121 Things I Want Cis Men to Stop Doing

Conveniently, all of them are sentences in the same article by the same cis man.

Tucker Lieberman
44 min readMay 12, 2021

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Silhouette of a man awkwardly standing on his head against a rainbow vortex background.
I feel like we’re standing on our heads. Silhouette by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay, Background by Tucker Lieberman.

The author Andrew Sullivan has antagonized trans people before. In 2007, he said the “gay rights establishment” should drop transgender people from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (legislation that has been proposed for nearly five decades now) since, he argued, the legislation stood a better chance of passing if it did not attempt to protect transgender people, who are not, in his view, “so important.” In September 2019, he wrote for the Intelligencer that he had been “mildly gender-nonconforming” as a boy and teased as a “girl” and thus he publicly worried that he “might never have found the happiness of being gay and comfort in being male” if he had been labeled as a trans girl. In his view, “the extremism of the new transgender ideology also risks becoming homophobic,” because supposedly it is intolerant of gender nonconformism and rushes to make people switch genders. In November 2019, the Intelligencer published his article examining teenagers who identified as trans boys but who later detransitioned and chose to live as women.

So it was little surprise to see his April 9, 2021 article on Substack headlined A Truce Proposal In The Trans Wars.” Ultimately it’s about the extent to which the government ought to ban children’s medical access to transition (puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery). He is minimally informed on this topic, but he is pretty sure that there needs to be a law against trans kids.

Wait: “The Trans Wars”? As if living as a trans person is like taking a side in Star Wars. As if trans people want to be in a war rather than just have their gender. And as if the solution, when enemies attack your right to exist, is to propose a truce. He subtitled his article: “There is a compromise available. Here’s one version.” The purpose of his article is to propose how he, a cis man, would compromise away trans people’s rights. He seems to think that is important to do. Primarily because he is vexed by the noise of the Star War. Also, because he thinks that the Other Side has some kind of a valid point.

The opinion that follows, at least in the version publicly available to non-subscribers, is over 2300 words.

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Tucker Lieberman

Editor for Prism & Pen. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." https://tuckerlieberman.com/