Why Don’t We Advocate For Trans Rights?
A few weeks ago, I came across this post by Instagram user Emily Cooper. She essentially just lists off some generally leftist political talking points - "Gay people should be able to get married", "Biden won in 2022" (apparently not believing in conspiracy theories is a political opinion now), "Abortion is healthcare", nothing too out of the ordinary.
One thing she said stuck out to me though: All of those are statements that imply policy, such as legalising gay marriage or treating abortion as healthcare (which in a sane country would mean that insurance has to cover it). The notable exception is "Trans people are valid". She doesn’t say "Trans people deserve healthcare", not even the classic slogan "Trans rights are human rights", just "Trans people are valid".
This is a general thing you may have noticed - The Political Discourse™️ about transgender people is rarely about actual politics and much more often about the philosophical question of "Is a trans woman a woman?". No matter your Opinion™️ on that, I think we can all agree that it doesn’t really matter?
Sure, it is annoying and I do sometimes get upset when someone misgenders me, deliberately or not. But do you know what else is annoying and upsets me way more? Having had to wait for 1.5 YEARS before getting the medication I need (and by the standards of some countries, that’s basically a speedrun).
Do you know what else is also annoying and upsets me more? Currently waiting for Some Guy™️ at the MD (essentially the institution that decides whether your insurance has to pay for things) to decide whether I get to have a surgery several psychologists agree I need, based not just those psychologists’ evaluations, but also the Some Guy™s personal opinion of me after having read what essentially amounts to a trans CV (which they explicitly requested, despite it being optional).
One last one, do you know what also also annoys and upsets me way more than getting misgendered by a random stranger? Under current German law, I’d have to spend somewhere above 1000 Euros, get myself evaluated by two "experts" (who are known to often exploit the power imbalance this creates) and then have a judge review all that just to get my legal name changed.
For none of those does it matter whether you believe I’m a Real Woman™ or not. It’s nothing new that granting trans people the above treatments reduces our rates of suicide and depression00568-1/fulltext), and shouldn’t it be the goal of policy to stop problems like those and ensure everyone gets their chance at life?
Those are substantial issues of policy, not just in Germany, that we could discuss and resolve instead of philosophising about whether I’m a woman. So why don’t we?
One thing that applies to whether you think a trans woman is a woman that doesn’t apply to how the state treats said trans woman is that single word: "You". The ways our medical system fails trans people doesn’t affect you, or any cis people for that matter, at all, and neither does the law for transgender people changing their names. But when it comes to how you view a trans woman or, god forbid, what pronouns you use for her, suddenly you’re getting all involved in this trans thing! And that’s what the whole conservative spiel of "refusing to use pronouns" or "what is a woman" plays off of - telling you that trans people want to control you, want to make you do things. You don’t want to be commanded to do anything, do you? So it’s time to knock these trans down a peg!
That’s why, when I enter "transgender" into the google search bar (on a barely used chrome install in german), "transgender im sport" (transgender in sports) comes up as a suggestion several entries above "transgender gesetz" (transgender law) or even "transgender operation" (transgender surgery - a field cis people tend to be overly curious about in my experience). When I enter "trans person", there aren’t any law related suggestions coming up at all - but variations of "trans person or transperson" (i.e. what language to use for trans people) and of course "trans person in sports" do, because those are the things that could even remotely affect a cis person and are thus the most googled ones.
The sports one is an especially silly example for this - in fact, what prompted me to finally write this was being asked to weigh in on it. I say silly because, if we take a step back, how many people are actually affected by it? Only a small part of the population does competitive sports to begin with, only part of that is in sports where sex-related differences in strength even have the potential to be relevant (and no, chess doesn’t count), and then only a tiny fraction of that is at a professional level where this difference could matter, and then in those tiny parts of the world of sports only an even smaller amount of transgender people actually participate. And even then, so what? What does it matter who wins at some tournament? And even if it does matter to you (which is pretty probably the only way it could ever affect you), then you still have to prove that trans women have a substantial advantage to begin with - and I know pretty damn well how much weaker I’ve gotten since I started taking estrogen.
But all those things don’t matter, because then that potential advantage is used as a reason to ban trans people from... students’ sports. Where we aren’t at such a pro level that every little advantage you get makes a huge difference, where who wins matters even less (aren’t kids supposed to have fun?), where in some cases the kids aren’t even old enough for any difference to have evolved to begin with, or where those differences are way overshadowed by teenagers developing at vastly different speeds no matter the sex.
It’s almost like the whole thing is just used as a wedge issue to exclude trans people from social life, and people don’t actually care about women’s sports (which also shows in how this is the only "problem" with women’s sports being discussed this publicly, while actual problems such as female athletes earning way less are barely addressed).
And that’s why my answer regarding trans people in sports was that I refuse to give an opinion on it. Because it doesn’t matter, and we have way more important problems to solve when it comes to transgender people. That in turn is why conservatives love to jump on these non-issues: It gives them something to discuss and have an opinion on, without having to deal with actual politics.
If you take away one thing from this post, let it be this: When talking politics, think about what problems you’re trying to solve, and who’s offering solutions to said problems.
Edits:
- 2023-12-10: Fix a typo and add missing content notes
- 2023-02-13: Switch nitter link to a different instance as nitter.net is down permanently