If you tolerate this...

An upsetting part of the rise of the trans panic is watching supposed allies being won over by the same old arguments that LGBT+ people are perverse social deviants and sexual predators. While it's upsetting, I think it also shows how far people are willing to go to protect themselves from ideas and thoughts that cause them discomfort.

Because that is what the panic is really about: Something about trans people existing makes some people feel threatened or uncomfortable for reasons they don't seem to want to think about or talk about.

Why does the knowledge of people choosing not to suffer the sex/gender they were labelled at birth feel bad for these people? I can't give a definitive answer to that. But what I can do is talk about my own experience with knee-jerk transphobia when I had to ask myself this very question. The answer turned out to be terrifyingly simple:

I saw my gender as a burden.

It was something I never felt I had any choice over. In the same breath that I believed in equality and fairness, part of me still believed that people being able to change to a different path was somehow an insult to everything I had gone through to carve out my own space and identity within my gender. I resented being reminded of my own suffering. I think the best way of explaining it was something along the lines of :

"I had to put up with it, so why shouldn't they? It's not fair."

Nothing about how I was feeling had anything to do with trans people, and everything to do with how I felt about myself and my own experiences with gender. Regardless of how I fit into my gender, the ways in which it had grated against my needs and desires all my life in one way or another had left thoughts and feelings behind that made me think negatively about my gender by default. It was in the foundations. Despite doing my best to be a caring and inclusive person, there was this nasty little toad of hatred, towards myself and others, squatting uninvited in the deep, ugly, painful parts of my own identity.

I did not want to look at it. I did not want to admit it was there. The idea of facing it was scary and embarrassing and repulsive. But I also knew that if I left it there to fester, it would only grow, hurting me and others around me. The little gender-hating toad did not belong there, and the only way to get rid of it was to be honest with myself about the bitterness I had towards the hand I had been dealt. I resented how I had been treated because of gender and I was displacing that resentment and anger onto people who were not responsible for any of it.

Dealing with having ugly feelings is never a fun or easy thing to do, but it is necessary.

Part of the reason I am sharing about my own past transphobia is because I want people to know it's okay to feel that way. Feelings are not rational things we can always control. But having negative feelings about something doesn't always mean the path that avoids those feelings is the correct one. Sometimes the unpleasant path is the one we need to go down in order to embody our values and give ourselves the tools and grace to heal and grow.

We are all just human. We all deserve safety, dignity, agency, and privacy. If you believe this, it should be obvious that our country's current path when it comes to trans rights is both regressive and harmful.

The only people coming for you and your kids are the very creeps currently spending way too much time thinking about everyone's genitals. Probably because they're richer than the Vatican and have far too much time on their hands for inventing new ways of protecting their unearned hoards of wealth. Think of it like the dragon Smaug, but instead of breathing fire, they have a firehose of transphobia flooding our media. To defeat them, we need to come together and support each other.

Because that is the core of the trans panic: Division. United we stand, divided we fall. It's an old, tired, long worn out adage, but it's the foundation of why this hatred is being manufactured. The more billionaires and the nasty little politicians they buy can splinter us off into spiteful, bickering factions, the more these global parasites stand to gain. By allowing ourselves to dehumanise trans and gender non-conforming people, we're doing their dirty work for them. Instead, we need to do the work within ourselves to humanise and extend compassion to trans people who should be supported to take up their rightful places within our communities.

Trans people do not deserve to be a debate. They do not deserve to have their participation in public life or basic bodily functions and autonomy politicised. They do not deserve to be a punching bag for all our social frustrations. No one does. Stop tolerating the mistreatment of trans people. We're better than this.