Article written by guest contributor Maybe Burke.
Things are scary right now, but they’ve been scary before.
And for many of us, they’ve never stopped.
Transgender people became one of the most hotly discussed topics during the 2024 Presidential campaign. As expected, we are now experiencing the repercussions of that rhetoric.
The serving President of the United States ran on fear and disinformation, which almost exclusively describes his position on trans people. But if you recall, back to his 2016 run he was actually pro trans people, if not decidedly more neutral. During the 2024 campaign we learned that JD Vance once had a close friend who was trans. The latest politician to make waves against trans people, Nancy Mace, had told CBS she was for trans people in 2023. This might not make a lot of people feel better. But knowing that these people don’t actually care about trans people actually comes as a bit of relief to me.
It’s not really about us. It’s about power.
So how did we get here?
I remember back in 2016, when Barack Obama gave his final State of the Union address. My brother texted me during it, celebrating. He was so excited to hear the President of the United States say “LGBT.” We had never heard something like that before. This was just as conversations about trans representation were sparking. It was May of 2014 when Laverne Cox graced the cover of Time Magazine declaring “The Transgender Tipping Point” and June of 2015 when Caitlyn Jenner took the cover of Vanity Fair with her address to the world to “Call Me Caitlyn.” So by January 2016, it felt like amazing progress to hear the President acknowledge us, even if by initial.
Around that same time I remember cisgender people constantly telling me how “lucky” I was as an actor, because “trans people are so in right now.” It felt just as ridiculous to say then as it does to hear now. But I also remember hearing from other trans people who specifically didn’t like the upswing in visibility. People whose lives were becoming more difficult now that our community was coming into new public awareness, not public existence.
Laws targeting trans people, and those who are gender non-conforming regardless, already existed in this country, but they weren’t talked about as openly as they are front and center today.
Before the government adopted slurs, harassment, and discriminatory legislation as the way to treat us, the rise in visibility was enough to raise the level of fear a lot of us held as a baseline. It should be said that representation doesn’t equal visibility. Trans people have become more visible, but that doesn’t mean we’ve been accurately or authentically represented.
People who otherwise were able to live their lives without disruption and not attract a lot of attention were now being noticed in ways that didn’t feel comfortable, or safe. I realized around this time that the more people learned about us, the more people could learn how to attack us if they wanted to. They learned that misgendering is bad, so they use it as a weapon. They learned what not to do, and many chose to do it. To quote Tiq Milan in the documentary Disclosure, “The more we are seen, the more we are violated.”
Gender policing isn’t new. Transphobia isn’t new. None of this is new. The interesting thing here is that, for the first time in many of our lives, we have been able to watch them fully fabricate the bias and hatred against a group of people. It was always there to a degree, but there is a stark difference between the news cycles about anti-trans legislation sweeping the nation in 2024 and the State of the Union that made my brother contact his trans sister to celebrate in 2016.
Trans people weren’t talked about in politics nearly at all eight years ago. And truly nothing happened to change that besides news media picking up stories about trans people and creating sensational headlines to attract readership. There wasn’t a group of trans people harming others and causing panic. We were just living our lives, and gaining a bit more visibility. And that attention sparked the first bathroom bill in North Carolina later in 2016. We quickly learned just how unfamiliar so many people are with us that they were quickly persuaded by the disinformation being peddled about us.
This is just a new tactic in the same old playbook. We saw this with the rise in Islamophobia used after 9/11. Wielding hatred against a “common enemy,” even as fabricated or forged that sense of “enemy” is, is unfortunately an effective way to gain power. We saw this in Nazi Germany. People love an us versus them framework. People in power use “makeshift” culture wars in an attempt to divide and control people to avoid class consciousness resulting in a class war. In other words, they use fear mongering to distract people, and turn their attention away from the systems keeping people in place.
I know that revealing this coordinated effort doesn’t change the very real impact of people losing access to healthcare, personal safety, and accurate documentation to reflect their identity, but it does give me hope that if we turn our attention to the aims of these attacks, we begin to unite around resisting them. It is part of what makes me optimistic about trans people’s futures.
The fear that extremists have peddled about trans people is rooted in the threat trans people pose to other people’s ability to see and seek freedom.
Trans people are liberated from expectation and circumstance. We took a world that is supposed to tell you who you are and how to act, and we have actively said no to it. We have built our own lives, sometimes within that world and structure in new ways, sometimes completely outside of that structure and those supposed “rules.”
THAT is what scares people.
If I’m allowed to be a woman, that means that woman has to mean more than just anatomy. Womanhood becomes more than the potential of motherhood. And that’s honestly too much for some people to handle. A lot of people are very comfortable in a rigid system with antiquated rules. But it actually has nothing to do with trans people at all.
Multiple times in my career, I have watched people’s minds change about trans people just because they’ve gotten to know me. When they actually meet a trans person, and realize we are just people, their worries and concerns subside. Exposure and unlearning can reverse the spell that fear mongering sets in motion.
I was nineteen years old before I really knew enough about my identity to realize I was trans. It wasn’t until I read Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender and started unlearning the gender binary that my feelings and my experiences all started to make more sense. It took me that long because no one was explaining it to me; there was no media to turn to that reflected how I felt or who I was. I had never read, or heard, or talked about trans people outside of a few hollow representations in stories on TV and in musicals. But these days, stories about us appear everywhere. It’s nearly impossible to watch, read, or get the news without hearing about us. That said, the majority of those stories lack the insights, sharings, and accounts of trans people ourselves.
Tiq Milan was right,”the more we are seen, the more we are violated.” But the inverse can also be true. The more we are seen, the more we can become known and accepted. I’m not saying that is all positive right away. I fear it will actually get far worse before it gets any better. But there are people starting to understand that these extremists are not invested in protecting anyone but their own power. Once that bubble bursts, people will be awakened to the truth about the coordinated disinformation being disseminated.
I do believe that with time, this will help us overcome the disinformation and fear mongering we are currently facing. When enough people realize that trans people don’t pose a threat to them, they will no longer pose a threat to us.
