Who's afraid of trans people?

Transgender people are a minority that is by far the most harassed and aggressed, attracting a lot of hatred, cruelty and discrimination. For centuries, they have been persecuted on the basis of expressing their gender identity, refusing to fully conform to the existing norms. According to a recent study conducted by Williams Institute at UCLA, "transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault".

Often times, cisgender people (those who feel comfortable within one of the binary genders, assigned at birth on the basis of their sex) have a hard time understanding trans individuals and what their agenda is. As they don't feel personally concerned with the subject, gender theory often isn't something they are familiar with; in fact many never even question the way they identify with the gender that was assigned to them, not once in their entire lives. 
Because of that, the general public is rather ignorant on different aspects that make up one's gender identity. It is hard to blame them given that none of this is discussed in schools, and media coverage of trans people is not only primitive but very offensive. As transgender people refuse to conform to the gender standards, those who do conform to them may experience a rather weird and uncomfortable sense that perhaps it's something they could think about too. How can you know how you feel about something if you've never given yourself the chance to ponder on it?

And this is exactly when the moral strain kicks in. Let's face it, whenever you’re aggressive about something it’s when YOU have an issue with it, not anyone else. I’m not saying that one who isn’t supportive of transgenderism has an issue. Many people just don’t feel concerned with it as a subject and at least during this lifetime they have simply other things to take care of. And that’s okay. We don’t have to all be involved in everything. What I’m saying is that anyone who isn’t supportive of transgenderism and projects that on transgender people with hostility definitely does have an issue. 
That issue is understandable to some extent. Given the current gender norms, it is safe to say we have been indoctrinated to express one of the two proposed genders and the overall societal institutionalised pressure makes it very hard to even entertain the idea of what could be outside of a spectrum. Considering the legitimacy of transgenderism sadly triggers for some of us an entire paradigm shift, a complete re-arrangement of life as we know it. So some would rather aggressively deny trans people's existence than change their whole life view and the potential consequences for their psychological and emotional wellbeing.

In short: this shit is heavy for everyone, even those who think they're "normal" and transgender people are not. You're a cis girl or a cis boy, which nobody ever asked you about, they just know what you have in your pants. You go to school, you follow your gender norms and if you sneak outside of them you are ridiculed by your peers, often by teachers as well. So you decide not to experiment, not to cross the sacred gender boundaries - at all cost. You become a teenager, so as a girl you feel the pressure to appear desirable, the pressure to sexualise yourself. For who? For boys. Of course, not only reinforcing cis-normativity and heteronormativity, but also the mistreatment of women, by objectifying and sexualising girls from a very young age. This is the rhetoric teenage girls experience. You seek to be wanted but you also want to be chased. You want to be the reward that someone works very hard for. Someone with power.

As a boy, you feel the societal pressure to desire, to conquer a girl, to show how many girls want you and how much you don't care. Especially considering what is explained to you about girls, how much weaker they are from you, how different they are. When a boy cries, oftentimes he gets told not to cry like a girl. So as a boy, you want to seem above it all, you want is to appear strong and unfazed. Someone who people want, someone who people fear. Someone with power.  All of these are obviously reductionist statements as each individual is different and a lot of different factors come into one's behaviour. But that’s exactly the point: we're all different. Each person, despite their sex, has a unique set of qualities and flaws, different genetic makeup, different receptors in their cells and all of that has nothing to do with what genitals you have, let alone your gender identity. But our overall socialization sadly taught us something else and it is very hard to decondition from this and learn how to look at gender, sex, sexual orientation, femininity and masculinity in a whole different light.

I am non-binary and queer, so although overall equality and trans visibility matter to me personally, I want to include views and opinions of the very people in question rather than speak for them myself. Hence, for this article, I based myself on a video called Gender-critical by Natalie Wynn  - a trans political commentator known for elaborate and creative video-lectures on her YouTube channel, Contra Points. In her videos, she addresses a lot of different contemporary issues, but this specific one is very close to my heart as it clarified certain aspects of transphobia that puzzled me and sensibilized me towards reasons why it's an issue in the first place. In the video, Wynn explains:
"The current discourse about transgender issues is an explosion of untreated sewage. We have far-right politicians menacing us with legal discrimination and erasure, we have fear-mongering and hostility in the press and that, combined with high rates of family rejection and mistreatment, puts trans people on the defensive. So in public, we tend to stick together, concede nothing, and shield ourselves behind simple, unambiguous slogans like 'Trans women are women!', which is true - we are women. But what happens is that people who don't really understand trans issues (in other words most people) have lots of unanswered questions about the details".

If we don't really get what the problem is and nobody's there to explain it to us, it's challenging for us to understand such a complex issue, complex enough to shake one's typical paradigm. It would be really great if someone explained some gender theory to the general public the way we like it: take us by the hand, break it down to manageable-sized pieces, use some examples and preferably organize a fun little quiz at the end of the lesson. But we can't always have things the way we want them, and unfortunately currently very important and relevant topics are usually not taught this way - especially when it comes to active socio-political issues. But sadly, this is a norm when it comes to the most urgent of societal problems, we tend to only reflect once we look back and apologise instead of being proactive.

The way this looks now is that a handful of people decide not to conform to certain norms, advocate for these norms to be changed, and then years later, if one is lucky or relentless enough (or rather both), a reform or a policy can be introduced. And even once this is done, it takes a very long time for such changes to be truly absorbed by society or even spread well enough to get to a larger portion of society. And that's another reason why people aren't proactive about this as an issue, other than being against the trans agenda. People just don't know any better and societal changes take time when they happen on a bigger scale.

Thus, people feel like they need to take matters into their own hands and stand up for themselves. There are maybe a handful of people (if any) in positions of decision-makers who advocate for trans people. With such a painful lack of representation, individuals themselves have to push the trans agenda as a form of battle for their own rights and identity. Often, they're met with very cruel responses: insults, denials, rejections. Many get threatened by transgender people, they get very defensive and act as if by giving trans people equal rights to them, they lose some of their own power, their own value. By equalizing everyone’s unique value as a human being, they feel like such freedom should only be allowed to those like them.

You don't have to be scared of someone else's identity. It does not concern you and nobody is imposing anything on you. Nobody is telling you to become trans, in fact barely anyone asks for your pronouns. It's going to take years to normalize the act of not assuming someone's gender, so if you don't like it so much you can be reassured that probably until the rest of your life you will be identified on the basis of your genital and there is little you can even do about it in tangible, immediate day-to-day situations.

But then why are you scared? If nobody is asking you, why are you replying? Why are you pre-empting that everyone now will suddenly turn trans if we let trans people be? Maybe what you're scared of are not trans people. Maybe you're just scared of your own potential complexity?