I was editing an essay when the first email notification came in, but I ignored it. Then came a second, and a third in quick succession. Curious, I switched tabs to see three emails about Trump’s trans military ban. Editors were emailing to ask if I would cover it for them, but I had missed the news when it first broke. When I do my writing, I keep my cell phone off and in another room to avoid distractions like Twitter, so I hadn’t seen the tweets from Trump declaring the service of 15,000 trans people in the military invalid.

I had missed most of the previous two work days because of personal stuff, like meeting fellow trans Establishment contributor Sam Reidel in person for the first time. Wednesday was supposed to be my day to catch up, so my first instinct was to focus on my existing deadlines and sit this news cycle out. But as I tried to connect back to my editing, I couldn’t dispel a nagging thought: Who was I to sit this one out? My followers and regular readers look for my opinion and reporting because they put value into what I have to say. How could I not write about such a major trans story, possibly one of the biggest of all time?

Once I made the decision to cover Trump’s tweets, I immediately jumped into action, pitching several websites with article ideas. Slowly the assignments started to come back in, from ELLE, GO Magazine, and The Washington Post. Everything happened so fast, and the deadlines were so tight, that I felt like I had no chance to breathe. I had no time for Twitter or Facebook. The story was all that mattered. I dove completely into my work.

How could I not write about such a major trans story, possibly one of the biggest of all time?
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I quickly churned out an op-ed for GO, which the editor published immediately in the early afternoon on Wednesday with very little editing, then shifted my attention to my piece for WaPo. Not having any time to make myself lunch or go out to grab anything, I actually called my mom and asked her to come over and help me out. (It is a little embarrassing to admit, yes.)

Through it all, the emails kept coming in. Editors who had ignored my pitches for months were suddenly changing their tune and seeking out my work on the ban. I felt like their token. I’ve struggled with being labeled “the trans writer” for awhile now. While I’m blessed to have had my work on my own identity open so many career doors, it’s also difficult to be continuously pigeonholed into writing only about that identity. Even now, I’m aware of the fact that editors are much more likely to say yes to me if my pitch is about a trans issue. I’m painfully aware of my typecasting, and was reminded of my place in the media landscape once again as the requests for work came pouring in on Wednesday.

The Real Cost Of Donald Trump’s Anti-Trans Military Stance

I took a break that evening and substituted an evening job and a shower for my dinner, then came back to my work to edit and add citations to my latest piece. Somewhere around 10 p.m., I finally collapsed in my bed, after 13 hours of writing and reporting work. It was easily the longest continuous output of my career so far.

When the election happened, my manager at my day job made a chilling comment that has stayed with me: “Trump getting elected will be good for your writing career.” There’s a degree of cynicism to this that bothers me, but in essence, my manager was correct. Months later, here I am, essentially profiting off of Trump’s bigotry. Intellectually, I understand that I should be fairly compensated for my work, but at the same time, so many trans people are going to get hurt from Trump’s ban. Who was I to make money off of that?

Yet, Thursday morning, I went right back to work, trying to catch up on the work I was meant to do on Wednesday before completing reporting on my piece for ELLE. My partner, herself a trans advocate, came to visit later that afternoon. We quickly dropped into a rhythm, her taking calls from reporters while I pecked away at the keys on my laptop with moments of conversation peppered in between.

I decided to go to bed earlier that night after about 10 hours of writing, and as I lay there scrolling through my Twitter timeline for the first time in what felt like days, the momentousness of Trump’s tweets started to viscerally hit me.

Covering trans issues as a journalist often makes me feel disconnected from the community. I work alone, at home, mostly interfacing with others through social media or with my editors through email. Covering trans issues as a professional means I need to maintain a certain distance in the name of journalistic integrity. But no matter what, these issues affect me as an individual, as a citizen. In order to survive, and to deliver stories for the greater good, I’ve had to learn to compartmentalize my own fears and anxieties as a trans person.

Covering trans issues as a journalist often makes me feel disconnected with the community.
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And the ban that had so thoroughly demanded my professional effort the previous few days was profound in its personal implications. It wasn’t just targeting trans people serving their country — it was a symbolic blow against every trans American. The Family Research Council, an anti-LGBTQ religious organization, has laid out a five-step plan to make it impossible for trans people to exist in American public life, and step five is a total ban on trans people serving in the military. Since Trump’s election, the FRC has made significant progress on completing its list, a terrifying prospect for myself and all of my trans friends.

Despite my dogged writing, I couldn’t help but feel completely powerless to stop the continued hate campaign that Trump’s ban represents. “Should I seriously look into moving to another country?” I thought as I saw the despair and anger coming from the trans community. My work combating Trump’s transphobia is crucial, I realize, but it can also feel like not enough in the face of such unending attacks. Despite my platform, I often feel helpless to exact real change.

These feelings are compounded by the fact that I don’t fully trust our allies — who make up much of the audience I’m serving — either.

The Left’s Long History Of Transphobia

Sometimes I get the feeling that allies who read my work aren’t really interested in helping to improve the lives of trans people. While the right seeks to eliminate us from public life, so often the folx on the left meant to protect us are arguing with us or making their allyship conditional on the tone we use in our advocacy. What good is having a platform in The Washington Post if those likely to read my words end up arguing about ancillary topics like whether a trans woman’s sexual partners are gay or not, or whether we’re “biologically male”? Plenty of liberal publications have covered detransitioners like Walt Heyer, who the White House cited in an official memo justifying the ban. Whether they feel like it or not, those outlets are complicit in thwarting progress for trans rights.

While I’m professionally engaged in emotional labor with the hope of telling trans stories that enable people to learn, I still see the constant Twitter threads and the comments sections calling me a man or mentally ill, or both. And there are always trans stories from well-meaning cis allies that unknowingly end up hurting my community in how they frame and handle trans stories.

