What The Right’s Obsession With Trans People Tells Us About Their Politics

First, it’s important to understand that the trans panic itself functions as a thought terminating cliche. It is a series of straw arguments that are designed to be simple. easily regurgitated non-points to shut down any actual discourse: “OK, we’re crashing the economy, renditioning people to an American Auschwitz with no due process and deporting citizen children with cancer but men in women’s bathrooms” isn’t there to convince anyone, really, it’s just there to provide cover for supporting the cruel and inhumane tyranny of Trump’s Fascist cult.

It’s a deflection, based on a fallacious appeal to morality, much like the abortion “debate”, anti-vaccine rage, and gun “rights”. Single issue pablum for people for whom the complexity of reality is just too much. It is the easiest, laziest path of least resistance towards a delusional sense of moral superiority and in-group identity politics. Contrarian opposition to long established law or well documented facts in favor of a fundamentally narcissistic black or white binary that always centers the bearer as a holy warrior against persecution, and is definitionally reactionary identity politics, from batshit conspiracy nonsense to extreme political positioning.

The trans panic bullshit needs no real debunking, because humans rights belong to all humans. Full stop. Just like immigrant rights are human rights, documented or not. So let’s just make sure that’s clear.

What fascinates us here at K dot I, though, is that the basis for this argument is one laid out by radical feminists in the 70’s and 80’s, before the more behavioral science-based gender-as-social-construct gestalt came into focus. While some RadFems would go on to reevaluate and refine their positions to include and support the emerging science of sex and gender as mutable spectra, a specific brand of anti-trans rhetoric also emerged in the same contrarian, reactionary deflection from this new information. These adherents, commonly know as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists – TERFs – formed most of the arguments we see from the Right on the issue today, which not only speaks to how craven the Right is in magpie-ing rhetoric that serves their political goals of oppression, but how oppressive and Right Wing these TERF arguments were from the jump.

The fundaments of this position are wild, and obviously false when examined with any kind of critical eye. So let’s dig in.

In order to make the argument that “trans people don’t exist” or “men don’t belong in women’s sports/bathrooms/prisons/spaces etc, one HAS to rely on an essentialist view of sex and gender, that there are inherent, unchangeable characteristics that are fundamentally defining of the binary. All men are this, all women are this, and no deviation or dynamic exists at all.

Therefore, no amount of hormones, surgery, or psychological divergence can change these immutable, unalterable characteristics. You’ll never be a woman, you’ll never be a man, there’s no such thing as non-binary or genderqueer, gender fluid, etc. Right? This is the argument.

So what are the defining characteristics, this monolithic inherencies that define the sexes? Biology? Sexual organs? Chromosomes? Nope. All of these have well defined medical outliers and a spectrum of expressions. A study even shows biological differences in the brain in trans women. Ok, what’s left, and what came from the arguments of proto-TERFs in the 70’s?

It’s this: all men are defined by their oppressor class status and behavior; it is their innate propensity towards non-consensual sexual acquisition, their dominant and domineering nature and resource hoarding, and their relentless exercising of core defining violence – physical, emotional, psychological, and political – in the pursuit of those goals the defines not just masculinity, but men as a whole.

This is the panic – all men are inherently violent rapists, so any men in any women’s space is a danger to all women. This sexual violence is so immutable and essentialist that again, no amount of hormonal, surgical, or behavioral intervention or difference can change it.

The corollary to this, of course, is that all women are also defined by male oppression and dominance; all women are weak, incapable, incompetent, and inferior to any man. Riley Gaines cannot compete against any man, because all men can beat her. This is how weak and incapable women are, inherently. There is no Venn diagram of overlap in skill, strength, ability, cognitive ability, etc, men are just definitionally and immutably better at everything, therefore, women cannot compete against men in any arena, be it sports, the workplace, politics, finance, leadership.

This is the binary that must be used to construct this panic defense: all men are always violent rapists, so no men can be allowed in women’s spaces, because women are all weak and incapable. These traits are so inherent that nothing can ever change them.

Man haters and women haters unite, I guess. Because this construct hates them both.

This is such an absurd position, and has been challenged by the Right itself, claiming “not all men” any time a critique of masculinity challenges their fragile identity politics. And of course ignores the existence and experience of trans men completely, because this argument doesn’t work both ways. When this argument was presented by RadsFems in the 70’s and 80’s, it was fairly soundly rejected by everyone until resurrected like a zombie as an easy in-group marker for mouthbreathing smoothbrains.

It is not un-coincidental that the rise of the alpha rapist fascist gestalt dovetails with this garbage take on Essentialism. Andrew Tate and Steven Crowder style homoerotic violence is another easy costume for those with weak internal selves to glom onto to gain social esteem and status. The trans moral panic becomes an easy way to reinforce and signal ones’ imagined in-group superiority, both within toxic gender performance and the delusional power fantasies of Fascism.

This is how they see the sex binary. This is how they create all binaries. Black and white thinking is a maladaptive behavior pathological to a host of personality disorders, ignoring reality and its’ complexity for simple constructs that place the user at the point of supremacy: “I’m great and you suck” is the whole of the law, and these easy, lazy thought terminating cliches give endless ammunition to perform this idiot’s dance of straw arguments, these bad faith bon mots that can be launched at every tweet, youtube comment section, facebook post, or tiktok one encounters.

“All men are violent rapists and all women are incapable victims, and nothing will ever change that” is a vile and warped view of the world, and it suits their purposes, and betrays their goals and aims as mindless violence and oppression to feed this identity.

It doesn’t make it any easier to pry the limpets and barnacles who cling to these absolutely dogshit ideas because they have literally nothing else but the meager emotional utility that hierarchical taxonomies afford them, but it’s fun to taunt these dipshits by pointing out that they are indeed admitting “yes all men” while also claiming victimhood for women.

We could title this “Riley Gaines thinks all men are rapists” or “JK Rowling claims all women are helpless”, but we’re not quite that far into our Buzzfeed era yet. Still, troll em back. These people are out of their fucking minds, and remember, they will not stop, they must be stopped.