“Transgender for everyone.”
I keep thinking of this bizarre and oddly-worded claim by President Trump. A claim he’s made many times.
What would that look like, exactly? Does it mean that everyone makes a transgender friend?
I can totally get behind that. Sounds nice.
The number of transgender people in the U.S. is, while unknown, estimated by USA Today to be 2.8 million. There are 342,034,432 people in the U.S. That means more than 314 million people have a pool of less than 3 million potential trans friends. Which means that, if split evenly, each trans person would have to somehow deal with over 120 new friends.
That is impractical at best and, no doubt, a nightmare prospect for introverted folks out there. Not to mention the fact that transgender people are already burdened enough with the emotional labor of having to deal with/educate cis people.
I prefer to think that “transgender for everybody” is a call for body acceptance and positivity. A complete and total destruction of gender. Gender will be treated as the social construct it is. People will identify however they want and dress however they want and use whatever pronouns they want, and everyone will just respect each other.
People would not be denied medical care simply because their government does not like them.
This would, of course, be something that Trump and the Republicans would vehemently oppose. In fact, they might even try to protect kids from it. They might try to draw as much attention as possible away from the many crimes they are doing/supporting/ignoring by focusing relentlessly on a very small number of people who would just like to be left alone.
Hey! I think I’m on to something!
Or, I would be if Trump was a deep-thinking kind of guy. He is not.
Remember, Trump is also the guy who claimed that kids go off to school, are gone for a couple of days and then come home having had gender-related surgery.
It’s not hard to imagine that he thinks Democrats want to force everyone to become transgender. And he likely thinks that in order to be transgender you must have had “the surgery.” And I am not even going to put into words the kinds of things he likely imagines that means.
The idea that gender isn’t a rigid dichotomy scares the hell out of conservatives.
Conservative men believe that women are lesser-than. Thus, for a man to “become a woman,” he is trading in something valuable for something worthless.
Conservative men believe similarly about homosexuality. To trade in being straight for being gay is to degrade yourself.
In order to make sure a guy doesn’t lose his “man card,” gender roles and gender presentation must be limited to two. If any lines are not clearly visible, a cis het man might accidentally cross one of them. And that must be avoided at all costs.
And the costs are very high! Especially when the people who are in control of the whole freaking country believe that masculinity is the highest form of currency next to money and that masculinity requires a high level of cruelty to achieve.
When assholes like that are in charge, you end up with a country that has a Department of War, sets up concentration camps, kidnaps Black and brown people, “takes over” Venezuela, takes us to the brink of war with Europe over Greenland — and so many more horrors.
Transphobia hurts everyone. Strict gender roles hurt everyone. Strict rules for gender presentation hurt everyone.
Trump’s obsession with transgender people isn’t simply “a distraction” from grocery prices, as the Democrats claim.
Trump really believes transgender people are sub-human. He really believes that doctors are “mutilating” kids in the name of transgenderism daily. Just like he really loves seeing “the radical left” attacked by his ICE army.
To Trump, anyone who doesn’t agree with him and kiss his ass is scum. To be anti-Trump is to be anti-American, because Trump sees the two as one and the same. It’s Trumpmerica now, baby!
And it really sucks. Nobody is happy here. Fascists are mad that they aren’t being welcomed with open arms by white people when they arrive to rid zip code after zip code of the Black and brown hordes. Conservatives aren’t happy that they are being called fascists for supporting fascism.
Liberals/people with any degree of human decency are angry that their neighbors are being terrorized by a deadly and violent paramilitary force that’s been given free-reign to go wilding in America’s cities.
In the U.S. right now, groceries cost too much, and human lives are worth too little.
Contact your elected officials at ALL levels of government and tell them you aren’t distracted by a goddamn thing. n
D’Anne Witkowski is a writer living in Michigan with her wife and son. She has been writing about LGBTQ+ politics for nearly two decades. Follow her on Twitter @MamaDWitkowski.