Sometimes I get the feeling that allies who read my work aren’t really interested in helping to improve the lives of trans people.
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At the same time, I’m thankful for the platform that I do have. I’m lucky to be able to speak to so many people about my community’s struggles. I constantly get messages from people who tell me that my work changed their life and honestly, the feeling I have when I hear that is indescribable. When it comes to the nasty comments sections, well, there’s a reason why my name is at the top of the article and not the bottom. Being a self-employed writer is a tough gig.

My precarious existence as a trans freelancer came into full focus Thursday night as the Senate prepared to vote on the “Skinny Repeal” of Obamacare. As a self-employed writer, I depend on the Affordable Care Act for my health insurance, and as a trans woman, I depend on Planned Parenthood for my hormone prescription. After the anti-trans politics of earlier in the week, the vote was the final push my emotions needed before breaking. After almost 24 hours of work with only sleep breaks in between, I openly wept.

The next morning, my words would go out to thousands, and yet, in that moment, I felt so utterly voiceless and alone.

Content warning: assisted suicide

The defining feature of feminism, for me anyway, is freedom of choice — especially when it comes to bodily autonomy. This is why we march for Planned Parenthood and fight back against restrictive reproductive rights laws, and why access to transition care for trans people is supported in most feminist discourse.

Yet there is one bodily autonomy issue that pops up in the news from time to time that generally flies under the feminist-discourse radar — and when it does emerge as a point of debate within feminist communities, responses tend to be split: right to die, or so-called “death with dignity,” laws.

Currently, the District of Columbia and six U.S. states allow people with terminal illnesses to request and receive prescription medication to hasten their death: Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Colorado, California, and Montana. There have also been several bills proposed on this issue in other statehouses, including in my own home state of Maine. The right-to-die law in California took effect in June 2016, and between then and late November, roughly 50 people had gone through the end-of-life process.

In many ways, right-to-die legislation seems obviously feminist. Not only is it rooted in bodily autonomy, but the issue has a long — if relatively unknown — feminist history.

After watching her mother fight and ultimately lose a prolonged and painful battle with liver cancer in the first decade of the 20th century, feminist Anna S. Hall became an outspoken advocate for choice when it comes to end-of-life decisions.

Prominent feminist and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who took her own life in 1935 after being diagnosed with breast cancer, was also one of the earliest champions for death with dignity. In her suicide note, she wrote, “When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. I have preferred chloroform to cancer.”

But as with any issue, there are also many layers and shades of gray. Right-to-die laws aren’t currently centered in modern feminist discourse — but should they be?

The answer is more complicated than it would seem at first blush.

The case for doctor-assisted suicide — or “aid in dying,” as it is sometimes referred to— is perhaps most convincing when applied to those who are terminally ill. But the choice to end one’s life is decidedly more fraught in other situations.

Sandra Bem, a prominent feminist and professor at Cornell University, made the news with her own suicide in 2014. She wasn’t terminally ill in accordance with the general standards of current right-to-die legislation, but she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She wrote extensively about her wish to end her own life before she lost the ability to decide for herself. As a New York Times article on her explained:

“No one in that inner circle tried to talk her out of suicide; they knew how fierce she could be once her mind was made up. All they asked was that she promise not to choose a method that would be particularly disturbing — using a gun or jumping off a bridge into one of Ithaca’s famously beautiful gorges. Sandy had contemplated both of those options, but she didn’t want that sort of death either. ‘What I want,’ she typed in her journal in an emphatic boldface font, ‘is to die on my own timetable and in my own nonviolent way.’”

Bem’s case is notable due to her lack of a terminal diagnosis; she would have been ineligible for doctor-assisted suicide in states where the practice has been legalized. With the exception of Montana — which requires a court to make determinations — the current states with right-to-die laws require two physicians to confirm that the person has less than six months to live. All of the states also require that the person be declared “of sound mind,” which as as the Times article put it, is “a difficult hurdle for someone whose brain is deteriorating” from Alzheimer’s.

Having gatekeepers determine if a person has a right to bodily autonomy raises obvious red flags, even echoing the often deeply flawed approval process needed for genital reassignment surgery (GRS); in order for a trans person to be approved for GRS, they must similarly convince two doctors of their diagnosis (gender dysphoria) and be evaluated for being “of sound mind.”

Having gatekeepers determine if a person has a right to bodily autonomy raises obvious red flags.
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Concerning right-to-die cases, official gatekeepers and other influential actors may also abuse their power, forcing people to make a decision to end their lives when they otherwise wouldn’t.

Take a recent case from the Netherlands, in which an unnamed woman in her twenties sought and ultimately won approval for assisted suicide after suffering from PTSD stemming from horrific sexual abuse from her childhood. According to a story in The Independent:

“Despite improvements in her mental state after ‘intensive therapy,’ doctors believed her multiple conditions were incurable and two years ago agreed to her wish to end her life. The doctors judged her to be ‘totally competent’ and that there was ‘no major depression or other mood disorder which affected her thinking.’”

Opponents of right to die laws were aghast that assisted suicide was deemed an effective treatment for the horrors of sexual abuse. And indeed, it’s certainly at least possible that mental-health professionals could have led the young woman to believe that her PTSD was unfixable, and thus unconsciously guided her to her ultimate decision.

The Many Faces Of Trauma

Turning to history reveals even starker examples of abuse. Most infamously, Nazis in Germany established “Aktion T4,” a euthanasia policy intended to eliminate anyone they deemed “undesirable” for their society. This policy targeted many different marginalized populations, but it should be noted that disabled people and those with mental illness were among the most brutalized under their program. In 1939, the regime authorized doctors to “decide that certain individuals ‘be accorded a mercy-death.’ These patients included those with schizophrenia, the criminally insane, and the chronically hospitalized.” The uncovering of the use of such euthanasia by the Third Reich in the aftermath of World War II opened feminist eyes to how a blanket endorsement of death with dignity could be abused by governments and systems with evil intent.

