Donald Trump’s victorious campaign for the White House exploited transphobic myths, fears and prejudices. His ads targeted trans athletes in women’s sports, gender-affirming medical care and new pronoun usages.
So anyone who disputes those practices is a transphobe, right?
Wrong. All of these matters are — or should be — open to debate. And if you dismiss people who raise questions about them as bigots, you’re engaging in a form of bigotry yourself.
Let’s be clear: transphobia is real, and some people are so lurid, discriminatory and misleading in their remarks about the topic that it’s fair to label them transphobic.
I’m looking at you, Donald Trump. On the campaign trail, he repeatedly claimed that schools were sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ consent. “There are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl,” he said in October.
That’s a lie, and a hateful lie at that. There is no instance — not a single one — of children receiving surgeries from their schools. And even in states where gender-affirming operations are legal for patients under 18, they can’t happen unless parents consent to them. Other kinds of care for trans minors — including puberty blockers and hormone therapy — require parental consent, too.
Trump knows all of this, of course. The only reason to spout these lies is to spark hate for trans people and their advocates.
But it hardly follows that everyone who raises doubts about medical interventions for trans children is a hater, too. In the most comprehensive scientific review of puberty-blocking drugs and other hormones, British pediatrician Hilary Cass concluded that the evidence for their beneficial effects on children’s mental health and well-being was “remarkably weak.”
To be sure, some critics have argued there are weaknesses in Cass’ own analysis. That’s to be expected. The science around this topic is still in its infancy, and there’s a lot that we don’t know.
Ditto for the research about trans athletes, which doesn’t yield any clear answers yet. A recent study funded by the International Olympic Committee showed that trans women athletes had stronger handgrips — a common indicator of overall muscle strength — than their peers who were designated female at birth.
But in the same study, the trans women athletes — who had all undergone at least a year of treatment suppressing their testosterone levels — had lower lung function, jumping ability and cardiovascular fitness than cisgender female participants.
In short: these issues are complicated. That’s why we should resist blanket prohibitions on gender-affirming care for minors and on trans female athletes participating on women’s teams. At last count, each practice had been banned in half of American states.
But that’s also why we need to keep an open mind about these questions, and to refrain from demonizing people who answer them differently from us. We’ll never learn more about the subject if we’re discouraged from discussing it.
And on our college campuses, especially, that’s what is happening. At the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach, students who doubt whether trans female swim champion Lia Thomas should have been allowed to compete on the women’s team have told me that they won’t share that view with others. The risk of being saddled with the “T word”—transphobe — is simply too great.
Never mind that some trans female athletes have themselves questioned whether they should be matched against cisgender women. “I only want to win if I know it’s fair,” female trans long-distance runner Andie Taylor said in 2021, worrying that her years lived as a man might give her an improper leg up.
What about the vexed issue of pronouns? Here, too, Trump’s campaign ads used a gratuitous barb — “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you” — to stigmatize trans people.
But that doesn’t mean we should require everyone to state their “preferred pronouns,” or that people who reject this ritual are bigots. I don’t ask my students to provide their pronouns, because I think it’s intrusive. If you want me to call you a certain pronoun, I tell them, just email me and I’ll do it. (And, because I’m the professor, the rest of the class will follow my lead.)
I might be wrong in my approach, and I’m happy to entertain critics of it. That’s how we learn.
But if they call me a transphobe, nobody will learn anything. There’s enough hate out there already. We don’t need to add to it, all in the guise of resisting it.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools” and eight other books.
