Should Anti-Trans Campaigns Be Seen as Products of a Moment?

Is it morally acceptable to change your gender?

Just over half the country doesn’t think so — a proportion that has stayed fairly stable since 2021, the year after I disclosed my gender transition. It’s disheartening to reflect on the fact that every other person you meet, statistically speaking, disapproves of your existence.

That divide perhaps explains the onslaught of anti-trans ads Republican candidates have run in the final weeks of the election, hoping to paint their more trans-accepting opponents as far outside what is normal in American society.

And yet, most notions of “normal” have rarely been fixed, even as there have always been those who insist they are immutable. Certainly gender may be one of the most fundamental — dare I say natural — ways we have organized societies. But history reminds us that all assumptions should always be questioned. Every significant challenge to the existing order — from the vote for women to interracial unions to marriage equality — has provoked strong reactions and, not uncommonly, hand-wringing about the downfall of civilization.

The debate over trans existence, and rights, might actually best be understood in the context of some (imperfect) historical parallels. Back in the 1950s, for example, Richard and Mildred Loving were prosecuted for being married and wanting to live in their home state — a crime only because Richard was white and Mildred was Black.

Race isn’t gender, and the comparisons aren’t perfect. And yet the arguments made against interracial unions like the Lovings’ in the 1950s and ’60s are eerily similar to those made against marriage equality a decade or two ago, and against trans people today: We hear appeals to God, science, the well-being of children and the natural order, in efforts made to write out of existence trans people, our care and our place in public life. Those arguments resonated back then, as perhaps they do for some people now. In the 1960s, a vast majority of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages, (a majority didn’t approve until the 1990s), even if now few question whether people of different races should be allowed to marry.

It’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to scoff at the narrow-minded views of the past. But doing so in the moment can be challenging. After all, “normal” has come to mean more than just “the average” or “the majority.” As Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, Australian professors, noted in “Normality: A Critical Genealogy,” “it also implies what is correct or good, something so perfect in its exemplarity that it constitutes an ideal.”Normality imposes an often arbitrary frame.