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Your Culture War Against Transphobia Harms Trans People
I transitioned back in the Aughts. Most of the cisgender people in my life were baffled. I remember a good friend, a cis man who always expressed support for my choice and never said a hateful word, still admitting it really made no sense to him. He simply could not grasp the impulse. But that wasn’t an issue between us. After all, I was the one transitioning, not him. Wherever my need to do so came from, it wasn’t any threat to him. We remained friends because we had a baseline of trust. He knew I wasn’t bothered by his gender identity. I knew he didn’t have a problem with mine.
Since then, it’s become an axiom of pro-trans social justice that no cis person can truly empathize with a trans person. The gap in relative privilege is too big to allow that intuitive leap. Over the last five years or so, loudly supporting trans people and abominating TERFs has become as ubiquitous in woke circles as loving Beyonce and despising Jordan Peterson. But the new pro-trans norm hasn’t made cis people any more willing to admit they don’t understand why people transition.
See, the impulse to transition is physical. You experience it in the body — the ache of an anatomy that your brain simply can’t reconcile, the jarring wrongness every time you realize someone is slotting you into an unworkable category, like how getting hit in the head…