OPINION: Yep, The “Paranoid” Trans Folks Were Right All Along
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Yep, The “Paranoid” Trans Folks Were Right All Along is an opinion piece by Dr. Antimony Deor.
About 5 years ago my girlfriend told me she was scared of transphobes. I told her not to worry — they were a tiny group of niche weirdos with no political influence, who were out of touch with the majority of the population.
10 years ago, I thought trans people on Twitter seemed a bit dramatic when they said that the question “do trans women have an advantage in sports?” being asked, actually meant “let’s end all trans healthcare” — and that eradication was the end goal.
A few years before that, at a LGBTQIA+ conference, I was incredulous when a group of gender-diverse people insisted that straight, cisgender people would never fully welcome us. Maybe eventually the married monogamous white folks — but never the ‘weird’ ones.
It turns out that all these people were 100% correct, and I was wrong.
They weren’t chronically-online paranoid leftists — they were clear-eyed about a movement that had never stopped being anti-queer, they’d just become more methodical. As an AFAB trans non-binary person, I just wasn’t bearing the brunt of it.
Now, when trans people are being kicked out of the bathrooms (and cis people actually too, despite TERFs claiming they ‘can always tell!’); when the US is trying to ban gender-affirming care for low-income people; when trans youth in Queensland are facing a ban on life-saving hormone treatments; when Sky News keeps asking every politician how a woman is defined — can we say we weren’t warned?
We had a good week back in 2018 when the majority first learnt what pronouns were and we could tick ‘other’ on forms.
Now it feels like we cracked the gender binary open just the tiniest little bit, and out crawled alpha/beta, redpill/blue hair, and tradwife/chad.
The backlash came fast, and has been exhausting and confusing – but not for those trans fems who saw it coming the whole time.
