The Panic Defense
How trans misogyny threatens democracy
In 1931, the famed British modernist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis published a brief and glowing book about a man he had come to admire named Hitler. The book is a lavish piece of racist propaganda, a celebration of the Nazi Party’s eugenic politics and an effort to dissuade fears Adolf Hitler’s anti-semitism would escalate beyond rhetoric. Written the same year Lewis toured Weimar-era Berlin—Germany’s “Western Babylon,” Lewis writes, “the Perverts’ Paradise”—he was far from taken by the city’s famed red-light districts, sexual leniency, and erotic clubs and jazz bars whose music he refers to using a racial epithet for Black Americans. Unlike the artists from around the globe who sought out Weimar Berlin—Christopher Isherwood or W.H. Auden most famously among them—Lewis was aghast at what he saw as a city succumbing to a steep and vicious moral depravity.
Visiting the legendary Berlin jazz bar Eldorado, Lewis is at first perplexed about what draws so many voyeurs to what appeared to him to be a rather mundane nightclub. But pity the poor unsuspecting soul who lingers too long with one of the Eldorado’s waitresses:
Then these bland Junos-gone-wrong, bare-shouldered and braceleted (as statuesque as feminine show-girl guardees), after a drink or two, will whisper to the outlandish sightseer that they are men. Oh dear — so all the sightseeing eyes are going to be satisfied! And they will goggle at the slight, smiling, bland Edwardian ‘tart’ at their side still disposed to regard this as a hoax after for it is too like, it is too true to nature by far.
To further break the “illusion,” the waitress—colloquially referred to as “daisies”—will take the disbelieving patron’s hand and pass it along her jawline where, “sure enough, the fingers of the sightseer will encounter a bed of harsh shaven bristles as stiff as those of a too brush.”
The sight of these women-who-were-not-women in Weimar Berlin was a frequent trope in travelogues and fiction from the time even while Germany, like most Western countries, criminalized homosexuality and crossdressing at home and in colonized lands across the global south. Many, including Auden and Isherwood, credited Magnus Hirschfeld, the famed sexologist who used synthetic hormones and gynecological surgeries (then as now more often used to tame gender deviance in alignment with the patient’s gender assignment) and used them to help patients transgress their gender assignment. Hirschfeld was reportedly called “the most dangerous Jew in Germany” by Hitler himself and his Institute for Sexual Science was targeted in an early raid and book burning by Nazi student groups in 1933. Queerness—that is, life outside of heterosexual reproduction—was viewed by the Nazis as a dangerous affront to their eugenicist regime. The Reich Central Office targeting abortion and homosexuality was, in fact, one office dedicated to the “serious danger” such activities represented to “population policy and public health.”
For decades after World War II and the fall of Nazi leadership—and even up to the present day—pundits and commentators blamed the sexual and moral excesses of Weimar Berlin for the rise of the Nazis, even casting the queers and daisies witnessed by Lewis as Nazis themselves. In his seminal 2016 history Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World, Gregory Woods suggests queer Berlin showed even liberal commentators “the depths to which others could sink or from which they must be saved…Berlin became the symbol of both the wonderful things that could be achieved if one fought for them and the terrible things that might happen if one did not fight against them.”
Once the threat Hitler posed to German Jews and Europe at large became even more undeniable than it was when Lewis denied it, Lewis authored his own version of this trope in 1937 called The Hitler Cult. Weakly claiming he had never succumbed to Hitler’’s “nationalist uptake,” he blamed his temporary flirtation with fascism not on Nazi propaganda or his faults in his own ideology but, instead, on those devious, lying waitresses at the Eldorado:
“Pre-Hitler Berlin was a sink of iniquity—the fingers of any moderately-fussy patriot must have been itching to spring-clean it. Its male prostitutes alone—with their India-rubber breasts and padded hips—the fairy hostesses of the Eldorado—were a standing invitation to the Puritan to organize a ‘march on Berlin.’”
As Woods writes, Lewis distanced himself from “sexual bores” who raided strip clubs and censored books but felt the trickery of men being women was a step too far. “The mere presence of ersatz women in the club,” writes Woods of Lewis and others, “was enough to foment and justify a right-wing putsch.”
