The Infinite Dignity of Transgender Existence
A response to Pope Francis and the Vatican.
Opinion, by Evan Urquhart
As local police ransacked our rented house, piling phones and laptops on the kitchen table to be taken to the precinct never to be returned, my family craned our necks to see what was happening from where we sat, watched by an officer. We chattered nervously, mostly we waited. I was afraid, but mostly I was very angry. Not only did I know deep inside myself that I’d done nothing wrong, but I could point to the search warrant itself for proof that as they stripped me of my valuables, my work laptop, my gaming systems. Not only was I not guilty, I was not even a suspect. The person named on the search warrant no longer lived with us.
It was at hour three that my anger at the indignity of being forced to sit and watch as I was robbed broke free, and I found myself lecturing two of the police on moral injury. “Moral injury describes the psychic harm that comes from a person acting against their own conscience and moral values,” I told them, calmly and clearly. “It’s been hypothesized that it lies at the heart of post-traumatic stress disorder and causes profound shame and social alienation. It is particularly common among police officers and members of the military.”
They didn’t answer. They didn’t even look at me.
I am five foot two inches tall. I am a transgender man. I think it’s safe to say that in the moment I lectured two police on moral injury I was more than a little ridiculous. A tiny, impotent fellow, lecturing two large cisgender officers, one a cis man and one a woman and both with a minimum of five inches on me. In my memory, I think I saw one of them flinch in discomfort, but he could just as easily have been fighting back laughter at my incongruous impression of a psychology professor.
What it means to assert transgender dignity in the face of a widespread societal belief in transgender ridiculousness is a question I’ve long been mulling. It feels particularly relevant today, because the Vatican just declared that, as a matter of Catholic doctrine, a person’s unique dignity is threatened by medical transition because it goes against a Catholic conception of the natural order. Here’s a quote from the declaration , titled “Dignitas Infinita,” or Infinite Dignity:
Teaching about the need to respect the natural order of the human person, Pope Francis affirmed that “creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created.” It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.
I am not a Catholic. What the Pope has to say about my dignity is no more relevant to my self-conception than a police officer busily ransacking my home for electronics. If the Pope thinks my unique dignity has been threatened by taking cross sex hormones, nuts to the Pope. It hasn’t been.
Still, I think the question of dignity is very interesting in a transgender context because we all know that being trans is synonymous in our culture with being foolish, silly, ridiculous or, well, undignified. To wear makeup or a dress while having broad shoulders and stubble is a sight gag. To be a small man with a small, nonexistent, or detachable penis is a laugh line.
If transness is understood as inherently undignified in the eyes of the Pope, the police, and in the widespread conventions of popular culture, drama, comedy, and literature, then to assert a sense of dignity as a trans person means fighting a social current that endlessly pushes back towards ridicule. How do we do it? Should we do it? What would it mean to assert our dignity, as trans people?
There is a temptation, in the face of the widespread perception of our lives as undignified, to say “the hell with it” and embrace foolishness. Much of transfemme culture, in particular, is playful in its willingness to embrace and subvert stereotypes, to reclaim AGP, kink, perversion, furry culture, to trans Kurt Cobain, to trans Superman, to spit in the eye of propriety. All of this is, I would say, good: The middlebrow conception of a dignified person in dignified clothing with moderate, dignified, centrist politics isn’t for us, and attempting to embrace it as a trans person means embracing self-hatred and destruction. (This doesn’t mean it’s incumbent on us to wear undignified clothing or dye our hair purple, just that however proper or improper our dress, it will never be the source of our dignity.)
That being said, there’s a danger of nihilism in any cultural movement based on rejecting the mainstream, and we all know that nihilism and despair, not to mention suicide, is a persistent scourge on the trans community. To fight nihilism you need a sense of self-worth and moral purpose. You need, in other words, something like dignity.
The history of the American Civil Rights movement provides instruction, if we’re willing to learn and listen, for how people deprived of dignity by the mainstream white consensus can assert their worth through fearless moral certainty, and force the world to change, at least a little, and for a little while. From the work of James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and others you can find a template for a person who has been deprived of worth to nevertheless insist that their worth is inherent and cannot be taken from them. But trans people are a smaller and more fragmentary minority than most. Most of us are born of cis parents into cis families, and many live out our lives without regular in-person contact with others like ourselves. For white trans people in particular, we may have grown up feeling that our privilege, which is easy to mistake for dignity, depends on denying our transgender nature and presenting a face that the world recognizes as respectable. For us, it can help to follow the lead of trans people of color, particularly Black Americans who grew up in utterly hostile cultural territory. Unlike white children they may have developed tools throughout their lives to help define and assert themselves in the face of mainstream diminishment and ridicule.
