What If Transphobes Are Right?
What If Transphobes Are Right?
If They Are, Theirs Is A Hopelessly Tiny World
If They Are, Theirs Is A Hopelessly Tiny World
The case for transphobes obliterating the existence of trans persons is airtight. I can’t gainsay their logic.
You may have heard the quip, “You’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you.” Any attempt to reassure the paranoiac that others aren’t plotting against them reinforces their belief. “Of course someone against me would say that!”
A similar phenomenon operates in transphobia. Gender criticals (GCs) insist trans women are predatory males invading women’s spaces. Pleading I just wanna go to the bathroom confirms to GCs that I’m a pervert preying on “true” women. Fundamentalist christians insist they’re protecting children. Telling them young people can safely and reversibly delay a harmfully unalterable puberty until they can make an informed decision seals in fundamentalists’ minds that trans-affirming care is “grooming.”
Airtight mindsets admit only the logic of their closed and tiny circle. I can’t prove everyone isn’t out to get the paranoiac. Winning the argument, they exclude any chance that even one person authentically wants to help or that people outside the chamber of paranoia aren’t harboring a single thought about them.
So, too, the transphobe’s argument is airtight but hopelessly isolated. Biological sex, chromosomes, and the immutable word of God barricade not only trans persons from self-determination but transphobes themselves.
Perhaps I, a deluded trans person, suffer the same isolating mania. “We tell you you’re wrong and that you’re mutilating yourself, children, and society, and you respond with ‘That’s just what transphobes would say!’”
I agree — I can’t be me inside the bubble of my own arguments. Nor do I try to prove I’m not an isolated maniac. Instead, I stand outside the compartment, living my life.
I don’t lead myself or transphobes on a wild goose chase. Sprinting like a hamster in a wheel, the transphobe tries to run me over with their steel bubble. But I have so much space to dodge them. Their peephole blinds them to miles of open fields that are mine to journey, while they smash into walls built by their dictates, roll into craters of their own digging, and crash against other folks’ airtight spheres.
I once did the same thing. For 50+ years, life was a choking little sphere that I desperately reinforced to keep from letting in air and any sight of folks living freely, for that would gainsay my conviction. Now that I stroll in green pastures, holding hands with people I previously couldn’t have conceived, I no longer fit into my old bubble. It’s obliterated. I’m no longer alone. With me are so many others being themselves, none of whom are out to get me.
I can’t even say transphobes plot against me. They can’t see me. They spy only a vague scarecrow they try to run over. And that scares them. Because that foggy figure reminds them of themselves.
It scared me into a wider world.
Love,
Bethany
Originally published at bethanybeeler.com
Subscribe to my Medium Posts!
To learn more about my journey, check out my memoir, How to NOT Know You’re Trans or my newly-released dystopian time-travel thriller, Above the Stars.
As always, your respectful comments are appreciated. 🤗