There’s a lot of that going around these days. As the historian Jules Gill-Peterson writes in her new book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, the “trans-feminized” figure has loomed large in justifications for interpersonal, state-powered, and colonial violence for centuries, dating at least as far back as the British empire’s suppression of Indian hijras and North American Two-Spirit peoples under the heel of Western white gender norms. Gill-Peterson (who is careful to not describe as “transgender” people who pre-dated or never identified with the term) draws a direct link between the violence of the state and the interpersonal violence visited upon trans feminine and trans feminized people, both targeting her not only for what she is herself but what her feminine embodiment and performance says about them and their own patriarchal entitlement:
“Gender as a system coerces and maintains radical interdependence, regardless of anyone's identity or politics. Trans misogyny is one particularly harsh reaction to the obligations of that system, obligations guaranteed by the state as much as by civil society. The more viciously or evangelically any trans misogynist delivers invectives against the immoral, impolitic, or dangerous trans women in the world, the more they admit that their gender and sexual identities depend on trans femininity in a crucial way for existence.”
Gills-Peterson carefully and artfully details a 200-year history of trans misogyny, which she defines as “the targeted devaluation of trans femininity and the people perceived to be trans feminine,” not only through personal animus but through institutional and societal machinery. Her subjects range from Mary Jones—a Black sex worker in New York City whose arrest was scandalously covered in the penny-papers of the time—to Jennifer Laude, the trans Filipina murdered in 2014 by a United States Marine named Joseph Scott Pemberton who was later pardoned by the violent autocrat Rodrigo Duterte.
Trans misogyny exists as a force to mark trans feminine people, like those daisies at the Eldorado, as a threat in need of a “pre-emptive strike.”
“The threat label, in turn, justifies aggression or punishment rationalized after the fact as a legitimate response to having been victimized—a self-interested playbook if there ever was one. Whoever pursues trans misogyny enjoys the rare privilege of being at once the victim and the judge, jury, and executioner.”
This is a dynamic that unfolds at both the interpersonal level and the political, with both abusive clients and romantic partners who’ve killed trans women or aspiring fascists in search of an autocracy both claiming trans femininity as so threatening it may justify either a cold-blooded murder or a “march on Berlin.” The agency of trans feminine people inspires, as Gills-Peterson notes, a “trans panic” that moves hearts, courts, and armies alike to view trans women as eminently worthy of destruction.
The men who picked up fairies on the street, or who paid to see female impersonators dance in nightclubs, acted out the same structure of violence when they threatened, assaulted, or robbed them as the colonial state in India or the settler-colonial state in America. This was the same violence wielded by municipal police forces that raided bars and locked people up for cross-dressing. The blending of state violence with interpersonal violence is a signature outcome of the global trans panic, a deadly merger that persists to this day.
Like Wyndham Lewis seeking salvation for having been fooled by the appeal of Hitler’s sexual purity politics, the trans misogynist murderer seeks salvation from judges, juries, and the media by likewise pointing to trans femininity as simply deserving of the violence it endures. Trans femininity itself becomes the danger—an incitement to “panic”—and any trans women who suffer as a result are simply just dessert for engaging in such a terrible way of life in the first place.
I was reminded of Lewis’s trans panic (which I first encountered in Woods’ Homintern) while watching an interview last September with John Eastman, the far-right attorney who led the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election on behalf of Donald Trump—an attorney for Vice President Mike Pence would call Eastman a “serpent in Trump’s ear” feeding him lies about the Constitutionality of this plan and its likelihood of success. As he explained in a leaked email, Eastman believed chaos on January 6 would cause enough delay and uncertainty to compel the Supreme Court to intervene and grant this fraudulent scheme the veneer of credibility.
Speaking with Thomas Klingenstein–a high-profile fundraiser of anti-LGBTQ causes and chair of the far-right Claremont Institute–Eastman said
“There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that ‘a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable.’ At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government. So that’s the question. Have the abuses or the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?”
And what, by chance, were the “abuses” that led Eastman to the dire means he pursued in the winter of 2020? Eastman, formerly the chair of the National Organization for Marriage and a frequent amici applicant in federal court cases concerning the rights of transgender people, didn’t have to look far. “You’re going to let 50-year-old men, naked, into teenage girls’ showers at public pools? Or drag queens doing story hour to six-year-olds?” Eastman said incredulously.“If I had said that ten years ago, you would’ve laughed me out of the room.”
Trans misogyny is rarely, if ever, adequately viewed as a factor in January 6 or the rise of the far-right in the US. In fact, liberal publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic have simultaneously embraced anti-trans narratives while publishing lengthy dissertations about Christian nationalism and debates about Trump’s autocratic aspirations—even though both are unsparing in their own trans panic and the anti-trans parts of Trump’s 2024 policy plank are among the most energizing for his Evangelical base.