Celia Kitzinger, Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Conversation Analysis at the University of York, discussed the fallout in a paper recounting the feminist history behind right-to-die movements:

“The subsequent Nazi euthanasia programme meant an end to many liberals’ involvement in ‘right to die’ movements and has haunted campaigns ever since. For many feminists (and disability rights activists) legalizing assisted death is inextricably associated with fears that vulnerable people will be disproportionately at risk — that under the banner of ‘choice,’ women, the elderly and the disabled will be targeted for assisted dying (or feel pressured into ‘volunteering’ themselves).”

These pressures could be anything from feeling unwanted or unsupported by loved ones, to wanting to avoid being a financial or psychological burden to caretakers. These are very real and valid human emotions that must be weighed by everyone involved with doctor-assisted suicide.

In a story for The Guardian last year, international disability rights advocate Liz Carr honed in on these issues to make a compelling case against right-to-die laws:

“There is a fine line between those who are terminally ill and those who are disabled in public perception and the emotional power behind the campaign for assisted suicide is based on misplaced pity. Rather than telling us we have everything to live for — and we do — we are helped to the proverbial cliff edge and offered a push.

People — disabled and not, with many years or only a few months ahead of them — become suicidal for many, many reasons. We know from surveys in Oregon, one of just [five] states in the US where assisted suicide is legal, that the reasons people choose this option have little to do with pain, although this is always the emphasis of supporters of assisted dying.

In fact, loss of dignity, loss of autonomy, loss of ability to do daily activities, and fear of being a burden — reasons which are essentially more about the realities of living with a disability in our society — are all more important than pain.

It is worth keeping in mind, too, that, in the context of economic arguments about a health service overly concerned with ‘waste’ of resources, disabled people may be seen as a drain, just like the elderly.”

She goes on to point out that the National Health Service in Britain, through austerity, is already rationing health care, and she fears that more costly end-of-life care will be pushed aside in favor of much cheaper doctor-assisted suicide.

This is not to say that right-to-die laws should be wholly rebuked, as they ensure crucial choice for many, including those who are marginalized by society. Melanie Reid, a former columnist who broke her neck and back in a horse-riding accident in 2010, expressed her view in a piece for the Times during the 2012 debate in Great Britain over this issue:

“The fact is simply this…we are condemning growing numbers of elderly, terminally ill or disabled people to a terrible lingering twilight rather than a good death in the circumstances of their choosing. And we are condemning the people who want to assist them to the threat of criminal prosecution. This is a scandal.”

When right to die as an issue is framed in this way, it’s easy to see the common connection between the fight for reproductive rights, the fight for trans rights, and the right-to-die movement; all are about empowering people to make their own decisions about their own lives and bodies.

But in assessing right-to-die measures, we must also take an intersectional view by listening to and elevating the concerns of those most directly impacted by the issues at hand. As feminists, we must always trust individuals to make their own choices with their bodies, while simultaneously fighting to keep these decisions free from outside influence, whether from the government, from family members, or from doctors. We must examine this issue closely and continue to push for more research. And we must make sure that people are truly choosing death for their own, personal reasons, and not because they’ve been made to feel like they’re a burden.

Having agency over your own body is a core tenet of feminism — but the current gatekeeping system seems like a potential compromise on safety. Without proper protections, a person’s choice to die is no longer a choice at all.

Prior to her “red pilling,” Laci Green’s secret anti-harassment Facebook group provided support to those abused by trolls.

Anyone who’s marginalized knows the dangers of online harassment — and YouTuber Laci Green, who rose to prominence by conducting online sex education content on behalf of Planned Parenthood and Discovery News, has faced some of the worst of it. In addition to the usual vile comments and death threats, she’s contended with physical harm as well, in the form of objects thrown in her direction during speaking engagements.

According to a large Pew Research Center study, Green’s experience is startlingly common: 73% of adult online users have seen harassment happen to someone else, while 40% have experienced it themselves (with marginalized creators facing a disproportionate amount of abuse). In light of this, last December, Green decided to take matters into her own hands by starting a secret Facebook group to share resources, tips, and blocklists in order to deal with abuse. She also shared various methods for filtering out abusive comments with YouTube’s new comment moderation system.

73% of adult online users have seen harassment happen to someone else, while 40% have experienced it themselves.
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Her influence in this space has been considerable — with 1.5 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, a lot of people listen to what Green has to say. Last year, she was even named one of the 30 most influential people on the internet by Time.

All of which makes her recent turn deeply troubling.

In late May, seemingly out of the blue, Green dramatically shifted her tone on harassment. Where once she supported the abused, she suddenly began questioning why there’s “more than two genders” and arguing that “both sides of the argument are valid” for everything from racism to transphobia to misogyny. In a stunning example of her newfound hypocrisy, she called feminist YouTuber and fellow member of her anti-harassment Facebook group Kat Blaque a “sociopath,” and earlier this month, she tweeted the following:

civil dissent is not harassment. conflict =/= abuse. hurt feelings =/= trauma. overstating harm comes at the expense of survivors. #message

???@gogreen18

In a series of videos, Green revealed that her shift was a result of “red pilling,” the term for a twisted Matrix-inspired recruitment process coined by men’s rights advocates, pick-up artists, and the “alt right.” The process involves a recruiter who attempts to position white supremacists as oppressed truth tellers while spinning phony racial and gender science as “free speech” that’s being trampled on by feminists and the political left.

