The Weight of America: Transgender People Under Siege

American society is like the inside of this monstrous mall, where people move like “sentient corpses". Photo: estherpoon

America has truly lost its soul, Kai McKenzie argues. Trans people find themselves under siege.

Guest article by Kai McKenzie 

As I sit in my Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada rental home, looking out at the quiet and cold snow-covered porch and yard outside, the ice crystals on the window glowing magically in the morning sunlight, and the little flecks of snow drifting upward on the breeze outside and catching the light like fireflies, I feel the weight of America. 

It’s inescapable. It follows and haunts me. I feel a fierce anger at the country where I was born, at the citizens who have thrown me and my children away, who barely bat an eye as our fellow trans citizens are erased from monuments, histories, medical records, and public life. America has truly lost its soul. 

The faces of the US

Born in Boulder, Colorado in 1964, growing up in Berkeley, California during the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, living in Boulder again for three decades before moving to Saskatchewan, Canada in 2018 for school, I’ve seen the many faces of the US: the liberal college town of Berkeley with its diversity and pride, colourful protests and street performers, passionate desire to stand up for human rights and fairness; the sleepy town of 29 Palms, California in the Mojave Desert, near the 29 Palms Marine Corp Base, where being American means being faithful and proud, ready to invade and stand strong at the behest of a Commander in Chief; Nashville, Tennessee, where my parents moved for a distinguished professorship in mathematics, a mix of southern tradition and new immigrants. 

Were There Transgender Vikings? The Laxdæla Saga Says So.

One of the main transphobic arguments these days is that people become trans because of "gender ideology".  And "gender ideology" is apparently something new invented by post-modernists, Marxists and progressive leftists. So what if I told you there were transgender people in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages?

Transgender people in history

I have already documented transgender people in ancient and medieval India, ancient Phrygia and Rome,  the Roman Empire, ancient Baghdad and  late 19th century Berlin, and I have also written a popular article about William Shakespeare being in love with a transfeminine person.   

However, with the exception of the poem on gender dysphoria from Kalonymos ben Kalonymus (1322), none of the original sources I have found have been written by trans people. All of the texts, including the one I  present here,  will therefore have to be read with an open, but critical, mind. 

Getting behind the stereotypes

Reconstructed Viking women's clothing.
Photo: Battle-Merchant

Many of the historical texts are  written by transphobes or people who do not understand gender variance. Still, even a queer-phobic or transphobic text can be a witness to gender variance, because why would the author imagine cross-gender expressions if the culture had no concepts of gender variance?

Whether the author of the text I am going to present today, namely the 13th century Laxdæla  Saga (also written as Laksdøla, Laksdæla or Laxardale), is transphobic remains to be seen. 

It clearly refers to negative tropes about both transfeminine and transmasculine gender variance. The story in the saga takes place around 1000 CE, which  mean that this may also apply to the Viking age.

Note that I am using the word "transgender" as an umbrella term covering a wide variety of gender variance here. The references found in the saga do not tell us if the people referred to were gender dysphoric or gender incongruent as we use these medical terms today. 

The similarities with contemporary gender variance leads me to believe, however, that many of them probably were.

The rise of queer and transgender Bluesky

Bluesky has become a real alternative to X-twitter for LGBTQ people. Transgender World has experienced  more than a 50% increase in followers since the US election.

The increasing polarization of American politics have seriously damages some of the most valuable parts of the internet: commons for debate and information sharing. Twitter was, for a time, such a place,  used by millions of people across the political spectrum for debate and research.

Not anymore. Twitter was weakened even before Elon Musk took over, but since he became the owner and leader of what is now X, it has devolved  a cesspool of hatred and trolling. He intentionally dismissed most of the moderators.

Toxic environment

I gave up debating transgender issues on twitter/X years ago, as it became increasingly clear that nearly all threads regarding gender variance might be taken over by  trolls whose goal was not to learn but to win. If you debated on their terms, you soon found yourself lost in a toxic sea of "fake news" and lack of logic. 

People have been leaving X-twitter for a long time now. I noticed that serious journalists stopped using twitter in their research. Activists who do not belong to the MAGA-tribe are also much less likely to use twitter for hashtag campaigns intended to raise awareness. Most trans people have stopped using twitter as a place of identity exploration or for finding friends.

Elon Musk has effectively destroyed Twitter, and I’m convinced it was intentional, as his extremist politics do not flourish in open and tolerant arenas for learning.

Note that Musk is a transphobe who has actively been harassing his transgender daughter on twitter,  He is that bad.

