What Do Trans People Believe?

On trans ideology, or lack thereof.

This week, I’m gonna EXPOSE TRANS IDEOLOGY!!!

All the conservative hullabaloo about a “trans agenda”, “gay agenda”, “gender ideology”, etc. certainly implies that the LGBTQ community is a cohesive group, complete with a singular message about what trans people ought to do and what it means to be human. From the outside looking in—and primed by decades of propaganda about what the “true” goals of the LGBTQ community are—it may seem like we have an internally-consistent ideology.

Well, I can tell you as a “voice on the inside” that this isn’t really the case. Many of us agree on some tangible political goals—that you should respect someone’s chosen pronouns, that transition-related health care should be accessible to anyone who needs it, that trans people shouldn’t be discriminated against in the workplace, so on and so forth (although even then you will find some defectors).

However, much of the “underlying philosophy” of transness is left up to the individual. What does it mean to be trans? What does it mean to be cis? What does it mean to be neither? When do you “become” the gender you’re aiming to be? Which came first; cisness or transness? And from a political perspective, how do we go about meeting the above goals? Should we be advocating for better treatment within the American health care system, or building up alternative networks so we can survive without them? Since trans people are not currently accepted by the dominant culture, should we be trying to gain acceptance among the dominant culture, or should we be trying to radically change it? If we’re trying to radically change the culture, what is our end game; a tertiary gender system (men/women/non-binary people), a society where gender still exists somewhat as we know it today but where transitioning simply isn’t a big deal, or some form of gender abolition? What does “gender abolition” even look like?

If you ask these questions to 5 different trans people, you will get 7 different answers. And maybe that’s okay; we’re all allowed to have our own unique relationship to our own experience of gender. At the same time, the trans community is in crisis right now, and part of that is a crisis of identity: Who are trans people? What do trans people believe? What are our traditions? What is this “trans narrative” we’re hearing so much about?

Let’s discuss. But first, what does it take to have a “tradition”?