They Keep Telling Us Our Transness Is Harmful & Avoidable
As illustrated by an Idaho law and a proposed Arkansas law. They seem to think transness can be flushed down the shower drain.
Yesterday, I wrote about a court ruling that upheld Idaho’s public school bathroom ban on trans students.
The day before, I wrote about a proposed Arkansas law that would allow trans people and their parents to sue anyone for having affirmed the trans person’s gender before they were 18.
Today, I woke up with an insight about those two things.
(Sometimes the water that swirls down the shower drain coughs itself back up and swirls out upside down and backwards.)
The Idaho court ruling doesn’t imagine how trans people *who continue in their post-transition gender identity* will be hurt by trans-exclusivity.
The Idaho court ruling effectively puts a higher burden of proof on trans people. It acknowledges that cis and trans students have shared public school bathrooms for years and that there’s no evidence of a trans student ever causing a problem. Yet it also says that, nevertheless, it’s perfectly fair and reasonable for cis people to make a law kicking the trans students out of the shared bathroom.
Supposedly, this is just common sense on the part of cis people who are astutely predicting how they may be harmed in the future; the court doesn’t listen to, empathize with, or trust trans people’s common sense on what will harm us.
So it’s allowing the anti-trans law to take effect. Cis people are not right now asked to prove that they’ve been harmed by trans-inclusivity. In the future, the burden will fall on any trans students who may be harmed by the law to file a new court case and prove how trans-exclusivity has harmed them.
The proposed Arkansas law imagines how trans people *who regret or question their transition, or whose parents do* will have been hurt by trans-inclusivity.
The proposed Arkansas law seems to rely on a broad credulity that many unspecified harms have happened or will happen and ought to be rectified. Because the proposed victim is an imagined “trans child,” this may at first seem to contrast with the Idaho law, but ultimately it does neatly fit into it.
Here’s the intention behind the Arkansas bill: If you call a child by their preferred name and pronouns or you help them with their preferred clothes or hairstyle, and if your acknowledgment or assistance can be considered part of their “social transition” to a new gender, and if at any point as much as 20 years down the road the child (who’s now an adult) or their parents (imagine that!) decide that their social transition was harmful to them, they can sue you for $10,000 (minimum) for having harmed that child.
In case that’s confusing, here it is again: Your alleged misdeed was your affirmation of the child’s gender, since in the plaintiff’s opinion the child’s gender became harmful to them, so now you’re on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars for complicity in someone else’s transness.
The proposed law doesn’t say what kind of harm must have occurred nor how plaintiffs must prove it. To me it seems the unstated assumption is that it’d be fairly easy to persuade an Arkansas judge that a trans person is harmed by our own transness and therefore that trans-inclusive people have been complicit in that harm.
These laws are two sides of of the same coin
In the first example, trans-exclusive law is seen as benefiting cis people and is not seen as categorically harmful to trans people. Self-accepting trans people are told we won’t be believed until we narrate, incident by incident, exactly how legal exclusion has personally harmed us.
In the second example, trans-inclusive attitudes are expected to be harmful to kids and teens who are imagined to have had the capacity to turn out cis until meeting a trans-inclusive person who improperly encouraged them to be trans. Trans people with internalized transphobia along with the unaccepting parents of trans people are given the hint that they need only ask a judge for money and they’ll get their payday. Meanwhile, the proposed law intends to scare potential trans allies into refusing to affirm any trans child’s gender.
Together, these imply that transness (simply being trans) is harmful to cis and trans people alike.
They contain no corresponding or competing concept of how cisness (not simply being cis, but rather cis supremacy) might be harmful to cis and trans people alike.
While we’re here, by the way, I share this item from my to-be-read list: last year’s anthology Feminism Against Cisness, edited by Emma Heaney. I anticipate it will provide insights along these lines, though of course I won’t be able to prove it in court until it will have happened to me personally.
They think they control the transness. They don’t.
We all — cis, trans, nonbinary, queer, endosex, intersex, whoever we are—live in our societies where we’re influenced by a multitude of gendered behaviors and expectations. Gender is presented to us. Happily or unhappily, consciously or not, we all absorb it. We each make something unique of it. We don’t really control our own genders for ourselves, and we certainly don’t control other people’s genders for them.
Gender gets flushed down everyone’s drain.
Trans people cough gender back up — upside-down, backwards, and in technicolor — which makes everyone notice gender a little bit more.
This makes some people very mad at the trans people.
They flushed gender down the collective drain and received something back from someone they didn’t expect.
So, this time, they try to flush transness down the trans person’s drain.
Which will not work.
This nonworking outcome is predictable. If we trans people digest, resist, and alchemize maleness and femaleness in a way they don’t like, why do they try to feed our own transness back into that process?
What do they expect we’ll do with our transness when we eat it?
Telling us not to be trans makes us ever more trans.
Tucker Lieberman keeps saying this. tuckerlieberman.com
