Chris Rufo Claims Trans Acceptance Threatens Reality Itself
Is the fact that some people are trans a threat to the “basic reality of the universe?” Chris Rufo thinks so!
by Evan Urquhart
The conservative obsession with all things transgender is continuing to result in comical amounts of coverage of the issue in Fox, including back to back appearances by anti-trans commentators on Fox and Friends Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. On Tuesday the show featured social worker Erica Komisar, who also penned an op-ed for the conservative Wall Street Journal over the weekend. Komisar, describes herself as a “parenting coach” who works with adults only, is one of the latest in a long line of people working in distantly related fields that the right has attempted to portray as experts. Despite never having worked with trans youth directly, Komisar nonetheless claims that children are too young to know their gender, and objected to schools efforts' to help their students practice tolerance towards transgender peers. She also claimed, falsely, that puberty blockers are irreversible (they are fully reversible).
On Wednesday the show featured Chris Rufo who made expansive claims about the nature of reality and expressed the fear that transgender people are an existential threat to the reality of the universe.
screenshot from Fox News
Rufo is advancing a far-right conspiracy theory that rests on the idea that reality itself is fixed and simple, but human beings’ understanding of it is infinitely malleable, and the purpose of the trans rights movement isn’t to increase awareness and tolerance for a small minority group but, instead, a plot from nebulous others to destabilize children’s connection to reality in order to turn them into woke supersoldiers. Like much of the anti-trans narratives that are currently circulating at Fox and other large conservative outlets this formulation of trans issues became popular in the extreme right fringe, where it exists as part of a larger antisemitic white nationalist framework, and is now in the process of being laundered by conservative mass media.
Like much of this junk there’s not a lot to debunk here, because it’s just not tethered to real-world facts in a way that lends itself to fact-checking. However, it seems worthwhile breaking down these claims that reality itself is being destabilized for nefarious political ends a little.
The first claim, which has become an article of faith in the larger anti-trans movement, is that humans can’t change sex (and that trans people are claiming otherwise). Like many anti-trans claims this rests on poorly understood scientific claims and bad-faith misrepresentations of the other side’s arguments. Let’s start with the concept of a “sex change.”
Sex changes are an older concept, dating to the early days of transgender medicine. In that era, trans people (mostly women) underwent a brutal gauntlet of psychiatrists attempting to dissuade them from seeking medical transition until some were, eventually given access first to hormone therapy and then, finally, genital surgery. These women were often advised to leave behind their homes and families and everything familiar and build a new life where no one knew them pre-transition. At that point they were said to have undergone “a sex change.”
Nowadays that language is antiquated. It falsely conjures an image of a single procedure a person can undergo, rather than a lengthy process with a long in-between period. It imparts an unearned magic onto genital surgery, ignoring the fact that hormone therapy and social steps were equally necessary. As trans people gained more of a voice in their own treatment, this simplified language began to disappear. Trans people don’t claim to have changed sex. They have long argued against the idea of transition being described as a simple, binary sex-change because it never represented the reality of the process of transitioning into another gender. This has also made more space for trans people who feel more comfortable staying in the in-between phase, those who prefer to describe their gender as falling outside the male/female binary, and those who can’t afford or are medically unable to access certain treatments.
Even if we ignore all that, however, what conservatives are saying doesn’t hold water. The most common form of medical transition involves taking cross sex hormones, which radically changes not only the trans person’s appearance but their smell, their muscle-mass, even their emotional makeup and personality. Biologically, this results in a person with characteristics from both sexes, with the cross-sex characteristics coming to predominate the longer a person continues taking cross-sex hormones.
Atypical hormone balances are well known in nature, and humans with a naturally occurring mix of sex-characteristics are called intersex. For anti-trans activists, if they acknowledge this reality, the standard answer is that everyone, including intersex people, can still be sorted into either the male or female category based on what reproductive equipment conservatives think they ought to have been born with. However, once we start talking about what characteristics a person should have had that invites the obvious question “says who?” Obviously, at this point we’re light years away from simple biology and deep into the territory of religion and philosophy.
The anti-trans case against the idea that sex can change only gets worse from there. Even if you accept that conservatives know what every person’s reproductive equipment should have looked like, and you accept that all the changes to a person’s sexual characteristics through hormone therapy and/or surgery aren’t enough to change a person’s sex, there’s nothing in medicine that suggests actually changing sex wouldn’t be possible, however strictly you want to define it. If you think that a person’s true sex is found in the chromosomes, there’s no practical reason why gene therapy to change a person’s chromosomes couldn’t be developed. Likewise to reproductive organs: There’s no reason that advanced medical techniques could never give a uterus to someone born without one, or ovaries, or testes, or any other sex change you could imagine. At most, you can argue that humans can’t change their sex now, if you define a sex change narrowly to include procedures that might be developed one day, but aren’t currently available.
If it is (theoretically, biologically, medically) possible for a human to change sex, and trans people aren’t arguing that changing sex is possible, and in fact have long argued against seeing transition as a single, binary sex change, what exactly are conservatives trying to say with all this spooky talk about the nature of reality.
Well, mostly, they’re trying to sound spooky and make people paranoid. This “fabric of reality” stuff is a fun ghost story conservatives tell each other to reassure themselves that they’re fighting the good fight against a nebulous (often Jewish or Jewish-coded) group of bad guys, and not arbitrarily picking on a vulnerable minority for literally no reason. No one wants to believe that they’re the bad guys, so by making up stories about who the real bad guys are (bad guys who are only named once you leave the mainstream and get all the way down the Christian nationalist rabbit-hole) they’re able to pretend to themselves and others that their irrational fears and prejudices are good, and their cartoonishly repressive laws targeting everything from drag shows to kids using the bathroom at school are not only okay, but necessary.