Green, it seems, was red-pilled after appearing in a debate with the prominent anti-feminist Blaire White, a trans woman, alt-right anti-feminist, and generally vile YouTuber who has said that trans women who get beat up or murdered deserve it for “tricking men,” fat people should be shamed until they lose weight, and refugees should be gassed (White has deleted the latter tweet since publication, but the archived version can be viewed here). While it appears that Green’s appearance on White’s channel marked an important milestone in Green’s “red pilling,” her turn may also be related to a relationship she formed with anti-feminist YouTuber Chris Ray Gun, who made a video last year saying those condemning Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” comments were “missing chromosomes,” and has claimed that white supremacists are just being funny.

In any case, that someone so influential in the progressive online space could make such a complete 180 has shaken the social justice community to its core. How could a defender of equality change so much, so quickly? And what does it mean for those who had come to trust Green’s safe space online?

The answers to these questions are chillingly incomplete — and raise questions anew about the safety of online spaces for those who routinely face harassment.

To understand the gravity of Green’s shift, it’s important to grasp how online harassment has evolved over the years — and how profound its dangers can be.

When Green created her anti-harassment Facebook group, it was largely in response to the rising trend of “response videos,” YouTube videos created by trolls who have devoted their lives to attacking feminist content. Creators of these videos often claim that their content does not itself constitute harassment, while simultaneously ignoring the actions of their followers, who frequently bombard their targets with an overwhelming number of slurs and violent messages.

When A Woman Deletes A Man’s Comment Online

Lindsay Amer, a queer YouTuber who has experienced response videos firsthand, explains:

“You see these anti-feminist YouTubers who gain hundreds of thousands of followers in under a year. I think there’s a lot of money in anti-feminism. The content is really easy to make and it doesn’t have to be high quality. Someone can just turn on a camera and rant and say something controversial and know that it’s going to get a ton of views. I see people who recut my videos with their bullying commentary added.”

Troublingly, up until recently, such videos were not only supported by YouTube, but incentivized. Because response videos are so easy to make, it was easy for reactionary YouTubers to churn out a lot of content, which YouTube then prioritized in an algorithm that favored prolific output, high view counts, and abundant comments — even if those comments were toxic. Gaming the very closely held secret of the YouTube algorithm became a de facto path to internet stardom, and the format was perfect for response-video creators. Even after changes to their algorithm in December of last year, YouTube has continued to discourage vloggers from preventing harassment — according to Amer, when users disable comments and the sidebar for other suggested videos, their content is less likely to be promoted by the algorithm, and their view counts plummet.

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Amer explains how these response videos can in turn breed serious abuse. After uploading her first video on her YouTube channel “Queer Kids Stuff,” she was surprised to see it take off — but after it was picked up by the Nazi “alt-right” website Daily Stormer, she was swiftly confronted with a slew of response videos. In turn, she says, the audiences of the YouTubers who created those videos “came at my channel and abused me and my followers”; the harassment included pictures of nooses, death threats, and anti-Semitic messages about ovens, showers, and being gassed.

Moreover, this abuse isn’t always “just” virtual — often, the threat can become physical. Just last weekend, for example, abusive YouTubers made their presence known at Vidcon in Anaheim, California, the largest online video convention in the world. During the panel “Women Online,” response-video trolls occupied the entire front two rows of the venue in order to harass the panelists in person. Eventually, feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian exclaimed to Carl Benjamin, a troll popularly known as “Sargon of Akkad”:

“You make your name on YouTube by making these dumbass videos that just say the same shit over and over again. I hate to give you attention because you’re a garbage human, whatever dude.”

Sarkeesian’s comment, which elicited a gasp from the audience, was rooted in a long and ugly history; over the last two years, Sarkeesian’s name or appearance has been displayed in roughly 20 video titles or thumbnails on Benjamin’s channel.

Benjamin especially likes to gripe about Sarkeesian’s speaking fees and the amount of money she makes — neglecting to mention that, in reality, she has had to cancel speaking events due to death threats. Meanwhile, according to a 2015 article by Daily Kos, Benjamin makes about $1.50 per thousand views on his YouTube channel. Assuming those numbers are still accurate, that would mean his latest video on the fallout from his Vidcon encounter with Sarkeesian has netted him about $546 in just three days. Benjamin also makes over $5,500 a month on Patreon, a website for creators to find funding. (Multiple efforts to seek comment from Benjamin for this story went unanswered, with several of his Twitter followers making accusations of bias.)

In a statement released on their official Medium account today, comments attributed to Vidcon founder Hank Green (no relation to Laci) addressed the controversy from this weekend, noting:

“He [Hank Green] apologized to her [Sarkeesian] for not having been more aware of and active in understanding the situation before the event, which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had not signed up for.”

But this comment is difficult to believe given that this type of trolling is becoming more commonplace. In March of this year, a panel led by political activist Cenk Uygur at SXSW was crashed by alt right troll Steven Crowder in order to generate content for Crowder’s YouTube channel, an incident which was only really covered by the right wing press. Even Laci Green’s boyfriend got into the act the day before the Sarkeesian/Benjamin conflict by filming a Kat Blaque panel for retweets. The problem has been prominent enough that, according to a screenshot, Laci Green herself emailed YouTube staff about the presence of certain YouTubers at VidCon just a few months ago.

All of which brings us back to Laci Green’s surprising transformation. It was response videos that first prompted Amer to connect with Green, which in turn led to the formation of the anti-harassment Facebook group. Until it was shut down in June as a result of Green’s red-pilling, that group provided some of the best support online for those facing virtual and physical threats as a result of their views and identity.

