The case for American trans optimism

The first half of the 2020s has been a rather difficult time to be trans in the United States, only made more gutting by how the 2010s saw what felt like a slow-building move toward general acceptance, up to and including serious corporate pushback to North Carolina's anti-trans bathroom bill in 2016. The last six years have seen an ascendant right-wing movement erase not just what modest gains trans people have made but also plenty of rights we'd always had and taken for granted, in particular access to healthcare for trans kids in certain states.

Perhaps the nadir of this nadir was the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024 on a platform that prominently centered anti-trans campaign messaging. The early days of the second Trump administration saw a fleet of executive orders aimed at curtailing trans rights, and even in blue states, many medical providers have backed down, opting to cease offering healthcare to trans kids rather than fight with the federal government. But even before Trump's return to office, a defense appropriations bill signed by Joe Biden and passed through Congress with the votes of several Democrats restricted healthcare for trans children of military members.

Last week's midterm elections, in which voters repudiated a sitting president on a scale not seen since Watergate, provide a glimmer of hope for trans people as much as they do other traditionally progressive constituencies. Many Republicans who lost their races — often resoundingly — went all in on peddling anti-trans rhetoric, backed by the seemingly infinite pockets of Elon Musk. If nothing else, it should introduce at least the idea in the hearts of pundits everywhere that anti-trans campaigning isn't nearly as effective when Trump is not on the ballot.

Yet even in the midst of this blue tsunami, there were plenty of reasons for concern from trans people. Anti-trans ballot initiatives aimed at restricting trans kids from playing in youth sports passed in blue states Colorado and Washington. More, plenty of the Democrats swept into office opted for their own brand of anti-trans messaging in the waning days of the campaign, most notably Iowa Senator-elect Josh Turek, who launched an ad late in the campaign that said he would stop any trans person from getting gender-affirming healthcare via Medicaid. For many of my trans friends, the reaction to the midterms has been a general sense of relief — and then a continued sense of anxiety lying underneath that relief. We might term this reaction: Oh well! It could have been worse!

The political questions of transness are one thing; quite another are larger cultural questions around how trans people are discussed and written about in the mainstream press and wider media. If the 2020s have been a hard time for trans people politically (and they have), what has only exacerbated that sense has been a feeling that trans people's voices are being silenced or even muted in conversations where we are the topic. Whether you're looking at major publications or streaming services, you can find a surfeit of news items that show a general unwillingness to center trans people in their own stories — and I say that as a trans person who is routinely invited to tell stories. If politics is downstream of culture, the slow erasure of trans voices from the broader media is arguably more dangerous to our lives than most legislation, which can, after all, be undone with new bills. It's much harder to negate larger shifts in the overall culture.

The fear, then, is that some combination of all of the above will lead to what amounts to a hopeful mirage for trans Americans before the Democratic Party abandons us and goes the way of Labour in the United Kingdom, a country whose fervid anti-trans politics speak to a broader rot in the minds of that nation's elites. We don't even have to travel that far back in American queer history to find very similar things happening in the HIV-AIDS era, when the stories of the gay men disproportionately affected by the disease were drowned out by the voices of straight columnists in mainstream publications.

Now, I do not want to claim that things are going to be just fine, nor do I think trans people have a glide path back to having our rights restored. We are in for a bitter, bruising fight, and regaining every single inch that was taken for us is going to take far too long and result in the pointless losses of too many in our community who are denied the care they need. Especially in red states, the fight to recognize the rights and dignity of trans people will surely occupy the bulk of the rest of my life.

However, I think there is a better case for muted trans optimism in the wake of the midterms than there is one for even the most muted of trans pessimism. What the midterms suggest most strongly to me is that the country might not yet be entirely comfortable with trans people writ large — and that backsliding is a real shift in our status quo from the 2010s — but Americans, and especially left-of-center Americans, are generally more tolerant of our existence than not.

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Consider: In Missouri, a red state that did not see an appreciable blue shift last Tuesday, a ballot initiative to prohibit trans healthcare for minors didn't just fail but lost by 10 percentage points. One could conceivably argue that the measure failed because the trans healthcare ban was tied to an effort to ban most abortions, an issue that attracts far less theoretical support in polling than anti-trans healthcare measures. But then consider how many trans candidates won elections nationwide, sometimes in places as red as Alabama. In the face of that, I might argue that trans people are roughly where cis gays and lesbians were in the late 2000s — not yet accepted, per se, but definitely drivers of the kind of curiosity that often serves as a prelude to broader acceptance.

My overriding assumption about the political question of trans people in the US is that there simply aren't enough of us to make our continued existence politically salient one way or the other. On the one hand, this sucks. It makes it far too easy to push back against us in the realm of the theoretical, especially when the question turns to high school sports. On the other, it means that getting angry at us is not a winning political issue in and of itself, as many Republicans found out on Tuesday.

My suspicion is that this means that Democrats will likely continue to sidestep trans issues at best, with an occasional Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Abdul El-Sayed offering something like full-throated support (though almost always couched in a candy shell of "think about how this affects cis people too"). There will surely be Democrats from redder areas who offer nods to anti-trans rhetoric or go even further than that, as Turek has. The party as a whole is unlikely to be all that interested in us one way or the other.

Yet that is where my optimism comes in. If Republicans cannot effectively run on punishing us and Democrats are mostly uninterested, then the work of trans politics lands in the laps of trans people and our allies, which is a much better place to start from anyway. Do I wish there were a mainstream American political party that started from a place of radical trans acceptance? Of course. Yet I also don't know how we get to radical trans acceptance in the political sphere if we don't first push for it in the broader culture.

Fortunately for all of us with skin in this particular game, the work of building cultural support for trans people is work we can do. We can do it by going out in our communities to meet those who've maybe never interacted with a trans person before, finding ways to step into broader public life, or (sigh) occasionally posting about our experiences online. I recognize that it is easy for me to say all of this as someone whose platform essentially dictates that I've been pressed into service around these questions ever since I came out. But I promise you that you, too, can take tiny steps toward making your little corner of the world a friendlier one for trans people as a community.

Too often, I have noticed among the trans people I know and follow a sort of defeatist sense that cis people have it out for us. Sometimes, this is driven by actual events, like an anti-trans ballot initiative passing in a blue state or a piece of polling suggesting whatever support we have from even progressives is conditional. But too often, that sense is driven by a kind of reflexive certainty that to be trans is to be hated, regardless of any evidence one might have to the contrary.

To that attitude, I would say: The world is bigger than you expect, and people are far weirder and more unusual than you expect too. Nothing is certain, and we should not assume good things will happen without working toward them. But no fight has ever been won by assuming it is already lost. We, finally, have a glimmer of hope after long, dark years. Let's see how bright that glimmer can become.

A Good Song

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