Radical Transgender Ideology

A possible explanation

Try to hear me out

To begin,¹ I want to present you with a simple diagram.

This is a diagram of an aggregate composite of recovered airplanes during World War II. As the story goes, engineers and statisticians at the time saw these dots as places that were most vulnerable to damage via gunfire, as these were the places where bullet holes were found among recovered aircraft. Engineers would see that, and conclude that more armor was needed on the red spots. That is, until Abraham Wald came to a much more important conclusion: These were the places recovered aircraft had bullet holes. But what about unrecovered aircraft? If the surviving aircraft were damaged in these places, but were still able to fly and land safely, then these areas were ones that did not need extra armor. Instead, the places where there were no holes, no damage, would be the most vulnerable areas of the plane’s body, as these would have been more completely destroyed in a firefight.

Thus, the theory survivorship bias was coined. It is a logical fallacy, you see. It makes one take away a conclusion from surviving members of a group that might be completely opposite to what is truly important. It focuses on entities that survived an elimination process, instead of the ones who have not. Thus, the results and commonalities between those survivors might appear exaggerated in response. Armor where no armor is needed; vulnerable areas still unprotected.

Survivorship bias is a curious thing, but also a potentially deadly one. And it is one that I think is worth considering when talking about or understanding certain marginalized communities.

You see, if you are transgender, you are very familiar with that diagram. It is referenced frequently inside the community. Why? Because humans are pattern-seeking creatures. More than that, we are meaning-seeking creatures with pattern-seeking faculties built into our evolutionary hardware. Long ago, our biological ancestors survived because they were able to see a camouflaged predator’s markings apart from the dried-out reeds and grasses keeping them from our vision. It helped us survive. And because of that, we see faces everywhere. We jump at shadows that look just a little bit too much like what might stalk us in the dark. And when we look at ourselves, and wonder about why so many of us share so many curious traits, it is hard not to imagine the shadow to that question: what about the ones who weren’t so lucky? What were they like?

With these pattern-seeking tendencies, themes, commonalities, and connections tend to emerge when looking at the trans community in aggregate. There are memes, of course, (and I will get there in a moment) but it is more than that. It was something my dad wondered about in discussing some literature I had recommended to him, the tendency among our number to become or embody things that seem so far outside the “norm” for most folks. So, I thought I would talk about it here.

The question was: Why are trans people so… extreme? So radical? Politically, culturally, sexually, even when it comes to our personalities. Why are there so many transgender radicals?

I don’t feel attached to this name

I am a white trans woman of middle-class, educated background. Though I am a wage-laborer and a service-industry worker, I am lucky to have been given opportunities to pursue higher education and academia.

What I just described to you could describe so very many of my trans cohorts. That is, it would if you would believe what the media talks about most often. We tend to be the ones that are focused upon: the highly educated, the photogenic, and the (relatively) high-profile. For many of our enemies, that is what Transgenderism and our Evil Ideology is entirely about: effete, mentally unhinged, and politically liberal elites who would love nothing more than to recruit your innocent children into our deviant lifestyle. People in positions of power who want to corrupt the youth.

Of course, all of that is nonsense.

Do you know how I know that is nonsense?

In a few months, we will observe Trans Day of Remembrance. We will say the names of those of us who have died during that year as a result of trans hatred and transphobia. That list is almost always overrepresented by Black, indigenous trans women and men of color, many of whom are sex workers out of necessity. And it is the identities of those people that put in stark contrast the image that I present myself as to the world.

That is what survivorship bias looks like in real time.

The ones the media loves to portray as the intellectual and political vanguard of trans people is truly anything but. Because the ones who are on the front lines, the ones who are most at-risk in this world are non-white and working class. The ones that the media often neglect to publicize or outright villainize are the ones that get taken out earliest. You see me— an educated and perhaps politically anomalous person—but our news media, our culture, hides who is most at risk. I am relatively safe, in comparison. I’m flying in largely non-dangerous skies. But I am lucky. I’m one of the ones who hasn’t been hit in the vulnerable areas.

