Alys+

Brianna Wu is a transgender woman who, regrettably, has a platform on Twitter. I've been pretty negative about her and her opinions on trans people, politics, and trans politics and have bluntly urged people to not, under any circumstances, follow her advice on transitioning.

Recently she posted her views in a way that concisely illustrates how feckless the trans politics she's arguing for are. Here's the tweet:

No more conflating non-binary with actual transsexuals.

No more trans women in sports.

No more access to women's spaces for people not medically transitioning.

And a unified voice in protecting dignity and health care for actual transsexuals medically transitioning.

I'm sure some cis people, even cis people who are pretty accepting of trans people, think this sounds reasonable. If I bend over backwards to be charitable, I guess there's a version of half of these I technically agree with. Yeah, the trans people she calls "actual transsexuals"¹ have different needs and experiences to some extent than non-binary people. (Although to be clear, non-binary people transition medically, too.) Yeah, it's good to protect dignity and health care for trans people who are medically transitioning.

But overall this is a political strategy of throwing people under the bus in hopes that the bigots will be mollified and not come after you. While this obviously isn't good for the people you're throwing under the bus, it's not good for you either. For one thing, this is corrosive to any trans community larger or more functional than a clique of you and your mean t-girl friends ². For another, the bigots won't be mollified.

Lastly, what does this supposedly get you? Dignity and health care are actually things worth striving for, sure, but what kind of gatekeeping is lurking behind "actual transsexuals"? I'm not saying there's no value in seeing doctors and psychologists for what is a medically and psychologically involved process, but the kind of gatekeeping I'm talking about, which attempts to identify "actual transsexuals," is bad for everyone. Even if you emerge with a scrip for hormones in hand, the process is pretty degrading. Maybe she would forswear those parts of the process and that's what she means by "dignity." But her embrace of terms like autogynephile makes me doubt that.

And it sucks for trans women to not be allowed in women's sports! I participated in cross country as my assigned gender well before I transitioned, but it was nonetheless a good experience. If I had transitioned earlier, I'd hate to give that up or be outed by being the only girl in the boys' race. I don't run competitively anymore (and to be clear, was never an elite athlete), but I think there's something corrosive about just knowing I've disallowed from the women's division on the basis of being trans. Similarly, I'm not going to be using the restrooms in the U.S. Capitol anytime soon, but there's something a little bit degrading about the fact that I would be supposed to use the men's restroom. Wu doesn't support bathroom bills like that, but I think her (apparent) blanket exclusion of trans women from women's sports would have a similar result. And as she herself has noted, most of the people pushing bans on trans women in women's sports are not concerned for female athletes (or even cis female athletes), which is why you'll see bans for trans women in the women's division of chess. Obviously, trans female athletes, congressional staffers, and chess players are most affected by these bans, but I think it a subtler way, it affects us all.

I can't help but think back to when Brianna Wu posted about how she's not a "biological woman." If that's just a weird way of acknowledging there are differences between her and cis women broadly speaking, some of them biological, fine. But I don't think that's what she means. I'm not going to psychoanalyze or speculate about what the thought process behind that might be, but it's hard to not read it as a concession to transphobia. Suffice it to say, I refuse to have my womanhood seen as some sort of special dispensation granted by benevolent cis people.

The reason I'm writing about this is not to point out that she sucks.³ It's because I don't think she's alone. I don't think I'm going to wake up tomorrow to find that all the trans women who already have access to medical transition have joined her or anything, but people are swayed by this false promise. I'm particularly concerned about newly out trans people who haven't seen what this kind of gatekeeping represents being swayed by Wu's veneer of reasonableness. With Christian nationalism's growing power in American politics, we need to stick together more than ever.