Continuities and developments in anti-trans efforts and resistance

In the last five years, more anti-trans legislation has been proposed in the United States than in the previous 200 years combined. Attacks on gender nonconformity and trans life are nothing new, but the strategies and anxieties of contemporary transphobia have evolved, surging into a tidal wave of paranoia and repression. If historical attacks on trans communities were often extralegal or bundled with larger attacks on gay and lesbian people, the 2020s brought de jure transphobia to the focus of anti-trans efforts. 

Religious, governmental, medical, and educational institutions presented an onslaught of legal and cultural attacks on trans life across the globe in the 2020s. In the face of increasingly organized and sophisticated attacks on trans existence, trans studies scholars Eagan Dean, postdoctoral fellow at the Clayman Institute; Ava L.J. Kim, assistant professor of gender, sexuality, and women's studies at UC Davis; and Susan Stryker, historian and Clayman Institute distinguished visitor, sat down with Institute Director Adrian Daub to talk about the historicity of the current anti-trans movement in the United States and globally as well as strategies from the past for survival. The Clayman Conversations event, “Trans Persistence Under Attack,” took a look at the vestiges of historical gender regulation, parsing through what is new and what isn’t in the contemporary siege on trans existence. 

The panelists noted that trans persistence represents continuance in defiance of the social, economic, and legal enforcement of traditional gender. It is this continuance of trans bodies, trans memory, and trans life that is under siege by the current anti-trans moral panic. As the name of the event indicates, it is not just that trans existence is under attack, but the historical record of transness is being denied as well. In conversation, Daub and Stryker referred to this as a “larger…attack on expertise.” In the context of the contemporary anti-trans moral panic, transness has been subject to a “politically forced amnesia” to make transness seem “new.” 

Such attacks are not new. More than 90 years ago, the Nazis razed Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute on Sexual Research in Berlin. Daub detailed the rhetorical similarities between the contemporary anti-trans movement and the Nazi’s crackdown of state control in the name of “common sense” or protecting “common people.” By making these claims, Nazis invented a common sense about gender that was contrary to the prevailing science of the era and trends in social acceptance.  Anti-trans groups of today have founded shadow professional organizations like the American College of Pediatrics, a conservative advocacy group that capitalizes on their name's similarity to the older, larger, and nonpartisan American Academy of Pediatrics, to manufacture institutional expertise and funnel transphobic obsessions through channels of legitimacy, as both Stryker and Kim remarked. 

The contemporary attack on trans life diverges from the historical reliance on the opaqueness of trans as a category that was often included in broader attacks on homosexuality or other supposed “perversions.” Now,  pundits and politicians are attacking “trans as trans,” Stryker noted. Prior to the 1990s, most anti-trans rhetoric castigated trans people for being “strange,” “promiscuous,” or “queer,” but today, discrete language and practices for gender transition are often the explicit core of anti-trans policy and animus. For instance, anti-trans laws before the 21st century regulated cross-dressing, public sex, and general behavioral “disturbances.” These laws were wielded to regulate behaviors of the poor, racialized, and those outside of the order of the nuclear family. Today, legislative and social attacks are outright barring practices or mentions of gender transition. 

One possible explanation for such a shift could be the new language and visibility of trans life in the 21st century. Opponents of trans rights have used this new language to recycle old homophobia, framing trans people’s existence as a sort of conspiratorial attack on children, women, family life, and even a stable world order. Political ostracization or media sensationalization of trans lives have occurred before, but now, Dean said, ordinary members of the public have “deputized themselves as enforcers of gender rather than spectators of rare gender phenomena.” 

The changes in media coverage of trans stories demonstrates this shift. Early 20th century stories of trans existence, as Dean noted, were entertaining as much as they were scandalizing news events. With inconsistent coverage from outrage to acceptance, words like “extraordinary” or “shocking” jump out across the stories of those who defied their assigned gender. Today, anti-trans actors take it upon themselves to enforce their own standards of adequate gender presentation both online and in real life, whether in medical settings, schools, or the pedestrian lives of those who “color outside the lines” of the dominant gender binary. 

The panel provided critical attention to both the historical continuities and modern evolutions of transphobia and illuminated the stakes of confusing the two. The panel members suggested the coordinated attacks also call into question a “rights-based” approach to social inclusion. Instead, we must engage in community building to support trans people’s wellbeing that doesn’t depend on a government to confer or withhold rights.