That truth leads many to claim an erroneous statistic—that the life expectancy of a trans person is age 35.² What that statistic (with no hard science to back it up) does is conflate the (very real) statistic that most of us are killed under the age of 35. The danger is very real, but it is often a stress-inducing myth spoken by well-meaning activists. We are killed by our families, by potential sexual partners who freak out once we “unmask” (tell them we are trans), by people who see an easy target for violence. Or, we are driven to suicide by the lack of a support network, or because our families would disown us, or because there are no other options. We lose a job. We can’t find housing. We are excluded from society, and then will be driven to our lowest point. And our detractors dare to say that there is a suicidality problem among trans people, and tell us to “join the 42%,” meaning the statistic of us that kill ourselves cited by Stephen Crowder and his ilk. As if most often when we do kill ourselves, it’s because of a society that hates and stigmatizes us. As if we are left many other options.

Having said that, I do want to get something out of the way. I am, by my own admittance, radical-minded.³ I am by no means any kind of “default” person in any kind of political conversation. Do not take my opinions on political anarchy as any kind of consensus among the transgender population.

HOWEVER. Would you like to take a look at some of the memes we trans folks share amongst ourselves in community? Just as a light-hearted little ha-ha between friends?

You can see a bit of a theme, no?

Now, why would we of all people be drawn to leftist/communist/anarchist politics? I have some theories.

How do I grasp reality, when I don’t have an identity?

I want to break a few things down to their barest elements for you as to why this might be the case, because it is… well. Complicated, to say the least. There has been a surge among younger generations to question and explore their genders, that much is true. We have been given more space, more freedom, to explore our identities compared to previous generations. I am a millennial, but millennials on down, through Gen Z and Gen Alpha, are in a peculiar place in history.

Put bluntly: The world—more specifically, the Western, capitalist-democratic world—has made it abundantly clear that things will only ever get worse until something drastic changes it, and even that is no guarantee that it will change for the better.

Millennials came of age post-9/11. We entered the workforce in time for the 2008 market crash. We started working through a period of recession recovery. Things started to look up, until the rise of nascent fascism made itself known in the first Trump administration. COVID-19 was a great reset of sorts, and gave us hope that things might change, the fever might break. Yet everything since then as only made our lives materially worse each year. Wages have not risen with cost of living expenses. And finally, Trump’s 2^nd administration has taken power, and is quick at work dismantling what elements of government were built to support and sustain our country’s population. There is no material benefit to being an American, if there ever was one. It has been a long, continuous serious of being gut-punched and set back every 3-5 years.

It is unlikely that I will ever own a home.

I am 37 years old, and working on my third advanced degree. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, and I’m almost done with my PhD. I am either under-experienced or over-qualified, the magical sweet spot of unemployment/underemployment. There is no reason for me to struggle to find employment in the two fields I am qualified for. I have been applying to jobs for over a year without even an interview to show for it.

Put glibly, every rite of passage, every step towards goals I was taught to believe that I was meant to achieve, has been ripped out from under me. Every door I have attempted to walk through has been slammed in my face. And the sad fact is, this is normal. Anecdotally, most of my cohort have faced exactly the same treatment. Corporate downsizing. Entire trades being made “obsolete” because some tech billionaire decided to “move fast and break things.” The systematic dismantling of the educational system. The gig economy, heightening the wage-earning economy’s most egregious abuses. The expectation for a fully employed adult is to have either a roommate or a romantic partner to pay off the bills, because it’s almost impossible for any single adult to be able to survive on their own unless they have been massively lucky. And even the two-income, fully employed households are drowning.

Is it any wonder my generation in general would like to burn down the doors that have slammed in our faces?

Is it any wonder that I would, for that matter?

Now, add into this mix one final flavor to make this special sauce complete:

In this climate, in this government’s administration, in this current moment…

Would you hire a trans person?

We are lightning rods of controversy. Everyone feels entitled to opinions about our existence now. Where we used to toil in anonymity and invisibility, now we have attracted the ire of several hate campaigns in every major country. News media loves how controversial we are, because trans news gets clicks. More importantly, outrageous stories about what depraved thing the trans people are up to make for big money. Attention is money, in this media environment. JK Rowling, billionaire children’s writer, has catapulted transphobia into the line of sight for people who would never in a million years have a single thought about my tiny population. She has spent her millions on anti-trans hate campaigns for almost a decade now. The hate campaign is obviously larger than her, though. Everyone from conservative think-tanks to religious organizations have declared trans people the enemies of humanity. Hell, last year the Catholic Church declared “gender ideology” as a crime against human dignity.⁴ Now, they won’t explain what they mean by “gender ideology,” mind you, but I think most people know they are operating at a common wavelength given the media environment as it is.

