Why Transness Isn’t Like Left-Handedness
Making the comparison of transness to left-handedness is easy, but there is more to the story than that.
by Riki Wilchins
About twenty years ago, my cis wife asked me why all the trans women we saw at conferences were all so hyper-feminine (myself very much excepted, alas).
My reply was that because the social costs of changing genders was so extraordinarily high, only those “last gaspers” who felt such a strong internal sense of femininity and womanhood that they had no other choice were willing to undergo what one academic called the mindfuck shit-show of transition.
During the Pleistocene era, when I transitioned, I lost my partner of seven years, my home, my job, and my family. I was verbally harassed on the streets, and sexually harassed in my new workplace — where most of my colleagues literally shunned me.
However, as I assured my wife, once the terrible costs came down, all kinds of different gender presentations would come flooding int
And indeed that seems to be at least some of what has happened:
Trans identification — just .05% for the Silent Generation, 0.2% for Baby Boomers, and 0.3 with Gen X; mushroomed to 1.0% with Millennials and 2% with Gen Z.
2% is still small in absolute numbers, but it’s an increase of over 200% over the historical average of just 0.5 or 0.6% identifying as trans. And Gen Z is huge — roughly a fifth of the U.S. population.
Using the historical average of 0.5–0.6%, we would expect to find about 350,000 transgender young people in Gen Z.
Instead, the total is probably around 2m.
By way of comparison, about 2% of the U.S. population are Mormon/LDS, and about 2.5% are Jewish.
A graphic showing the rise of left handedness since the 1900s has been making the rounds along with many comparisons of trans to left-handedness, which also faced tremendous social disapproval and discrimination, but blossomed once the prejudice disappeared.
Up until the early 1900s, left-handed people were considered evil, perverted, and abnormal (just like you-know-who). The Latin root sinistra — where our English word “sinister” comes from — actually means left.
Schools would tie children’s left hands down to force them to write right-handed. Left handed people were punished and social stigmatized.
As a result, left-handedness in the U.S. was only 2% in 1932. But as the stigma began to wane it rose to 7% by 1946, to 9% by 1968, and then to 12% by 1972. It is now expected to level off around 14% — the actual base rate.
But I think the idea that this explains the exponential growth we’re seeing in trans only explains half the story.
The other half is bound up with that 25-cent word, hermeneutics, which is a complicated name from philosophy for the study of what we know and how we know it.
It’s not just that more trans people came out, but also that today we live in a different information economy which enables more people to recognize that they ARE trans.
And also there are now many more ways that people can understand themselves AS trans.
When I came out, there was no internet, no books other than medical texts, and even though I was a leader in Cleveland’s gay community, no one in my circle actually knew anyone who was trans I could talk with.
I had no terms, no language, to describe what I was feeling. As B. R. George and Stacey Goguen point out in an amazing paper on this, the effect of this kind of hermeneutic absence is that key parts my own self-experience and social experience remained unintelligible — even to me.
And when you finally get that knowledge, which for me was picking up Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon, it “ feels like a revelation: a life-changing flash of enlightenment, one of those click aha! moments: ‘“Jeez, this explains everything.’”
Today, of course, every person carries as much as they need to know about trans literally in their pocket. The amount of available information is staggering.
This is why red states continue making efforts to restrict or ban information about pediatric care.
As with abortion, what will matter now in the half of the country where PGAC is banned, is the flow of people, the flow of medication, and the flow of information.
Today there are also many more ways to recognize one’s self AS trans. I was one of those few “true transsexuals” who mostly fit the model of going from point A to point B in an orderly fashion.
But now there are scores of identities out there within which one can to recognize one’s self as being trans: agender, graygender, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, nonbinary, etc.
In fact, according to a recent Washington Post/KKF poll, only about 1/3 of trans adults still identify in the old binary boxes of trans male/trans female: A clear majority (62%) identify as something else. And that skew is even more pronounced among young people.
And then there’s a third factor, almost as important as the other three above: social support. Transition can be a difficult, lonely, even hostile place, especially if you’re of color, undocumented, or young.
But increasingly, people are finding all community, friendship, connection, and free advice online. And because of that fewer and fewer of us today will ever have to go through that mind-fuck shit-show alone.
Riki Wilchins writes on trans theory and politics at: www.medium.com\@rikiwilchins. Her two last books are: BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens, and When Texas Came For Our Kids. She can be reached at her Gmail at Trans Teens Matter.