Last weekend I went to a big box hardware store to buy some paint. As I was waiting on the paint mixer, I was subjected to a nearby conversation.
A man was telling another man — a stranger, from what I could gather based on context clues — about The Transgender Menace.
According to this fellow, our nation is in the midst of a crisis. Tiny children are getting hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and changing their gender. It’s being encouraged by their teachers and parents. It’s mental illness taking the form of a fad. Something must be done! They’re already here! You’re next! You’re next! And so forth and so on.
First off, the man’s argument was factually inaccurate, as only the smallest percentage of people are getting HRT before the age of 18, and then only with parental permission and a letter of support from a mental health professional. As for those 18 and older, I feel that if you’re old enough to join the military, you’re old enough to make any other personal decision.
Secondly, there is nothing I feel so passionately about that I feel the need to accost a random stranger about it in the paint aisle. On the other hand, I try to have a personality that isn’t based on angrily reacting to the latest propaganda-fueled stalking horse, so maybe I’m the wrong person to ask.
I know several trans people, including a few I count as friends. I’ll admit, I don’t understand what it’s like to feel that you were born in the wrong body. However, it seems to me that there are a lot of things I don’t understand — Bernoulli’s principle, the Cyrillic alphabet, the sudden proliferation of Labubus — but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Whether I understand it or not, planes continue to take flight, Bulgarians continue to speak Bulgarian, and backpacks continue to be adorned with weird little bunny gremlins.
Whenever I hear someone spewing hate toward trans people, whether it’s coming from a dude in the paint aisle or the people elected to hold the highest offices in the land, there’s always a temptation to argue back with facts. It’s tempting to cite the statistic that fewer than one percent of trans people regret transitioning, or bring up that trans and non-binary people are well documented throughout history and are nothing new.
However, I think the better argument is much simpler:
Getting worked up over what strangers may or may not be doing to their bodies is weird and creepy.
It’s not just me, right? What’s wrong with these people? Ten years ago, if you blocked the paint aisle to rant about children changing genders, people would assume you were deeply and perhaps dangerously mentally ill, and they would be right to do so. How has this become normalized?
I am fortunate to have many friends, and barring any war injuries, I assume they all have various parts that they conceal from public view for the sake of propriety. The amount of time I spend thinking about those parts or what they do with them is zero. This is because I am not a weird pervert. If I did spend a lot of time thinking about those parts or dictating what my friends are allowed to do with them, I expect I would have a lot fewer friends and probably end up on a list of some sort.
Isn’t this country at least nominally supposed to be about freedom? Where’s the freedom in controlling the deeply personal decisions that law-abiding citizens are allowed to make? Seems like Communism to me.
For all the talk of people brainwashing children into becoming transgender, there’s only one dangerous group of people in this country who are controlling what others can do with their bodies. They call themselves the Supreme Court.
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