To be fair, of course, online harassment is extremely complex, and hardly solely the fault of Green — and to be quite honest, I couldn’t care less who her boyfriend is or what her politics are. But to suddenly turn around and whitewash years of abuse is inexcusable. Gaslighting actual abuse victims by downplaying their trauma and equating it with “hurt feelings”—especially with such a large platform—is an unconscionable violation, especially knowing herself the results of such toxicity. (Ella Dawson, a sexual health writer who has written several times about her own online harassment and the topic more generally, tells me, “I’m really surprised to see Laci using this line of argument when she herself has received so much harassment and abuse in the decade she’s been making videos.”)

Green and others in her newfound camp often claim that this is an issue of protected dissent and free speech. But it’s hard to imagine any contexts in which sending death threats or telling a Jewish woman to “get in an oven,” or even labelling someone a “sociopath,” can be taken as simple “civil dissent” — especially considering how abusive language can and does manifest as physical threats.

Green’s change of heart has, unsurprisingly, incited a backlash of outrage from many who fight for social justice — and at times, problematically, this has veered itself into abuse, with people sending misogynistic slurs in Green’s direction and doxing her private identity information. But while responses like these are dangerous and should not be condoned, creating a respectful dialogue around Green’s dramatic shift is perfectly fair.

Since YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook continue to choose the path of least resistance concerning online harassment, it’s up to us to provide love and support to those on the receiving end. Laci Green was doing that with her words, actions, and her Facebook group. It’s distressing to see her change her mind — while endorsing abuse that has harmed far too many for far too long.

In October, a family court case out of England exploded into international media attention when a judge removed custody of a 7-year-old transgender girl from her mother and transferred her permanently to her father, who is not supportive of the child’s gender expression. This past spring a similar case in Canada resulted in a judge initially ruling that a trans child was not allowed to wear female clothes in public. These cases and others like them have become a hammer for conservative political operatives to attack the very idea of supporting transgender children — usually by attacking mothers for “confusing” their trans daughters.

When trans kids who are assigned male at birth (AMAB) socially transition, it is most often the mom that is demonized by the press and subsequently by society. Sometimes, other women come under attack; the right-wing tabloid Daily Mail used a similar case — a trans daughter, a supportive mother, an angry father — as an excuse to run a hit piece about Susie Green, the CEO of social services charity Mermaids, a U.K. organization with the mission of supporting children who are struggling with gender identity. But the paper also targeted Green’s transgender daughter, suggesting that its animus is just a larger-scale version of vilifying women for supporting their transgender kids. Mothers of trans kids now live in fear of losing their kids simply for supporting their children’s transitions.

Typical media interviews of trans kids’ parents feature the mother laying out how the family first noticed and dealt with cross-gender insistence, the initial reaction to allowing exploration of the child’s gender, and ultimately how the family has facilitated a social transition. After the mother’s take on the emotional labor of laying out why a social transition is truly necessary for their beloved child, the interviewer then turns to dad and asks “So how do you feel about all of this?” This type of coverage centers the father’s feelings in the transition for the entire family and we see it again, and again, and again.

Whether or not dad approves often signals how everyone else should feel about a child’s transition, specifically about the “loss” of a “son.” The roots for this are deeply steeped in misogyny, and established before the child is even born. Both times that my own ex-wife was pregnant, when I was still male-presenting, everyone would always ask if I wanted boys. Even when I replied that my child’s sex truly did not matter to me, I still got pushback: “yeah, but you REALLY want boys, right?” The expectation was that I would love any of my kids, but as a presumed man, I would REALLY love boys more. Interestingly, upon coming out as trans, more than one person has remarked “So THAT’S why you really wanted girls.”

Mothers of trans kids now live in fear of losing their kids simply for supporting their children’s transitions.
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The flip side of assuming that all fathers want boys is that when trans girls express a desire to transition and live as their true genders, those that oppose any child transitioning love to blame the mother. They argue, either explicitly or implicitly, that she must have groomed the “boy” to want to be feminine, as if mom really wanted a girl all along and so she projected her feelings so strongly onto her AMAB child that the kid finally took the hint. It’s true that fearing the loss of parental approval is often enough to keep a trans kid quiet — that was my experience, and the experience of most of my trans friends who waited until adulthood to transition. But can tacit parental pressure really force a cis child to pretend to be trans?

Children are sharper than we give them credit for, especially with social skills. They know at a very young age how a lot of the basic world works. They’re beginning to observe how gendered systems around them work. They have an understanding, deep down, of what society considers “normal”. When I was 8, I knew the feelings, thoughts and desires I was having were “wrong.” That boys weren’t supposed to tell anyone they were really girls. I understood the consequences, even then of what would happen if I did that. What are the consequences for a cis kid standing up for their own “natural” gender identity? At the end of the day, children understand when society has their backs. Parental approval is simply not a strong enough motivator to make children face the fear and shame of being trans. Implying that mothers “feminize” their AMAB children is just another way of overlaying misogyny on top of transphobia.

The tendency to see women as undermining masculinity and gender norms is common and dangerous, and it’s expressed especially vehemently in cases of young trans girls assigned male at birth. Trans boys children face terrible oppression as well, but I haven’t seen as many visceral reactions to international headlines; the rejection of masculinity outrages society in a way that the rejection of femininity does not. This dynamic is also in play when discussing how trans women are demonized in public access rights debates (like bathroom bills). Trans women tend to come more under fire, because of societal fear of emasculation, and concomitantly, trans men tend to be erased from discussions of trans issues. But in the few cases involving AFAB trans children — like one in Missouri about a trans boy who wanted to change his name — tend to focus inappropriately on mothers. In the Missouri case, a judge tried to cut Nathan’s mother out of the proceedings by assigning a court-appointed guardian, even though the mother was present and active in the case.

