Every Living Transsexual Is A Republican Policy Failure

Living in spite

JMW Turner, “Sunrise With Sea Monsters” (1845)

There do certainly seem to be more of us. I’ve seen it happen in clubs and bars, support groups and protests, clubs that functioned as support groups, and bars that turned into protests. But it’s also true in workplaces and schools, clinics and prisons, surveys and polls attempting to estimate how many of us there are and how quickly we are multiplying. The latest effort comes from Gallup who, earlier this week, released their annual estimate of the population size of “LGBTQ+” people in the United States which climbed from 5.6% in 2020 to 9.5% in 2024.

The number of people identifying as transgender specifically has likewise climbed and at a similar rate, from 0.6% in 2020 to 1.3% in 2024. The increasing number of people identifying as transgender and, more specifically, transsexuals accessing medical treatments is a frequent trope in right-wing agitprop, legal filings, and legislative debates, portrayed as a potentially fraught sign of ill restraint on the part of gatekeepers—doctors, teachers, parents—or evidence of a “social contagion,” a medicalized excuse for moral panics whose epidemiological verbiage suggests the necessary action is quarantine and eradication. Even in it’s most liberally-coded forms, this anxiety operates on the assumption that identifying as trans and, more specifically, transitioning medically are fraught last resorts, only to be pursued after a rigorous regime of assessments and punishments based on the unquestioned belief that any number of trans people (and especially transsexuals) should be viewed skeptically and warily until it is equal to zero.

Even friendly responses to these claims tend to point out how few trans people there are relative not across time—how many then vs. how many now—but across the population. To address liberal anxieties about youth transitions increasing (from relatively minuscule to relatively small), we point out that fewer than 0.001% of adolescents in the US have received puberty blockers or hormone therapies for gender dysphoria (while the CDC tells us 3% of adolescents identify as transgender). In the face of a nationwide media campaign targeting trans athletes, we assure audiences that many states report just a handful or fewer trans student-athletes across their entire state and the NCAA points out “less than 10” of their 500,000 collegiate athletes are trans. While helpful for rebutting specific points—i.e. doctors prescribing transition care are somehow doing so without appropriate ethical caution—one should wonder if we also aren’t simply affirming the initial anxiety we’re trying to address, that it’s possible there could be too many of us and there should probably be fewer.

So let’s sit with the fact Gallup reminds us of but has been obvious for some time—there are more trans people than there used to be, more than there were five years ago and certainly more than ten years ago. Within this increase is a likewise increasing number of transsexuals—that is, trans people who’ve accessed medical treatments thanks to growth in medical providers offering this care and both public and private insurance plans covering it. While answers as to why this is happening often focus on the social—increased awareness, visibility, look-at-this-chart-of-left-handedness, etc.—it’s the material changes in access to medical care that fascinate me most.

Trans people’s oppression has always and remains a material reality more than a social one, fueled not by mere abstractions like hate but by poverty, unemployment, violence, and criminalization. These are both society’s response to a transsexual and the barriers a transsexual must overcome to access the medical treatments that, for most, define transsexualism. You cannot change your sex through knowledge or desire or the mere legal right to do so (though a lack of those things will certainly make it harder). You can only change your sex by accessing hormones and surgeries, both of which have become more common because it has become easier, more accessible, and more affordable than it once was.

Notable to me is this increase has also come since 2020 which, again, might suggest a social explanation. Huddled away on quarantined Zoom calls and left alone in our homes, it was undoubtedly easier to delve into introspection and endure the awkward phases of transition away from prying coworkers or harassing commuters. However, the luxury of working from home was unevenly distributed among racial groups and largely limited to high-income professions trans people are underrepresented within. In contrast, the increase in trans people has continued apace year-over-year in the five years since 2020 and is evenly distributed across racial groups while trans people are disproportionately in low-income jobs that never had the option of working from home in the first place. Since transitioning is a material reality—one that alters your relationship to your employer and, more pertinently, your employer’s relationship to you—it seems likely this increase was buoyed not just by increased awareness or visibility but by mass employment, greater power for workers, and other factors that would make one’s income, housing, and health care stable enough to withstand the shock to one’s privilege that accompanies life as an out transsexual.

So transitioning is easier, more affordable, and less likely to lead to unemployment and economic ruin—even while Republican politicians try to erase it entirely. In fact, that increase in trans people from 2020 to 2024 also occurred while we became the main figure in Republican nightmares, the subject of over a thousand pieces of state legislation and hundreds of millions of dollars in electoral campaign spending every year. The plain goal of these policies has always been, to borrow a phrase, “eradicating transgenderism from public life entirely” as part of a broader effort to entrench patriarchal labor arrangements and gender norms. While often discussed like siloed and abstract debates over fairness in women’s sports or the true definition of womanhood, the policies being enacted at the state and now at the federal level are basically conversion therapy by statecraft, designed to not only put medical transitions out of reach and coerce the doctors and authorities who might support us but also raise the cost trans people pay for being trans, weakening our overall position in society to pressure us into the closet, the prisonhouse, or the grave.

That the number of trans people has increased in the face of such a totalizing onslaught is not a reason for alarm, nor should our small absolute numbers be offered as a reason for calm. It should be greeted by our friends and our enemies alike as a testament to our concrete will towards freedom. It has always been true that transitioning entails sacrifice and costs, and it is the goal of advocates and activists to reduce that cost or, at least, ensure trans people have the material defenses, community, and resources to weather those costs. But in the face of efforts from the schoolhouse to the White House to raise those costs, it is no small assurance that they are utterly, indisputably failing.

One wonders if that failure is being driven not simply despite their best efforts but in spite of them, that nothing ignites a desire like someone devoted to your destruction attempting to build a containing wall around it. A transition is not merely a strike against an assigned gender or even the people who immediately assign that gender to you—it is a strike against the cissexism that undergirds an fascistic worldview dedicated to treating bodies and their gendered, reproductive capacities as merely means to a rigid, narrow end. But the act of transitioning often requires a re-evaluation of purpose, a reassessment of authority, and an open embrace of the reality that the goals, dreams, desires, and bodies of every person is an end in and of themselves.

The authors of Queers Read This—the famous 1990 manifesto distributed by the NYC direct action group Queer Nation—open their polemic by reminding their readers:

“Everyday you wake up alive, relatively happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act. You as an alive and functioning queer are a revolutionary. There is nothing on this planet that validates, protects or encourages your existence. It is a miracle you are standing here reading these words. You should by all rights be dead.”

Or put more recently, “if u r transgender u have to live . if u accomplish something else then good . if u accomplish nothing else then good . but u have to live."

When I look at the Trump administration and the violence, criminalization, and surveillance they want to enact towards trans people, I do not see a bottom. I do not see where they would stop or why. But what I do see are more and more trans people climbing out of the graves they’re trying to bury us in.