And I screamed ‘til my voice was gone

What it all amounts to is this: for the bulk of human history, trans people have been in existence. It is a quirk of the human condition. Only until the internet did our history become more visible. We existed in doctor’s handbooks and papers, but we were a pathology, a paraphilia, a sexual disorder. Magnus Hirschfeld did research on trans people in the 20’s, but the Nazis burned those books in the 30’s. All that science, lost. It set us back decades. In the 70’s, we were the exotic other, sung about by the Beatles, Lou Reed and David Bowie, but nothing more than a sexual object. Hell, by comparison, the song “Lola” seems downright sweet. A generation of queer folks were slaughtered in the 80’s and 90’s by AIDS, an epidemic fostered by none other than the Reagan administration no less. But with the internet, we began to connect dots. Find the points of commonality. Find our community.

Only until recently, could we even put together a composite diagram like the survivorship bias I spoke about. Only until recently were we given a voice to speak for ourselves. Only until recently have we been able to give the necessary tools for identity-formation to kids who might be like us. Only until recently have options and safety been in a good enough state for people to begin coming out of the closet. Only until recently did we begin to change the negative narratives cultivated by the dominant culture.

Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” was released in 2011. That is how recent I think most people even heard the word “transgender.” Because of a fucking Lady Gaga song.⁵

Most of our existence in history has been robbed from us by a culture that hates us. Only when we began to speak for ourselves did the sleeping beast truly bare its fangs. Imagine a population that has been, from the outset, marginalized. Victimized. Villainized. Monsterized. Whose name has been turned into a slur.

All because those uppity tr*nnies couldn’t just take their abuse and shut up.

When you comprehend that there has been a gun aimed at your head all your life, even when you didn’t realize it, it radicalizes you. It makes you realize that respectability was never going to be granted to you. There will never be a way in which you can twist yourself that will be acceptable to your enemies. There will never a permutation of a transgender being that will ever be seen by fascists and transphobes as “one of the good ones.” There are no “good” ones. Even if you say the danger is those “other” trans people. That will only delay the inevitable. They will always come for you in the end.

In the end, the question for you, dear reader is this:

Why are trans people so radicalized? Why would they be drawn to a politics that promises revolution, seizure of the means of production, and a disintegration of the political machine that has killed and marginalized your people for millennia? Why do we argue for more access to health care? Freedom to live in the way we were meant to? Freedom to embrace our true selves, no matter how “shameful” that might appear to be? Why must we always make it about our identities? Why must we talk about it endlessly?

Really, the question is, why wouldn’t we be radical?

When your history is robbed of you, when you are villainized to the point of cartoonish absurdity, when avenues of employment are denied you because either you are too controversial or your employer is a bigot, what else would you do? When only 1% of the population at most might share your experience, why wouldn’t you want to try to endlessly explain yourself, your experiences, your identity to others? Because when we do talk about it, there’s a chance, just a chance, that talking about it might save another lost soul, who cries to themselves at night thinking that they are alone in the world. We know what that’s like, and we wouldn’t wish it on our worst enemies. So why do our enemies wish it upon us? We want a world where NOBODY ever has to feel like that. We want that lost soul to know that they aren’t alone. That they are a part of a community with a rich history and a culture. So what if a few memes are cringeworthy—who cares! So what if you find our politics extreme? What other option do we have, but to ask for liberation?

So again, I say, the reason you see so many trans radicals out there is because the other ones didn’t survive. All the bullet holes you see in our wings are battle scars, superficial. The ones whose vital parts were hit? They didn’t make it.

We are radical because we need to be. We are radical so future generations don’t have to be. We are radical because to desire freedom is a human desire, and to not want it is to deny your own humanity.

What other option do we have?

1. Lyrics taken from “Salt,” by Bad Suns

2. See this article: https://19thnews.org/2022/08/black-trans-women-life-expectancy-false/

3. So radical, I went and wrote a manifesto about it: https://maeforrestbarnes.substack.com/p/against-unjust-authority?r=2x9a9e

4. Dignitas Infinita: https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2024/04/08/240408c.html

5. No disrespect to our fair Lady, Stefani Germanotta. She gave us the iconic line, when asked if she might be trans, “So what? Would that be so horrible?” I could never hate you, queen.