Criticism of parents of trans kids is centered in misogyny. When AMAB children transition, mom is assumed to be projecting her own desires onto her kid. When AFAB children transition, mom is failing to project a strong female presence as a role model. Both attitudes simultaneously overburden and pathologize the mother’s role as a child’s chief advocate. In fact, the mother is often at the forefront of transition efforts not because she’s the cause of the child’s gender dysphoria, but because she’s the child’s main caregiver and first defense. It’s the mother who most often puts in the emotional labor to research, consult experts, and ultimately initiate the conversation to help their child. It’s also the mother that becomes the target of hate, the biggest scapegoat.

This is part of a long-standing tradition of blaming mothers for any issues with their children. After all, it wasn’t really that long ago that “refrigerator moms” were blamed for causing autism. Supposedly, cold (hence the term “refrigerator”), unloving mothers caused children to withdraw into autism. It’s cultural gaslighting to blame a parenting style or a mother’s personality for their children’s traits that society doesn’t approve of. And it’s part and parcel of the way society blames women whether they do “too much” (the mothers of trans children) or “not enough” (the mothers of autistics).

Fathers that support transitioning children are subject to much less scrutiny, despite sometimes being their child’s strongest advocate. In the rare instances when fathers of trans kids are attacked, they’re often blamed for allowing their wives and partners to rule over them, a subtle attack on their very masculinity. Seizing the chance to criticize the mother of a child transitioner is really just about taking a free shot at women. It’s pure misogyny.

The media and courts need to stop demonizing the mothers of child transitioners and work to find ways to be more supportive of these vulnerable families.

In October, a family court case out of England exploded into international media attention when a judge removed custody of a 7-year-old transgender girl from her mother and transferred her permanently to her father, who is not supportive of the child’s gender expression. This past spring a similar case in Canada resulted in a judge initially ruling that a trans child was not allowed to wear female clothes in public. These cases and others like them have become a hammer for conservative political operatives to attack the very idea of supporting transgender children — usually by attacking mothers for “confusing” their trans daughters.

When trans kids who are assigned male at birth (AMAB) socially transition, it is most often the mom that is demonized by the press and subsequently by society. Sometimes, other women come under attack; the right-wing tabloid Daily Mail used a similar case — a trans daughter, a supportive mother, an angry father — as an excuse to run a hit piece about Susie Green, the CEO of social services charity Mermaids, a U.K. organization with the mission of supporting children who are struggling with gender identity. But the paper also targeted Green’s transgender daughter, suggesting that its animus is just a larger-scale version of vilifying women for supporting their transgender kids. Mothers of trans kids now live in fear of losing their kids simply for supporting their children’s transitions.

Typical media interviews of trans kids’ parents feature the mother laying out how the family first noticed and dealt with cross-gender insistence, the initial reaction to allowing exploration of the child’s gender, and ultimately how the family has facilitated a social transition. After the mother’s take on the emotional labor of laying out why a social transition is truly necessary for their beloved child, the interviewer then turns to dad and asks “So how do you feel about all of this?” This type of coverage centers the father’s feelings in the transition for the entire family and we see it again, and again, and again.

Whether or not dad approves often signals how everyone else should feel about a child’s transition, specifically about the “loss” of a “son.” The roots for this are deeply steeped in misogyny, and established before the child is even born. Both times that my own ex-wife was pregnant, when I was still male-presenting, everyone would always ask if I wanted boys. Even when I replied that my child’s sex truly did not matter to me, I still got pushback: “yeah, but you REALLY want boys, right?” The expectation was that I would love any of my kids, but as a presumed man, I would REALLY love boys more. Interestingly, upon coming out as trans, more than one person has remarked “So THAT’S why you really wanted girls.”

The flip side of assuming that all fathers want boys is that when trans girls express a desire to transition and live as their true genders, those that oppose any child transitioning love to blame the mother. They argue, either explicitly or implicitly, that she must have groomed the “boy” to want to be feminine, as if mom really wanted a girl all along and so she projected her feelings so strongly onto her AMAB child that the kid finally took the hint. It’s true that fearing the loss of parental approval is often enough to keep a trans kid quiet — that was my experience, and the experience of most of my trans friends who waited until adulthood to transition. But can tacit parental pressure really force a cis child to pretend to be trans?

Children are sharper than we give them credit for, especially with social skills. They know at a very young age how a lot of the basic world works. They’re beginning to observe how gendered systems around them work. They have an understanding, deep down, of what society considers “normal”. When I was 8, I knew the feelings, thoughts and desires I was having were “wrong.” That boys weren’t supposed to tell anyone they were really girls. I understood the consequences, even then of what would happen if I did that. What are the consequences for a cis kid standing up for their own “natural” gender identity? At the end of the day, children understand when society has their backs. Parental approval is simply not a strong enough motivator to make children face the fear and shame of being trans. Implying that mothers “feminize” their AMAB children is just another way of overlaying misogyny on top of transphobia.

The tendency to see women as undermining masculinity and gender norms is common and dangerous, and it’s expressed especially vehemently in cases of young trans girls assigned male at birth. Trans boys children face terrible oppression as well, but I haven’t seen as many visceral reactions to international headlines; the rejection of masculinity outrages society in a way that the rejection of femininity does not. This dynamic is also in play when discussing how trans women are demonized in public access rights debates (like bathroom bills). Trans women tend to come more under fire, because of societal fear of emasculation, and concomitantly, trans men tend to be erased from discussions of trans issues. But in the few cases involving AFAB trans children — like one in Missouri about a trans boy who wanted to change his name — tend to focus inappropriately on mothers. In the Missouri case, a judge tried to cut Nathan’s mother out of the proceedings by assigning a court-appointed guardian, even though the mother was present and active in the case.

