In 2007, I stood in front of a judge in Indiana and asked for two things: a new name and a new gender marker. Back then, the court didn’t require surgery or a doctor’s letter. Just a court order. Indiana amended my birth certificate, and I walked out a legal woman.
That was nearly twenty years ago. I’m still waiting for the apocalypse.
I bring this up because an anonymous TikTok account with a handful of followers and no face just left me a comment explaining the “bottom line” on trans people. Here it is, in full:
When you strip away all the ideology and look at the bottom line. Women’s Rights Vanish: The moment a biological male can enter a female refuge, changing room, or sports category simply by declaring a feeling (distressed or otherwise), female privacy, safety, and fairness are completely destroyed. Words Lose All Meaning: If woman and man are just self assigned moods rather than biological facts, then homosexuality is erased, and trans cancels itself out because there are no real categories left to transition between. Children pay the price: Telling kids they are born in the wrong body because they don’t fit outdated stereotypes replaces basic acceptance with unnecessary medicalization. Bottom line: You CANNOT RUN A SANE, SAFE SOCIETY ON INTERNAL FEELINGS. Biology is REAL, sex based rights are non negotiable, and common sense has to come first.
I’ve had my name and my face on this fight for two decades. They’ve got an avatar. That’s fine. Let’s look at their bottom line anyway, one line at a time.
“Women’s Rights Vanish”
The strongest version of this argument is a real concern: women’s spaces exist because of male violence, so letting anyone in on a declaration sounds like it defeats the purpose. I take that seriously. Here’s the problem: it’s a prediction, and we’ve had plenty of time to check it.
Self-ID isn’t new. Argentina adopted it in 2012, Denmark in 2014, Ireland and Malta in 2015. Today 24 countries have it. That’s more than a decade of real-world data. Women’s rights didn’t vanish in Buenos Aires or Dublin. They didn’t vanish around me in Indianapolis, either.
And if you want to talk about who’s actually at risk in a changing room, let’s talk. Trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape and sexual assault. That’s not some self-selected survey; it’s from the government’s National Crime Victimization Survey. A global meta-analysis in JAMA Network Open found roughly a third of trans adults report lifetime sexual violence. And when schools restrict trans kids from the right bathroom? Their risk of sexual assault goes up to 36%.
So yes, let’s talk about safety. Ours.
“Words Lose All Meaning”
This one’s a rerun. Back in 2007, Catherine Crouch’s film The Gendercator imagined a future where butch lesbians get forced into transition. It got pulled from San Francisco’s Frameline festival after the trans community called it what it was. I was in Indiana when that fight was hot, and I sat in a debate about it where Susan Stryker spoke. The “trans erases lesbians” line was old then.
It’s even older than that. Christine Jorgensen made front-page headlines in 1952. Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute in Berlin was performing surgeries by 1930. That’s seventy-plus years of people transitioning in public. Gay people are still here. Lesbians are still here. The words still work.
And if someone who might once have lived as a butch lesbian decides to transition instead? That’s not erasure. That’s their body and their choice. Feminists used to have a phrase for that: bodily autonomy.
“Children Pay the Price”
Here’s what the evidence actually says. Socially transitioned kids who are supported in their identities had rates of depression and anxiety no higher than their own siblings or matched peers. The data points toward health, not harm.
Someone will bring up the Cass Review. Fine. It’s been picked apart for its methods by researchers who actually work in the field.
To me this is the same fight as abortion. It’s about whether families, kids and their doctors make medical decisions, or whether the government does it for them. And look at who’s leading the charge to take that choice away. It’s not leftists. It’s not liberals. It’s Matt Walsh, Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni. Hell, Vladimir Putin held up J.K. Rowling as a victim of cancel culture. She didn’t want the endorsement, but that’s who shares her ideology. That’s the company “common sense” keeps.
“You Cannot Run a Sane, Safe Society on Internal Feelings”
Society already runs on internal feelings. Religion is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. Nobody takes a blood test to convert. You declare a belief, and the law protects it. If inner conviction can’t run a sane society, half the law has a problem.
But here’s the real bottom line. Strip away all the ideology, as my commenter likes to say, and what’s left is a feeling. It’s not fear of predators; the data killed that. It’s not protecting lesbians; they’re fine. It’s not protecting kids; supported kids are doing well. It’s not regret; across 27 studies and nearly 8,000 patients, the pooled regret rate after surgery was 1%. What’s left is the ick. A lot of people just feel icky about us.
I’ve said this for twenty years: they don’t want us to exist, and if we do, they want us to suffer. Some of them say it out loud. At CPAC in 2023, Michael Knowles declared that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”
And it’s not just the American right. In 2010, lesbian separatist Bev Jo Von Dohre wrote of trans people: “They expect we’ll be shocked to see statistics about them being killed, and don’t realize, some of us wish they would ALL be dead.” (also archived at TransAdvocate) In 2022, Helen Joyce, author of Trans, said the goal was “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition,” calling every one of us “basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world.”
A sane world. Sound familiar?
Some of them will tell you they’re nothing like the right. They’re leftists. They’re feminists. They’d never stand with the people banning abortion. But look at where they all land. Knowles, Joyce and Bev Jo all end up in the same place: somebody else gets to decide what we do with our bodies. That’s the anti-abortion argument, word for word, just with a different target.
Feminists marched for decades under “my body, my choice.” On election night 2024, white nationalist Nick Fuentes flipped it: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” It spread across TikTok, the same place my commenter lives. Funny how some feminists end up saying the same thing as Fuentes once the body is trans.
This was never about biology. It’s about bodily autonomy and personal liberty: who gets to decide about your body, your name and your life. I decided mine in an Indiana courtroom almost twenty years ago.
So here’s my bottom line: you can’t run a sane, safe society on internal feelings. Stop running yours on the ick.
