ADAMS: In Defence of Trans Women
Every so often, a piece of writing comes along that is so earnestly sincere, so drenched in nostalgic self-pity, that you almost feel bad pointing out how it functions as a kind of respectable prejudice.
Ben Ryan's recent essay in The Atlantic, “In Defense of Effeminate Boys,” is just such a piece. It is a well-tailored garment of victimhood, woven from the author's genuinely painful memories of being bullied in middle school for being a “sissy.” He recalls the taunts, the isolation, the casual cruelty of the 1990s public schoolyard. It is a sad story, and my heart genuinely goes out to the younger version of the author who endured it.
But the essay is not merely a memoir. It is a polemic. And its target, dressed up in the language of concern for confused children, is the transgender community.
The argument is a familiar one to anyone who has been following the cultural wars of the last decade. It goes like this: Once upon a time, a boy like Ben would have grown up to be a gay man. He would have found his tribe, his identity, his place in the world as part of a distinct and vibrant subculture. But today, the argument goes, that same boy would be “transed.”
He would supposedly be swept up by a misguided medical establishment, encouraged by over-zealous activists, and convinced that his femininity means he is actually a girl. He would be, in the memorable and deeply dehumanizing phrase, a “lost gay boy.”
Now, I am a man who has built a small career on being skeptical of right-wing orthodoxies. I am not easily shocked. But reading this piece, I was struck by the complete and total absence of trans people as people.
They are not in this essay. They are not quoted, they are not interviewed, they are not extended the basic courtesy of being allowed to speak for themselves. They exist only as a phenomenon. A trend. A threat. A disease that might infect a vulnerable gay boy. They are the storm clouds gathering on the horizon of the author's idyllic memory of his fundamentalist Christian childhood, where at least everyone knew he was a boy, even if he was a bit much.
This is the classic move of the concerned intellectual. You don't have to hate anyone, you see. You just have to worry about them. You don't have to call trans women men; you just have to imply that their very existence might be confusing the real victims: the gay kids.
It reduces a group of human beings—with their own histories, their own pains, their own complex journeys of self-discovery—to a sociological error. It erases their agency entirely. The idea that a trans woman might have arrived at her identity through the same kind of painful introspection and self-knowledge that the author used to arrive at his gay identity is simply not on the table. No, for the author, she is merely a "medical mistake" that happened to a boy who was just like him, but who got lost in the wrong waiting room.
And what is the evidence for this great “transing” epidemic?
The author offers only his gut feeling that "things have gone too far." He offers the anecdote of a psychologist friend who knows a kid and the spectre of a culture that is, in his view, too accepting of the idea that gender might not be a binary—a finding, I might add, that is supported by a growing body of neuroscientific research that the author hand-waves away in favour of his own lived experience.
Because that's what this ultimately boils down to, isn't it? The author's own identity. The author's own pain. The author's own fear that his particular brand of suffering is being rendered obsolete, his tribe poached by a newer, shinier, more medically complicated one. The essay is a cry of "What about me?" directed at a world that has, thankfully, moved on to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between sex, gender, and identity.
He wants to return to a simpler time. A time when a flamboyant boy was a flamboyant boy, full stop. A time before we started asking questions like "Is that a boy or a girl?" and started taking the answers seriously.
I understand the nostalgia. The world was simpler. But it was also crueler. The kids who whispered "Is that a boy or a girl?" in the author's 7th-grade classroom were the vanguard of a culture that demanded conformity. The author's essay, sadly, feels like an echo of that same demand. It’s just dressed in nicer clothes and published in a more respectable magazine.
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