Trump and the transphobes won in the US. But there are still ways trans people can win.

To defeat Trump and right-wing extremists, pro-democracy advocates must help humanize trans people in the eyes of Americans. Photo: Valeria Blanc.

Let us not beat about the bush:  the election of Donald Trump is a disaster, for LGBTQ people, for America, and for those who want to make our societies more open to diversity and inclusion. This is going to be hard. But this "culture war" is not over. There are so many good people fighting for a better world out there, and if we act appropriately, tolerance and compassion may still prevail in the end.

But first, let us see where we are right now:

The Bad

Americans have elected a person who is - at best - an unhinged, aggressive populist, but who also tick off nearly all the boxes of what constitutes a Fascist. 

We will now get a new administration in Washington packed with people who do not respect the basic rules of a democracy. 

In other words: If the anti-fascists of the US do not manage to handle that danger, the worst-case scenario is the end of real American democracy. This is what happened in Germany when parts of the establishment decided that Adolf Hitler was a man they could manage.

Many are exhausted from enduring Donald Trump's toxic mental instability for over eight years. There is no rest where we can have moments in safe spaces of rationality and optimism. Trump is a seriously sick man, a narcissist incapable of genuine human compassion. And he is getting worse. The next four years are going to be bad.

But we are not where the Germans were in 1933 yet. And it is important to keep that in mind. This is not the end of this story. Actually, this may be the start of a better one.

Today's anti-trans activism is about so much more than transgender people

LGBTQ people scare the fearful because they seem to threaten their imagine world order.
Photo: valentin russanov

The extreme anti-trans activism we see today is about much more than gender diversity. The transphobia is driven by a deep and irrational fear of the unknown, a fear political extremists are exploiting in order to gain power.

When I started this blog back in 2008, most of the transgender debate gave the impression of being about "facts", both inside and outside the transgender community. We wrote article after article about science addressing gender variance and the real life experiences of trans people themselves.

Sure, there were transphobic activists around, as well as transphobic pseudo-science. But many believed that it should and could be possible to come to an agreement on what gender variance was, based on sound science and the lived experience of trans people.

Those of us who took part in the debate back then, still have a tendency to appeal to science, facts and the reality of the lived experience of trans people when debating transgender issues, the idea being that  our opponents will actually listen to knowledge-based arguments. It worked before, so why not now?

This is about much more than gender identity

In order to understand this, it is important to understand that the current backlash against transgender people is not really about transgender people in isolation  – or about what it really means to be transgender. 

It may look as if the "debate" continues to be about "facts", given that anti-trans activists often refer to "science" when dismissing transgender identities. But the truth is that this has nothing to do with science or facts. This is all about feelings, and particularly about  the fear of the unknown. They are not debating in order to learn. They are debating in order to win. They seek control.

Moreover, at this point in history the social and economic context makes it so much easier to use transphobia as a political tool.

All you need to know about transgender regret rates

We have collected a large number of articles and papers on to what extent trans people regret transitioning over at Transgender Report. There is only one possible conclusion to draw from all of this: The regret rates are extremely low.

Defining what "transgender regret" is, is not an easy task, as there are various ways of transitioning (legal, social, medical etc.) But if we look at what most people consider "transitioning", namely undergoing hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgery as part of coming out as trans publicly, we end with regret rates around 1 percent.

A meta-study from 2021 ended up with the following conclusion:

“A total of 27 studies, pooling 7928 transgender patients who underwent any type of GAS [gender-affirmation surgeries], were included. The pooled prevalence of regret after GAS was 1% (95% CI <1%–2%). Overall, 33% underwent transmasculine procedures and 67% transfemenine [sic] procedures. The prevalence of regret among patients undergoing transmasculine and transfemenine surgeries was <1% (IC <1%–<1%) and 1% (CI <1%–2%), respectively.” 

In comparison, studies indicate that approximately 20% of cisgender plastic surgery patients report some degree of dissatisfaction post-surgery. Specific procedures have higher regret rates, with breast augmentation leading at 31%, followed by rhinoplasty at 27%, liposuction at 24%, and eyelid surgery at 16%. 

This does not mean that all gender-affirming surgery is perfect. What we see here is most likely that transgender patients are so relieved to be able to live as their true selves, that they are willing to live with some imperfections. They starting point is most often a jarring mismatch between body and gender, and not a cis person's desire to live up to some kind of esthetic perfection.

Go to Transgender Report for a large number of articles, news stories and papers looking at transgender regret and regret rates.

Photo: Gettys