However, there can also be strength in observing people who have great privilege. As a heterosexual white transgender man, I have looked to heterosexual white cisgender men, not as models for my behavior (never that), but as models for how a person acts when they believe implicitly that they deserve respect, that they are worthy of fairness and right treatment and entitled to demand it. A world with more justice in it would have much more of that particular flavor of entitlement, not less, because the certainty that your worth is as great as anyone else’s would be available to everyone.
The muscle a trans person needs to assert their worth in the face of a dominant culture that mocks them begins with coming out. Every trans person who has once come out to anybody has begun developing the muscle for transgender dignity, a dignity that exists in defiance of anyone’s attempt to define us as ridiculous. However, there are a number of ways we can cede ground and dignity to our mainstream oppressors. One is nihilism, which I already mentioned. Another is an attempt at concession or compromise with respectability. A trans person who places their dignity in contrast with other, less worthy, trans people, someone who grovels and begs for the mercy of being recognized as one of the good ones, loses that dignity of asserting themselves as having worth inherently. Once they concede to the mainstream that their worth can’t stand on its own, unsupported by the diminishment of other trans people, they’ve lost it and are reduced to asking for it back from people who will never, ever grant it to them.
Similarly, a trans person who lives a stealth life, as necessary as that may sometimes be for their survival, also sacrifices some dignity, particularly if they allow comments about trans people to be made in their presence without asserting the worth and dignity of their trans siblings. A trans person who embraces racist politics, sexism, transmisogyny, or the politics of wealth and privilege does something similar. It should come as no surprise that many of these compromises can cluster together, as they do in Caitlyn Jenner, the least dignified trans woman in existence.
When I lectured the police on moral injury I wasn’t talking about moral injury, not really. Instead, I was drawing on whatever I had inside me to assert my worth in a situation designed to deprive me of my dignity, a situation where I was being treated with disdain and inhumanity. I didn’t know I was capable of standing up that way until I found myself doing so, but I recognize now that my entire previous experience as a trans person had been preparing me to say, in the face of implacable and unmoving disrespect, that nevertheless I was unchanged by it. It was their issue, their moral injury, nothing to do with me.
Mainstream society is organized to undermine the idea that a trans person can serve as an unbending force of moral dignity, from its polls implying trans equality can be won or lost by a popularity contest to its comedians making their millions on trans people as a punchline. The Vatican statement is one more of an endless set of reassertions of the mainstream certainty that trans people are degraded wretches, lesser specimens of humanity, inherently pitiable and ridiculous. Transgender dignity is found in the rejection of this, and not just this, but also every one of its supporting pillars. It is a rejection of the idea that men and women have between them, as the Catholics would have it, “the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings,” with its bizarre implication that a heterosexual married Catholic cis woman has more in common with a female chicken than the human man she shares her life with.
Transgender dignity is a rejection of the idea that our demonstrable human flourishing as trans people could be negated by anything, much less Catholic doctrine or a navel gazing rhetorical question like “What is a woman?” Transgender dignity strengthens as you realize no answer to that question could stand a chance at either buoying or diminishing us.
Because of the intense cultural hangups the mainstream invests in sex and sex differences, transgender dignity requires an acceptance that we will be called undignified by the mainstream, and there is nothing we can do about it until they accept the radical idea that women and men are equals. To the mainstream mind, we are symbolic of the unsettling idea that man and woman are not discrete categories that can never be breached or amended, and the response to being unsettled is laughter and, sometimes, violence. As trans people we trouble some of the mainstreams most deeply experienced fears and prejudices. For this we will be laughed at, jeered at, feared, and hated. To embody dignity as trans people is to accept this as the state of things. It means saying, calmly and directly, that nevertheless we are as real and worthy of respect as anyone. We demand and expect fair and equal treatment, and if we don’t get it, that is the mainstream’s moral injury. It has nothing to do with us.
UPDATE: After talking with people present, the author slightly altered this essay to obscure some details of the experience of a police search, so as to better protect the privacy of those other than the author who were connected to the incident.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media and an incoming member of the 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism fellowship class at MIT.