It is a failure to perceive trans misogyny (or panic about gender fluidity writ large) as merely a distraction from loftier, more generic concerns about “democracy.” Trans femininity is an assertion of agency against an existing and widespread hierarchy, an act of self-determination in defiance of patriarchal power that not only breaks the rules of that power but breaks its foundation, its logic, and its reproducibility. The ability of the trans feminine person to safely be feminine—to transform the uniform of coercive reproductive regimes into willful defiance of that regime—is an act of self-determination so threatening to the people who benefit from the status quo it may very well justify the denial of self-governance. To ignore the threat posed by trans misogyny—or, worse, to conflate trans people’s own advocacy as its mirror to account for the wrongs on “both sides”—is to empower an assault on your own personhood
Republican candidates for office and right-wing organizations certainly know this. It’s why they’ve enacted close to a hundred anti-transgender laws in the last four years alone and spent $50 million in the 2022 midterms strictly focused on messaging about trans people. Much of these were meant to serve as a shield for candidates facing their deserved backlash following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion and the enactment of invasive and life-threatening abortion bans—an effort that has failed at the electoral level while uprooting families, banning books, and denying trans people control over our own bodies.
Many of those abortion bans were first passed into law in the middle of the 19th century when, as Gills-Peterson notes, many cities across the country began to likewise criminalize cross-dressing. While Western countries sought to mandate “the cult of true womanhood” among white women in the face of industrialization, shifting demographics, and the emancipation of Black slaves, their colonial forces around the globe enforced Christian gender norms at the point of a bayonet. The refusal of colonized populations—from the travestis of South America to Crow badés—to adhere to Western gender norms was often characterized as reason enough to deny them control of their own government and their own resources.
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Gills-Peterson draws particular focus on the British Empire’s “gendercidal” campaign to wipe out India’s hijras. The 1871 Criminal Tribes Act required all hijras to register with colonial police and banned them from traveling outside their home district, wearing women’s clothing, or public dancing. “Hijras were so feminine they were regarded as ungovernable,” writes Gills-Peterson. “The threat of hijras was so morally severe—and politically dangerous to the colonial state—that nothing less than the total eradication of all hijras could squash it.”
As many historians and scholars are keen to point out—most famously Aimé Césaire—the logic of European colonial powers became the logic of European fascism between World Wars I and II. The repression of reproductive rights and queer life witnessed by Wyndham Lewis in Nazi Germany were not novel for their time—homosexuality, crossdressing, and abortion were likewise criminalized throughout the United States. In fact, the sexual decadence of the Weimar era was perceived as a failure of social democracy by much of the Western world and its repression as necessary in Berlin as it was deemed for “natives” around the globe. Gender deviance, for many outside observers, was seen as a problem caused by self-governance and, therefore, a problem so drastic as to justify the withholding of self-governance.
This defense for the denial of democratic power comes up again in the propaganda of American segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s. As the historian Jennifer Dominique Jones shows in her book Ambivalent Affinities, homophobia and trans misogyny featured prominently in the propaganda of conservative politicians and white supremacist organizers hoping to demean civil rights protesters or SNCC volunteers registering Black people across the south to vote. This included efforts by the state to tie queerness and Black civil rights to widespread anti-communism fears, with Florida in particular mobilizing to purge all three from public schools and universities.
As Jones describes, the Ku Klux Klan in particular became enraptured with stories of gender deviance among Black people as a weapon to delegitimize their fight for the vote. This ranged from accusations of homosexuality among Black organizers to actually outing them—most famously of Bayard Rustin—to the kinds of trans misogyny we’d recognize from today’s conservative politics. In an infamous 1960s newsletter titled The Fiery Cross, the Klan published obscene takedowns of Black drag balls in northern cities, mocked the deaths of trans feminine Black people, and became particularly enraptured by the interracial marriage of a white British transsexual woman and an African-American South Carolina man. “The sex change bride…tells of racist terrors confronting it and its mate in Charleston,” mocked the Klan.
