Thanks for this. I'm increasingly hearing the anti-trans people lean into this idea of "fakeness."
Of course it's an old anti-trans prejudice that trans people aren't "really" our gender and are somehow "artificially" remaking our bodies to "deceive" others. That prejudice has existed in various cultures and times, going back forever, even when certain people have lacked words for trans.
But it was only last year that it began to click for me that anti-trans people are using the modern word "trans" as a cognitive shortcut for "fake."
I first noticed it in Peter Boghossian's video interview last year, in which he says: "I don’t want to say ‘actually trans,’ because I don’t even know what that means...I translate the word ‘trans’ in my head as ‘fake,’ cause I get mixed up by the words.”
When he came right out and said it, that was when the lightbulb went on for me. The anti-trans movement is building their anti-trans tropes around the assumption that trans is a synonym for fake.
Doing so heightens scrutiny of anyone "suspected" of being trans through questions like "How do we know who's trans?"
If that question were asked only by psychologists with a professional interest in maximizing everyone's long-term gender happiness, it would be an unusual question to be asked by those transition gatekeepers alone. Or, in another version, "How do I know I'm trans?" which is about trans and nonbinary people predicting our own happiness regarding our life choices.
But once trans starts to mean fake, then everyone will start asking "How do we know who's trans?", because it translates as "How do we know who's fake?" That's a very different question.