Criticism of parents of trans kids is centered in misogyny. When AMAB children transition, mom is assumed to be projecting her own desires onto her kid. When AFAB children transition, mom is failing to project a strong female presence as a role model. Both attitudes simultaneously overburden and pathologize the mother’s role as a child’s chief advocate. In fact, the mother is often at the forefront of transition efforts not because she’s the cause of the child’s gender dysphoria, but because she’s the child’s main caregiver and first defense. It’s the mother who most often puts in the emotional labor to research, consult experts, and ultimately initiate the conversation to help their child. It’s also the mother that becomes the target of hate, the biggest scapegoat.

This is part of a long-standing tradition of blaming mothers for any issues with their children. After all, it wasn’t really that long ago that “refrigerator moms” were blamed for causing autism. Supposedly, cold (hence the term “refrigerator”), unloving mothers caused children to withdraw into autism. It’s cultural gaslighting to blame a parenting style or a mother’s personality for their children’s traits that society doesn’t approve of. And it’s part and parcel of the way society blames women whether they do “too much” (the mothers of trans children) or “not enough” (the mothers of autistics).

Fathers that support transitioning children are subject to much less scrutiny, despite sometimes being their child’s strongest advocate. In the rare instances when fathers of trans kids are attacked, they’re often blamed for allowing their wives and partners to rule over them, a subtle attack on their very masculinity. Seizing the chance to criticize the mother of a child transitioner is really just about taking a free shot at women. It’s pure misogyny.

The media and courts need to stop demonizing the mothers of child transitioners and work to find ways to be more supportive of these vulnerable families.

As she rounds the corner into the last half mile, she notices the crowds on either side of the route are starting to get bigger. She’s trained tremendously hard for this half-marathon. Her pace has been good so far, right in line with her splits from training, and she still has energy left in the tank. She knows she’s in front of all of the other female competitors and could easily kick to the finish line for the win, but instead her pace slackens. She intentionally slows down, knowing what would be waiting for her at the finish line: the doubts, the questions, the publicity — even if it’s just the local paper.

She doesn’t need that in her life right now. She slows down even more.

First one, then a second and third woman pass her. Finally her legs kick back into motion as she matches the pace of the third-place runner, finishing just behind her, just off the podium. With post-race chocolate milk in hand, she looks longingly at the top three finishers chatting with local reporters and race officials, freshly received medals hanging from their necks. “Those things are just not for girls like us,” she thinks to herself.

What would possess a woman, in the best physical shape of her life, to back off a race like that? The truth is that she’s a transgender woman. And the truth is that most of society believes she has an inherent physical advantage over cis women in athletics.

The real truth, however, is that she doesn’t.

People who are opposed to trans women participating in women’s athletics are most concerned about fairness. The fear of men masquerading as women to gain medals and glory has a long history — but one grounded in very few real-world examples. It has, however, resulted in decades of humiliating gender testing policies for female athletes.

People generally have an assumption that trans women have an inherent, permanent athletic advantage for life based on their assigned gender at birth. Oft-cited factors against trans women’s participation in women’s sports include: height, weight, narrower hips (supposedly making it easier to run), smaller breasts (making arm motion more free), wider shoulders, and a larger ribcage (meaning lung capacity is greater). The common trope for trans women is that we’re all tall, narrow-hipped, small-breasted, and masculine-appearing. This simply isn’t true. I happen to be tall (6’1”), but wide-hipped. I also have trans friends who are 5’4” and 130 pounds. Trans women have bodies that are just as varied in size and shape as cis women.

Moreover, what opponents to trans women’s inclusion in female athletics often gloss over is the drastic effect that a standard regimen of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) has on the athletic performance of trans women.

For trans people, the question of whether to begin HRT is a very personal one; not all trans people end up on hormones or transitioning to live as their true selves. When it comes to competitive trans athletes, however, there are various requirements laid out by governing sports bodies concerning HRT treatment and athletes’ eligibility to compete. And such requirements often differ between the sexes. In January, the International Olympic Committee lifted its requirement that trans women undergo gender reassignment surgery before competing, stating that trans women (assigned male at birth) must complete a full year of HRT before being eligible to compete as women, while trans men (assigned female at birth) continue to be free to compete at any point of their choosing. In fact, there is a trans male hockey player, Harrison Browne, who has decided to put off testosterone treatments until his playing career in the National Women’s Hockey League is over.

To understand how HRT affects trans athletes requires a basic understanding of hormones. Estrogen and testosterone are the two primary sex hormones, and both affect the body in very different ways. Testosterone’s biggest advantage is that it more efficiently builds muscle than estrogen does. You hear women complain about how men can lose weight much faster than women can — testosterone is the reason why. More muscle gives a person the ability to burn fat at a higher rate. This is why those whose bodies run on testosterone appear leaner; bodies on testosterone are simply more athletic than bodies on estrogen.

It’s also important to understand just how Hormone Replacement Therapy affects trans women’s bodies. Speaking from personal experience, the loss in strength is jarring. I started HRT in mid-April of this year and before I moved out of my house on June 1st, I struggled to open jars. My per-mile splits dropped from 9:30-minute miles to 11-minute miles seemingly overnight. Now six months into HRT, fat redistribution has made my hips and rear end bigger and I’m growing a chest. This has had the added effect of reorienting my spine to accommodate new weight in new places, meaning my doctor-recorded height has shrunk from 6’2” to 6’1” with more height loss expected. Not every trans woman loses height, but it’s common enough that most of my friends have lost an inch or two from HRT.

Critical to understanding how trans athletes are discriminated against is an understanding of how hormone levels differ between men and women. During the Olympics this year, we heard much talk about Caster Semenya, who is intersex and not transgender, and her naturally high testosterone levels. Even though Semenya isn’t a trans woman, her story provides an apt introduction to how sex hormones affect athletic performance — and how the media can be misleading concerning these effects.

