary it was for me when dad had reacted the way he did. How I'd always felt like a weird kid who didn't quite fit. How I'd never understood that other people felt completely comfortable with what everyone around them told them they were, a boy or a girl. How I felt for a long time that fighting that system, one that I could exist in with only minor discomfort, was a losing battle and wasn't safe, wasn't worth it. How it was fundamentally inconceivable to me that these kids had chosen to seek out this treatment but were actually naive and misguided about whether it was something they really wanted, really understood what they were getting into.

"I didn't know that's how you felt when you were growing up, and I'm really sorry. Can I ask, and I know this is maybe a stupid question, but I love you and I'm genuinely just trying to understand — why doesn't it work for you to just be a gender nonconforming man? Don't you think some of the reason you felt this way was because you saw how dad could get angry, and you guys fought a lot, and you didn't want to emulate that when you grew up?"

"I kind of do think it's partially that, but I don't think it's a completely fundamentally different thing happening for a lot of trans kids. Yes, maybe I just didn't want to be a man, and at some point, I realized I could choose not to be one. I didn't viscerally feel like I was born into the wrong body and didn't feel like the way everyone was treating me as if I fit this category was unendurably wrong. That's definitely something a lot of trans kids have, and it makes life hell, and lots of them kill themselves rather than keep living through it, in a similar way to how I thought I didn't want to exist if my chronic pain was never going to get better."

"But I don't think there's this clean line between me and them. My brain doesn't see me as a man, and whether that's because my life experiences made me not want to be one, or I already 'wasn't' one on some pre-ingrained biological level, I don't think it matters. It's a choice and it's not a choice. Who you 'really are' isn't completely predetermined, but that doesn't mean it's not real. I think we should trust those kids to choose what they want."

I want women and trans people to win. I want them to believe in the possibility of a world that sees them in any way they want to be seen, a world that holds them accountable for nothing but their own actions and choices, a world where they are treated as equals and not inferiors.

In opening up to my family about my gender, I was inviting them to see parts of me that I had previously hidden and asking them to trust I was right about my own experiences. I chose to believe that their love for me was greater than their fears for me (they generally make this easy to believe). Yes, this was a deeply personal and private moment, but it was also inescapably a political one, in the sense that it had the potential to impact how real trans kids are treated by the medical system. There is no clean line we can draw between policy and acceptance.

That world doesn't exist yet, but I live in it every day. I know what it feels like, because the people around me have shown me what it feels like. It feels scary and destabilizing and normal and obvious. It is confusing to so many and it is so simple a child could understand it. It is feared by most and dreamed of by all. When we let the fear be loud enough to stop that kid from dancing in the mirror, we lose. This world is something we create, together, by being brave and kind, strategic and practical, sincere and thoughtful, rebellious and mischievous.

Building this world in a way everyone can live in will require struggle, and sacrifice, and yes, sometimes compromise and conciliation. But it will also require us not to appease the voice in our own heads that tells us we dream too big, we ask too much, that we reach too boldly for the sky and risk leaving the ground.

We won't forget the ground. But we also cannot forget that wide open sky.

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