You Can’t Eliminate Transgenderism

Conservatives say we don’t exist. Bro. We’re literally right here.

by Evan Urquhart

The big news in transphobia over this past weekend was that a far right commentator from the Daily Wire, Michael Knowles, called for the eradication of “transgenderism” at CPAC on Saturday, to a cheering crowd. Soon after this was reported by multiple outlets the story became bogged down by hair-splitting over whether “transgenderism” is a synonym for trans people (which it self-evidently is).

Knowles, who threatened to sue publications that reported that he wanted to eradicate trans people, explained that transgenderism can be eliminated without eliminating trans people because trans people aren’t real.

screenshot from Rolling Stone

Knowles’s distinction, a common one among anti-trans activists, rests on the idea that there’s a sense in which trans people don’t really exist, despite the obvious fact that trans people are physically present in the real world. This way of thinking rests on the belief that people’s identities are almost infinitely malleable (no surprise that it’s common among propagandists). They think any person can be convinced they are trans by seeing and hearing about trans people, and consequently they can be protected from this happening if trans people are removed from their view. They also believe that trans people can be turned cisgender by taking away their medication and prohibiting them from wearing cross-gender clothes. They claim this can be done without any damage to the trans people involved. Perhaps they’ll even be better off!

Or, at least, that’s what they claim they believe.

There are many reasons why someone who loves freedom, creativity, and the boundless diversity of the human spirit might not want to live in a world where “transgenderism” was a banned idea, even if it was just an idea. Many people like there to be room for play and experimentation and criticism of gendered social role expectations and appearance norms. However, the belief that trans people could all be turned into cis people, with no harm done to them, is also an empirical one. If a person genuinely believed trans existence to be a superficial, correctable wrong idea (like trickle-down economics or widespread voter fraud), this wouldn’t even be hard to prove.

Set aside, for a moment, the mountains of evidence that led to individualized medical transition as the current best practice in treatment for gender dysphoria, and the lack of any positive results for conversion therapy throughout the years. Maybe, somehow, all of that data was manufactured by big pharma and trans activists, in a decades-long plot to bring us to the verge of transgender acceptance in 2023. If this is the case, then conservatives could fund studies of their own to conclusively show, once and for all, conversion therapy for trans people works and provides better outcomes for trans people than transition does. If they cared about ethics they wouldn’t even need to do anything without consent: There are plenty trans people in highly religious environments who are desperate for their gender dysphoria to be eased without having to transition and lose their communities, families, and faith.

To understand why conservatives prefer not this, and why to the contrary they often oppose having any evidence collected at all, its useful to think about the work of Lisa Littman on a phenomenon referred to as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, or ROGD. ROGD is believed to be a form of false gender dysphoria, which has its onset at puberty and is caused by interactions with transgender peers. Littman’s first paper studied the attitidues of parents, who were found using anti-trans websites which had popularized the idea of ROGD. It found, unsurprisingly, that parents who frequented websites where ROGD was talked about believed their children to have had sudden onset of gender dysphoria after interactions with transgender peers. However, Littman’s follow up paper, on detransitioners, failed to find any consistent ROGD-like pattern among people who had transitioned and then detransitioned due to regret. When conservatives attempt to provide evidence for their claims, even when they try to stack the deck by cherry picking samples of people who already agree with their ideas, the evidence just doesn’t show up.

Conservatives aren’t stupid. They know that more research is most likely to lead for increased evidence supporting transition, because that’s what the evidence has shown until now. That’s why they’re more likely to oppose the collection of data, rather than fund more research. Their opposition to trans existence is irrational, implacable, and complete. When somone like Knowles says that trans people are laboring under a delusion and “we need to correct the delusion” he isn’t saying he thinks there’s a humane way to accomplish this, much less that the anti-trans GOP policies he supports are humane, he’s just using the idea that there could be to obfuscate the fact that he just called for a group of people to be eliminated from public life.

In truth, there is no such thing as transgenderism. There are only transgender people. Many trans people tried as hard as they could to avoid being trans, only to accept in the end that they could not deny themselves and survive. Trans adults have long dreamed that younger trans people might find the path to accepting themselves a little less hard than those who came before, but however difficult trans existence becomes there’s no law that can ever stop new trans people from being born. The eliminationist impulse can made things very hard on trans people, but it is doomed from the start because it is predicated on a false view of the world.