Outlets commonly reported without context that Semenya’s hormone levels were three times higher than an average woman’s and were, in fact, approaching levels of an “average man.” Stunningly, the actual average testosterone levels were simply left out of reports. Cis men generally have T levels that fall between 300 to 1000 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL), while cis women typically have T levels in the 15 to 70 ng/dL range — even if Semenya had three times the testosterone of a woman with a high amount of testosterone, she still wouldn’t fall within the average range for a man, demonstrating how inaccurate many media reports were.

Further, the difference in performance between men and women in speed-based sports is about 11%. In other words, women’s times will run about 11% slower than men running at a comparable competitive level. It went unreported that Semenya’s 2016 gold medal winning 800m time was actually 13% slower versus the men’s 800m gold medal time. She may have had higher testosterone than her competitors, but she definitely didn’t run like a man.

Standard HRT treatment for trans women includes a testosterone blocker, usually spironolactone, and synthetic estrogen, called estradiol, which is also prescribed to cis women with hormone deficiencies and to alleviate menopause symptoms. Testosterone is by far the more powerful sex hormone, so the testosterone blocker is definitely needed; otherwise the excess estrogen would simply be swallowed by its counterpart. This is why trans women take two forms of medication for HRT while trans men just have the testosterone injections.

The effects that T blockers have on trans women are astounding. Dosing typically starts small and expands over the first nine months to a year, but when the medical regime is in full effect, trans women’s T levels are typically quite lower than cis women’s. The Olympic committee now requires a full year of testing T levels below 10 ng/dL before trans women are allowed to compete as female.

Without the advantage of testosterone on building muscle, trans women are stripped of any advantages they may have had as a result of once having higher testosterone levels. Yet, sadly, the assumption that trans women have said advantages is so pervasive that very little scientific research has been done to look into it. What’s presented as common sense, in fact, has very little factual basis in science for a crowd that likes to preach biological essentialism.

Joanna Harper, a trans distance runner and medical physicist, has been outspoken in her advocacy on behalf of trans athletes. She wrote about her experience of transitioning as an athlete for the Washington Post:

“Within three weeks of starting hormone therapy in August 2004, I was markedly slower. I didn’t feel any different while I was running. But I could no longer match my previous times. By 2005, when I was racing in the women’s category, the difference was astounding. I finished one 10K in 42:01 — almost a full five minutes slower than I’d run the same course two years earlier as a man. Interestingly, when I looked up my times in USA Track & Field’s age-grading tables — used to compare runners of all ages and both sexes — I found that I was just as competitive as a 48-year-old woman as I had been as a 46-year-old man.”

Every athletic trans woman I know shares this same experience, and yet the comments at the end of Joanna’s article show that cis people just can’t get past our assigned birth genders. When Joanna looked into the scientific research behind transitioning athletes, she realized just how thin the research was, so she took matters into her own hands and published her own study.

“I was curious whether my experience was typical. There had never been any studies of transgender athletes, only of transgender women generally. So over the next seven years, I collected almost 200 race times from eight distance runners who were transgender women (including myself as runner №6).

My research, published last month in the Journal of Sporting Cultures and Identities, found that collectively, the eight subjects got much slower after their gender transitions and put up nearly identical age-graded scores as men and as women, meaning they were equally — but no more — competitive in their new gender category. (The outlier was a runner who had raced recreationally as a 19-year-old male and became serious about the sport — doubling her training load and shedding 22 pounds — years later as a female.)”

Once you get past the relationship between muscle and hormones, the bigotry of the anti-trans argument becomes readily apparent. By singling out trans women with larger ribcages for exclusion, are they saying that cis women with large ribcages have the same advantage? If you’re going to ban all trans women because they’re tall and have an advantage, does that mean that Brittney Griner, who is 6’8”, cis, and can dunk, should be banned from basketball? That feels utterly wrong — in the exact same way as excluding trans women on the same basis would be.

The real damage comes from the dominant social view that trans women “are really men playing dress-up.” This belief runs so deep that it even permeates the thoughts of trans athletes. The story I told at the beginning of this essay was fiction, but it is based on multiple real-life stories that I’ve personally heard from competitive trans athletes.

What does this say, then, about the implications toward the concept of fair play? When a woman with no real advantage feels so oppressed that she would throw her own race rather than bear the harassment that may come from winning, what message does that convey? Is it fair that the cis women who were allowed victory can enjoy the rewards from good competition while trans women cannot? Trans women train just as hard for competitive and casual athletics as cis women do, and yet are systematically and socially cast out from reaping the rewards.

Further, policies dictating whether or not and at which point in transition trans women are allowed to compete in competitive athletics varies widely across different sports and between different athletic governing bodies. It’s not difficult to imagine a trans athlete being allowed to play her sport at her liberal high school during the school year and then also being denied the chance to play in AAU or under another non-scholastic governing body. Everybody seems to try to be putting things together as they go along. Olympic rules on gender and hormone testing have been receiving fairly strong pushback in the wake of Semenya’s gold medal winning performance, but their rules seem to achieve a good balance between fairness and ease of policy.

This is a positive first step and should serve as a model for other organizations as they grapple with the politics and controversy surrounding trans women pursuing athletics. If it’s good enough for the Olympics, it’s good enough for everyone else.

It’s time to push back on the assumption that trans female athletes have an unfair advantage. Hormones are messy and can’t always be easily controlled, but the hormone levels of trans women are the most controlled and easily maintained of any single group of women. With consistent T level testing, there’s simply no valid reason to exclude any trans woman from competitive women’s sports.