10 Points of Anti-Trans Bias You Can Call Out (More or Less Gently)

Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, wrote a great essay several days ago. It's called "Are too many children transitioning? That’s the wrong question." He shared it to Bluesky. (He also has a book, Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists, coming out next month.)

I think the essay strikes a good balance of speaking gently to the cis reader while also telling them to cut it out with unwarranted anti-trans bias.

Here are 10 things I think he did right. I'm isolating them as "writing tips" in the hopes that others will follow his lead.

1. Be real: You, reader, aren't an expert, are you?

For a casual reader who's picking up the We Are Concerned anti-trans trope, Cohen reminds them to question to whom this "we" refers. “It’s fashionable among well-read non-experts," he says, "to believe ‘we’ need to be more ‘cautious’ or ‘slow down’ with regard to gender affirming care for children.”

Good plan: Compliment the reader as being well-read while reminding them they aren't an expert.

2. Stop tone-policing trans people

Demand more from yourself as the potential ally you could be, and demand less from the victims.

As Cohen puts it: “It is disheartening that instead of offering support, so many well-meaning people are demanding more — more patience, more understanding, more compromise — from a community that is being repeatedly punched in the face.”

3. Stop counting trans people with the goal of arguing that there should be fewer

Really, how many trans people are there? What do you expect you'll do with those numbers were you to get them? Yes, one place and time may have had more trans people than another, and...?

Exactly how many people at various moments in history might have been trans “does not matter for the question of how we care for children (or adults) today."

4. Stop talking about whether you 'want' more people to be living their own lives as they see fit

Whether you want someone to be a certain type of person in a certain situation is irrelevant. They are who they are. They're in that situation. Whether you want our shared world to have more of that type of person in that situation is likewise irrelevant. You can, however, want people to find support. As Cohen puts it:

“The decision whether to slow down or be cautious about changing behavior comes after you let the affected people have the right to make the choice, not before. The failure to recognize this is correctly read by the trans community as devaluing or dehumanizing.

I don’t want more children to go through a gender transition any more than I want more women to have abortions or more old people to have hip replacement surgery. I want people to have access to the care they need — including the care they think they need — and I want the scientific community to have the resources it needs to study and adjudicate all the evidence.”

5. Stop worrying about those numbers especially if you aren't an expert

Especially if you aren't an expert, don't worry how many trans people (including trans kids) exist, nor what choices they're making about their bodies (in consultation with their parents and doctors as appropriate). These aggregate numbers aren't your business. As a non-expert, you can't understand them nor advise about them.

“The appropriate frequency of gender affirming care for minors is exactly the kind of opinion non-experts should not have...If you care about children, you want them to have access to this care if they need it. We should not be standing on the sidelines cheering the numbers going either up or down.”

6. Being alarmed by a procedure's popularity isn't a reason to ban it

Just because more doctors are performing a procedure or more people are seeking it out doesn’t mean it should be banned. Cohen says: “Lots of people are troubled by the dramatic global rise in babies delivered C-section, but reasonable people do not call for laws preventing patients and doctors from agreeing to undergo the procedure.”

7. We could encourage more access to that which we'd like to have more information

Authorities shouldn’t apply “an unreasonably high standard of scrutiny” to gender-affirming care. “Instead of restrictions, we should be thinking about how to increase access to more, better, medical care, more research, more support.”

8. What you decide is important may say more about you than about the thing you value

“Sex and gender (and fertility) are not sacred, and don’t belong on a medical pedestal," Cohen says. "They are as important as people think they are — and by people I mean the children involved, their parents, and their doctors (not you).”

That pitch-perfect "not you" sings in my heart.

9. Manage your own risks, and don't project the concept of risk onto trans people. That's hypocrisy.

Are you worried about…

Children’s developing brains? Well, would you let your child play tackle sports, accepting the risk of head impacts?

Irreversibility? “Lots of medical procedures involve 'irreversible' changes. That nightmare you have about your teeth falling out is because of the shocking realization that nothing — nothing — can make an adult tooth come back." The nightmare is about your fear of death.

Regret? It’s infrequent for gender transition, but just look at the regret rates for cosmetic surgeries.

Everyone's life is full of risks. I suppose that projecting the idea of risk onto trans people is a form of terror management: the mind finding ways to live with fear, as if the social value of cisness could help someone conquer death. A cis person, instead of worrying about their own teeth, worries about the trans person's teeth and whether the trans person's dentist is coming for their teeth.

Be more grounded, pay attention to your own risks, and worry about yourself lest you be hypocritical.

10. We can be open to multiple liberations, and it's still wrong to be anti-trans

Regarding how Cohen begins to imagine a "more egalitarian" world:

In one framework, he says, we might thrive with fewer harmful stereotypes. Some people might “experience comfortable, affirmed, lives without drugs or surgery, because societal acceptance would alter the conditions under which we construct our mind-body relationships.”

In another, we might thrive with the freedom to do what we like. There, “people making adjustments to their bodies to fit their identities or imaginations would be normal and accessible and not that big a deal either."

He goes on:

"I can’t say which of these worlds would be better, which is more likely, or whether we could have both — but that doesn’t affect my views on the contemporary political repression of trans people and their scapegoating by today’s marching forces of fascism.”

In sum, the battle isn't between fewer gender stereotypes and more body autonomy. Both of those are ways of getting free. The real battle is against fascism.

Tucker Lieberman is a freelance editor. tuckerlieberman.com