For the Love of God, Please Stop Blaming Trans People for Transphobia
Trans people aren’t to blame for transphobia, no matter how often powerful elites say otherwise.
In order to understand the problem with Barack Obama’s recent comments on trans people, we must begin by talking about the new Julia Roberts movie. A strange choice, to be sure, but these are nothing if not unusual times.
Roberts, one of our best actresses, lends her immense skill at hurling insults to the otherwise abysmal After the Hunt, a rare misfire from Challengers maestro Luca Guadagnino. The film has been branded as a #MeToo thriller set in the world of academia, in which Roberts plays a Yale professor whose colleague (Andrew Garfield, going big) is accused of sexually assaulting a queer doctoral student (Ayo Edebiri, trying). But for all its alleged interrogation of campus politics, After the Hunt is far less interested in exploring rape culture than it is in pointing the finger at, well, you name it. The movie offers a laundry list of critiques lobbed against all the usual suspects: PC culture, coddled college students, fourth-wave feminism, pronouns, and just about any other topic that has occupied a Fox News chyron in the past five years.
In the film’s lowest moment (which is truly saying something), Roberts’ character is confronted by a group of campus protesters who seek to question her regarding grievous professional misconduct. (The shortest possible version: Rather than supporting a sexual assault survivor, she repeatedly berates the student, among other misdeeds.) As you may guess, the gaggle is treated not as the voice of reason but as a punchline. When a nonbinary activist charges toward her, proclaiming, “We just want accountability,” my theater guffawed in recognition of the stereotype they were being fed: the self-serious, perpetually aggrieved trans person. After the Hunt views the most outrageous sin as not a young woman of color being violated, but caring about it in too cringeworthy a manner.
Sometimes it feels like the discourse about LGBTQ+ lives feels as if it takes place in an alternate universe from the one we actually occupy: in which a years-long assault on equality has come home to roost. The current occupant of the Oval Office, who got reelected by claiming schools are forcibly transitioning kids without their consent, has used his second term to cash in the far-right’s most gleeful fantasies of trans subjugation. A year that began with the White House targeting trans people’s passports and health care has devolved so rapidly that leading government figures have called to investigate whether trans people are literally terrorists.
Things are very bad, but somehow LGBTQ+ people keep being told it’s our own fault, that we did this to ourselves. Into this morass walked the former U.S. president this week, sitting down for the farewell episode of WTF with Marc Maron, which aired on Monday. In a wide-ranging conversation, Obama briefly paused to blame fascism not on actual fascists but on its victims. (The podcast’s eponymous host, for his part, called it liberals’ “buzzkill problem” in a recent standup special.)
You can’t constantly lecture people without acknowledging that you’ve got some blind spots, too, and that life’s messy. I think this was a fault of some progressive language, was almost asserting a holier-than-thou superiority that’s not that different from what we used to joke about coming from the right moral majority and a certain fundamentalism about how to think about stuff that I think was dangerous.
If it weren’t immediately clear that Obama was talking about trans people, he proceeded to clear up any doubts.
If I talked about trans issues, I wasn’t talking down to people and saying, “Oh, you’re a bigot.” I’d say, “You know, it’s tough enough being a teenager. Let’s treat all kids decently. Why would we want to see kids bullied?”
Here, Obama is engaging in several rounds of historical revisionism. While he appears to suggest that his administration broached freely the subject of trans issues, Obama often played LGBTQ+ rights close to the vest. Just days before the November 2012 election, it was actually his vice president, Joe Biden, who gave his full-throated support for the trans community, not Obama himself. Shortly after beating his boss to the punch on publicly endorsing the freedom to marry, Biden called trans equality the “civil rights issue of our time.” After his eventual reelection, Obama would omit mention of trans people from references to the Stonewall Riots in his second inaugural address, and it took until 2015 for him to say the word “transgender” in the State of the Union.
However, the more significant revisionism is this sadly pervasive idea that the reason America has devolved into its current state is due to the very same progressive overreach that After the Hunt attempts to critique. It’s the worst possible kind of both-sidesism: an insistence that because illiberalism is bad, its counterbalance must be equally objectionable. If only the vulnerable people who stand to be harmed most by the downfall of our delicate democracy could simply be more chill about it, perhaps others would deem them worthy of rights. It’s essentially a plea to embrace respectability politics, but with a different Instagram filter slapped on.
For the record, queer people have tried this sort of thing for decades, and it never really works. The notion that LGBTQ+ equality, if only packaged differently, would be more palatable to our political foes motivated the removal of trans people from a landmark nondiscrimination bill — known familiarly as ENDA — in 2007. The legislation didn’t pass anyway. Mike Pence, then a member of the House of Representatives, warned that even the gay-only version of the bill would “wage war on the free exercise of religion” in a speech before Congress. When LGBTQ+ advocates pivoted to the fight for marriage equality after the ENDA fallout, leading conservatives were unmoved by the reemphasis on the white-picket-fence values of “love is love.” They claimed that letting queer couples marry would result in bestiality, polygamy, incest, and pedophilia.
There is no way to engage in a debate on terms that will be agreeable to people who wish that your community didn’t exist. It does not matter if LGBTQ+ people are nice and polite or whether they are encircling Julia Roberts in a Yale common area. The distinction matters little because zealots seeking a pretense to discriminate will certainly find one, even if they have to invent it; now they have an entire anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda industry to grease their fabrications. Only in this era could Charlie Kirk, who certainly cared little about whether he was “talking down to people,” be lionized as a civil rights hero while trans people are being tone policed.
If you want to know how we got here, it has nothing to do with outraged queers or liberal cringe. It has everything to do with religious extremists seeking to win at all costs. When queer people got marriage equality, not because of respectability politics but sheer hard work, far-right groups spent years figuring out which minority group they could pick on — a segment of the population so persecuted that even a Democratic icon would have no issue asking them to be cool about their rights being stripped away. The GOP has undoubtedly found its perfect scapegoat.
When Obama neglected to mention trans people during his aforementioned 2013 inauguration speech, an 11-year-old trans girl wrote him a letter. Entitled “Sadie’s Dream for the World,” it was not filled with the lefty wokescolding about which we hear so much these days. It was a simple plea for humanity.
The world would be a better place if everyone had the right to be themselves, including people who have a creative gender identity and expression. Transgender people are not allowed the freedom to do things everyone else does, like go to the doctor, go to school, get a job, and even make friends.
Transgender kids like me are not allowed to go to most schools because the teachers think we are different from everyone else. The schools get afraid of how they will talk with the other kids’ parents, and transgender kids are kept secret or told not to come there anymore. Kids are told not to be friends with transgender kids, which makes us very lonely and sad.
When they grow up, transgender adults have a hard time getting a job because the boss thinks the customers will be scared away. Doctors are afraid of treating transgender patients because they don’t know how to take care of them, and some doctors don’t really want to help them. Transgender patients like me travel to other states to see a good doctor.
It would be a better world if everyone knew that transgender people have the same hopes and dreams as everyone else. We like to make friends and want to go to school. Transgender people want to get good jobs and go to doctors like they are exactly the same. It really isn’t that hard to like transgender people because we are like everyone else.
Maybe it’s time we finally hear what she has to say.
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