Maeve Higgins: Transness points to exciting future but the backlash has been vile

Transgender people may be the catalyst for cisgender people starting to look beyond the physical and explore the interior, the community, and the elements that make us feel and think, places where transness points to a beautiful and exciting future, writes Maeve Higgins

LGBT+ activists and their supporters rally in support of transgender people on the steps of New York City Hall in October 2018. Transphobia is rampant in the US, there is a brutal and concerted effort to disappear trans people. File photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

NATURALLY enough, I don’t remember my birth, but I imagine my parents and doctors did the whole ‘it’s a girl’ thing. 

It was easy to tell from my body that my sex was female. As a child, I felt pretty much like a girl, meaning society both dictated and affirmed my gender identity, and that wasn’t confusing to me because it aligned with the sex assigned to me. This saved me a lot of trouble because as the years passed — cue the saxophone, please — I became a woman.

My gender identity matches my sex, making me a cisgender woman. Not all women are cisgender; some of us are transgender women and have to make a bigger effort to match our sex and gender identity. The same goes for men; not all men are assigned male at birth, so it’s a process for them, and often a fraught one, to match their sex and gender identity.

In Ireland today, some cisgender people are beginning to look closer and think deeper about these questions of gender and sex for what seems like the first time. Transgender people may have been the catalyst for this national discussion, but this is clearly about cisgender people. 

Cisgender people are the ones who need to figure out which future we want to live in. Transness is not new; as long as there have been people, there have been trans people. 

Trans people and how they live have taught me to look closer and think deeper about how things are and how they could be. 

Gender identity means different things in different countries and changes throughout time. Initially, this can be challenging to think about, and some people feel defensive and even shut down when the idea is brought up. But understanding how we perform gender is nothing to be worried about or scared of; it’s actually really interesting. 

We must not put our own anxieties onto others. We perform gender when we do simple things like deciding what shoes to wear or how to pitch our voice and face when we speak in a work meeting. It is to our benefit to understand this. It’s also our responsibility, especially with transphobia waiting in the wings.

Transgender in the US

In Ireland, the conversation is nascent, but here in the US, there are, loosely speaking, two realities openly competing for the future. There is a growing number of people here who identify as transgender. 

Those figures are still tiny, but The New York Times reports that they illustrate a significant rise since a previous report in 2017, though the analyses used different methods. It states that the data “captures a stark generational shift and emerging societal embrace of a diversity of gender identities.”

In the US, more young people than ever before are embodying ways of being that do not fit traditional gender identities. Day by day, they are living and creating this radical reality, which is quite beautiful to see. When I look at the trans people in my community, I see fun, kindness, and a kind of workaday anarchy borne of thriving outside of the structures imposed on us all. 

Transgender people make up new families and look after each other in ways both practical and conceptual. These bonds of care and compassion for one another are the polar opposite of how much of society here operates, with a dog-eat-dog, individualistic bent.

In tandem with this hopeful and tender reality, there is a backlash.

This backlash forms a much darker reality that is muscling in and trying to take control of the future. Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimisation, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault, according to a 2021 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. 

Deadly violence against transgender people has risen in recent years, and racism plays a role, too, with a spike in murders of transgender Black women.

Matching this danger is a formalised violence, the systematic and bureaucratic kind, coming from the top. There is a well-funded and highly organised push within state legislatures to advance bills targeting transgender people. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) keeps a running list of these measures. 

This is updated weekly, and you can see the jump in laws barring or criminalising healthcare for young trans people; restricting access to the use of appropriate facilities like public toilets, disallowing trans students’ ability to fully participate in school and sports, allowing religiously-motivated discrimination against trans people, as well as making it more difficult for them to get identification documents with their name and gender.

Again, this is a cisgender issue; transgender people are not the ones trying to control or define cisgender people. 

This fixation of some cisgender people on the physical is not just intrusive, it’s pedantic, and it’s boring. To focus on a person’s genitals strips them of everything else — and that is so much — that makes them a person. This makes them easier to ridicule and destroy. 

It is dehumanising to reduce any person to our physiology; it is laughable that because someone has or does not have this particular chromosome, hormone, or appendage in or on their body, a stranger gets to say who they are. 

Yet transphobia is rampant here; there is a brutal and concerted effort to disappear trans people; this is a fact. However, trans people are not defined by transphobia, not even close.

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While these statistics about violence against trans people and these laws that seek to annihilate transness are frightening, there is more to transness than statistics and laws and even the physical world. There is much to gain by thinking deeper and looking beyond the physical. 

The exciting part of life that we can’t readily see, the interior, the community, and the elements that make us feel and think, are where transness points to a beautiful and exciting future. There is nothing magical or ‘other’ about trans people, but it is in their reality and future, the one they work for and create by being, that I see the happiest and safest world for us all. 

That is the future I want to live in, how about you?