In the wake of an election in which Donald Trump stoked fear about trans people — as in the much-discussed ad that warned “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — Democrats are now debating how much the issue of trans rights hurt them and how fast they should retreat from it. Which is remarkable, because throughout her brief campaign, Kamala Harris was all but silent on the subject. It’s not clear how much further Democrats could actually retreat.
The party’s decision to focus on the issues that matter to most voters, especially reproductive rights, and set trans rights aside is based on a misconception. The two issues can’t be separated, because trans rights don’t just resemble reproductive rights; trans rights are reproductive rights.
In the last couple of years, as the right wing in the United States has stepped up its attacks on trans people, it has devoted tremendous energy to curbing access to gender-affirming care for minors (and in some cases adults). Supporters of such legislation argue that young people are not qualified to make — or even participate in — decisions they may regret later in life.
Of course, young people make all kinds of decisions they may later regret. But opponents of trans rights argue that there is an area in which the consequences can be nothing short of catastrophic, and that area is reproduction. Whether the focus is gender-affirming care, sports teams or bathrooms, the mission is, invariably, to protect women and girls from trans people. Two stars of the campaign to limit access to care are Chloe Cole in the United States and Keira Bell in the United Kingdom, girls who transitioned to being boys and later detransitioned to being young women. Both of them have repeatedly expressed fear that the treatment they received as teenagers could have rendered them infertile. It may or may not have; the long-term effects of puberty blockers followed by hormone therapy aren’t well known, though many trans men who started hormone treatment as adults have been able to get pregnant.
Still, infertility seems to inhabit its own special category of cultural anxiety. One influential voice sounding an alarm about gender-affirming care is Abigail Shrier, whose 2020 book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” advanced a view of transness as a social contagion endangering America’s children. Its cover features a picture of a little girl with a perfect round cutout where her reproductive organs would have been.
I am trans and I am a parent of three children, one of whom I carried. Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself. I also have many friends (none of them trans, as it happens) who never had children. I occasionally envy their freedom. They may occasionally envy me my sprawling family. In neither case is the feeling of regret — if it can even be called that — significant or particularly long-lasting. It is, rather, an awareness that life is a series of choices, all of which are made with incomplete information.
Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I had transitioned in my 20s or 30s rather than at 50. I probably would have been unable to have a biological child — not because hormones would have rendered me infertile but because until fairly recently many countries in Europe required people seeking to transition, either legally or medically, to undergo sterilization first. In the United States, university-based clinics that offered trans care often enforced the same requirement. Why? “I think that the logic was a concern about enforcing binary views of sex and gender,” Jacob Moses, a historian of medicine who is writing on the issue of regret and gender-affirming care, told me recently. “This is in the 1960s, 1970s, before legalization of same-sex marriage.” Eugenic thinking also played a role, he added: Trans people were often considered mentally ill and unfit to have children.
Anxiety about trans people and reproduction, and the laws and rules that it produces, cut both ways: On the one hand, these rules aim to stop people born with female reproductive organs from forfeiting their ability to get pregnant (anxiety about trans people not having babies), and on the other, they aim to ensure that people who do transition will not reproduce (anxiety about trans people having babies). In both cases, the objective is to control the means of reproduction. That’s usually the goal of movements that purport to protect women and girls.
Elizabeth Reis, a distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York, studies the medical history of intersex people. (Intersex describes natural variations of physical sex characteristics that can be present at birth or become apparent later in life.) Going back to the mid-19th century, procedures performed on intersex people to make their bodies conform to the gender binary left some of them unable to reproduce. “It seemed like doctors didn’t want them to have children,” Reis told me. These days, many of the laws that restrict access to gender-affirming surgeries for young people make exceptions for intersex children, who are still often subjected to “corrective” surgeries without their consent.
I have spent some time reporting on the global movement for “traditional values,” or for “natural family,” or against “gender ideology.” I have heard its natalist message and understood its barely hidden subtext: White heterosexual cisgender people should have as many babies as possible, not just for their own sake but for the benefit of their Christian nations. I have also seen how this movement acts when it is in power, as it is in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
First, that government banned all adoptions by U.S. citizens. Then it banned what it called “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors,” not unlike our so-called Don’t Say Gay laws. Then Russia outlawed adoption by people who are in same-sex couples. Then it banned medical and legal transition, and dissolved the marriages of people who had transitioned already. Next it banned any public mention of homosexuality. More recently it declared the “international L.G.B.T. movement” an extremist organization, effectively outlawing queer people and displays of queerness. And this month, the lower house of Russia’s parliament passed a law outlawing public communication (“propaganda”) that might be seen as promoting childlessness.
For more than a decade, Putin has made procreation a focus of his political rhetoric — much as JD Vance has in the last few years. In his short time in the Senate, Vance has introduced or endorsed the full spectrum of anti-trans legislation, some aimed at limiting access to care and team sports and one that would end the practice of issuing passports with an unspecified gender designation.
Back in Russia, early in the process of outlawing L.G.B.T. people, a crusading right-wing politician invoked me as a worst-case scenario. What Americans really want, he told one of Russia’s most popular tabloids, “is to adopt Russian children and raise them in perverted families like Masha Gessen’s.” I have a U.S. passport, am queer, and Jewish, to boot, so this reference to me tied together a number of groups that Putin vilifies. The specter of Mexican criminals supposedly bringing disease into our country does the same for Trump. On the right, all fears are interconnected, as are all dreams: Replacement theory lives right next to the fear of trans “contagion,” and the promise of mass deportation is entwined with the vision of an America free of immigrants and people who breach the gender binary.
Trump’s and Vance’s politics are coherent, and their legislative agenda is clear: Roll back trans rights, lesbian and gay rights, reproductive rights and women’s rights, all in the name of making America great, straight and white again. It’s entirely possible that Harris’s evasions on the issue of trans rights helped cost her the trust of voters, and by extension the election. But the price trans Americans will likely pay if we are abandoned by the Democratic Party as a small and unpopular constituency may be much higher.
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