Gills-Peterson’s book a work of history from below and is valuable precisely because she spends much less time on the reported logic of trans misogynists than on the ways trans feminine people fight for life under it. What political history she does cover (outside of the colonial context) is between queers, specifically the exclusion of trans feminine people from mainstream gay rights or feminist organizing. As much as drag queens were vaulted as a profession, street queens like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson were regarded as threats to the legitimacy sought by early gay rights organizers like Frank Kameny just as trans people and our rights are viewed with barely-veiled disgust by modern gay conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and James Kirchik. Likewise, dreams of essentialist womanhood and utopian separatism fueled much of the rise of actual “TERFs” in the 1970s, but it was the stench of trans women themselves that caused many advocates seeking mainstream acceptance to flee in favor of acceptability and mainstream legitimacy.
This coincided with the rise in public visibility of the binary transsexual who, as Gills-Peterson notes, “wouldn’t just take hormones but could surgically change sex to pass in her own right, disappearing into American society much like gay men hoped to—at least, that’s the way it was sold to the media.” Frightful of trans femininity’s power to render all those associated with it as delegitimized subjects undeserving of rights, life, or autonomy, even many trans people themselves were—and are—desperate to flee from it.
Today, trans misogyny is one of the most powerful political forces in the world, surprising even Donald Trump with its ability to inspire fervor and excitement among its most loyal adherents. As Judith Butler tracks in their own new book (which I reviewed here last week), “anti-gender” animus is routinely marshaled by politicians, religious zealots, and strongman autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, and few figures loom as large in their nightmares as trans women.
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Both Butler and Gills-Peterson note the interconnected nature of gender to explain why gender fluidity inspires such panic. Gender is not only the way we police and categorize others but likewise the way we police and categorize ourselves; We are assured, through daily reminders and reinforcements, that patriarchal, coercive gender regimes bring order and certainty in a chaotic world. Perhaps more powerfully, they absolve us of the anxious pursuit of our own individuality in a social world. This is especially true when paired (as it usually is) with racist and xenophobic invective as Trump, Putin, Orban, and many beneath or beside them will do. Even to the liberal, the notion of gender identity can serve as a calming salve that these norms change but slowly and decidedly over a lifetime rather than chaotically and freely within a gesture, a moment, or a glance, making trans people significantly harder to fold into a neoliberal order than, say, the masculine gay man.
The trans misogyny invoked in colonial India, Weimar Berlin, segregated America, or modern-day Russia is an effort to squash and obscure the reality of that interdependence, that frightful realization that the barrier between you and others is porous at best. “Trans femininity is produced out of the collective social body,” writes Gills-Peterson. “And like all manifestations of gender, it cannot be isolated and removed from the whole. For those attempting to avoid that inconvenient truth, not much is left other than to accuse trans women of being exceptions—too feminine, too sexual, and too dangerous to live with everyone else.”
A century of scholarship since the rise of European fascism has emphasized the isolation and estrangement of the perfect authoritarian subject and the fear of the authoritarian towards anything that encourages collective action or solidarity. Capitalism, too, benefits from the kinds of “toxic individualism” that encouraged so many to move away from the support needed to fight the COVID pandemic as fast as possible. It is telling to me that statehouses across the country responded to the pandemic by weakening public health measures that can prevent the spread of an actual contagion while simultaneously passing laws regarding trans people as a “social contagion.” They will readily admit that we do live in a society where it inspires trans misogyny and the state’s monopoly on violence but openly disregard it when the answer is community and care.
Viewed from that perspective, trans misogyny is so powerful because it invites blame and violence as defense mechanisms against the existential fear that the way you live your life and express yourself reflects on my life and my self, that every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you. Our agency and our personhood defies an order that brings you structure and, you’re told, protection from chaos. Some of us even use that agency to rewrite our own body in defiance of a hierarchy you were pretty sure all your life seemed inevitable. So, too, did the divine right of kings.
Your disgust, your impatience, and your confusion in the face of trans femininity are willing tools in the hands of dictators big and small, as valuable to Vladimir Putin’s grip on power as it is to the prison warden, the patriarchal father, or the abusive partner. Our freedom is so wily, so dangerous, so much that an untamed fear of it—an ambivalence in the face of it—routinely inspires you to sacrifice your own.
Incredible essay, it ties together so many seemingly loose historical factoids into a coherent narrative
“Trans femininity is an assertion of agency against an existing and widespread hierarchy, an act of self-determination in defiance of patriarchal power that not only breaks the rules of that power but breaks its foundation, its logic, and its reproducibility. The ability of the trans feminine person to safely be feminine—to transform the uniform of coercive reproductive regimes into willful defiance of that regime—is an act of self-determination so threatening to the people who benefit from the status quo it may very well justify the denial of self-governance.” Thank you, Gillian.