The Trans Agenda*

*from someone who actually knows

Source image by John Fowler

Search results for “Trans Agenda” are rife with the most wildly doom-laden pronouncements imaginable. Warnings about “the very real threats that [trans people] pose to all of society” (ad copy for Kara Dansky’s The Abolition of Sex) or claims that “transgender ideology has done immense harm to women, kids, and free speech” (Megan Murphy, via her podcast) are easy to find.

And no, I’m not going to link sources, because I’m not going to signal-boost that garbage. You can look it up it if you want. Nor am I going to debunk these straw-man arguments; others have already done it better than I would.

Besides the pearl-clutching levels of hysteria involved, one thing is immediately clear. The characterizations of the trans agenda available in the media today are:

• Screamingly transphobic,

• The product of some kind of fever dream, ungrounded in either reality or common sense.

It’s obvious that none of these people have ever actually asked any trans people what our agenda is. Or if they have, they have not listened in good faith to what we have to say.

As a trans person with an agenda, I’m here to set the record straight. And while trans people, as a community, have just a diverse a set of viewpoints as any other group of people, and while I certainly don’t speak for all trans people in all things, I feel reasonably confident that my view of the trans agenda is widely shared by others.

The Trans Agenda

Are you ready? Brace yourself. Here it is, so simple it fits on a t-shirt:

That’s it. That’s the whole agenda. We just want to be happy. Everything else—about bathrooms or pronouns or gender markers on your documents or access to hormones and surgeries—follows from that. Maybe I’ll do a post on that someday, but for today we just want to be happy.

What? Were you expecting something more? Ok! Let’s unpack it, shall we?

Why does anyone do anything?

Sigmund Freud would say "to get laid," but we all know that guy had his... quirks. My view on why anybody does anything, at least in what we are choosing to do for ourselves in our own lives, is a bit different. Related, but broader. Consider:

• Why buy a new car when you could buy a used one for a lot less? They both get you where you need to go.

• Why ever pursue a career in the arts, or go into veterinary medicine, or become a grade school teacher, or almost anything else, when everybody knows it’s easier to make a ton of money as a finance bro?

• Why date anybody? Why get married. Why bother looking for love at all?

• Why get your knee replaced? You can still walk on it. It just hurts. Suck it up, you little wuss!

There’s lots of superficial reasons to do all of these things. “A new car will need less maintenance and use less gas. It’ll be cheaper in the long run.” “Because I love working with children.” “Because I can’t imagine living my life without her.” “Yeah I can walk, but when every step is literally agony, it really gets in the way of doing anything.”

If you probe into those answers, if you ask why any of it matters—ask why, why why, like an annoying six year old until you reach the end—what do you find?

Because it makes you happy. Or it helps you be happy. Or it addresses a problem that stands between you and your happiness.

Even things people know are bad in the long term, they still do because at least for a while those things can feel really great! Meth jacks your dopamine up to the sky, baby! Yeah, your teeth gonna fall out, but until then, you’re mainlining chemical happiness!

Everything we do—at least in the realm of things we are choosing to do for ourselves in our own lives—is in support of our happiness. Short term or long term, in direct pursuit or to reduce obstacles, it’s all about happiness.

Freud wasn’t wrong, he just didn’t peel the onion deep enough. Why get laid? Because it feels great, which in turn brings us some moments of happiness.

Why do trans people transition?

At this point we could short-cut to "because it makes us happy." While true, that’s not a satisfying answer because it doesn’t address the implied question of “ok, but why not pursue happiness the normal way?”

As in, “You know. Like cis people do.”

Leaving aside that trans people—like gay people, like straight people, and like cis people—are a perfectly normal part of human diversity, this really boils down to gender dysphoria, what gender dysphoria does to us, and what we can do about it.

Gender dysphoria is a huge subject, and also one other people have covered better than I could. And god bless them for doing it. The main points that matter here are:

• Gender dysphoria is the collective psychological distress people experience when aspects of their life (from their bodies to the way they’re seen and expected to act in society to everything in between) run counter to the person's own innermost sense of themselves, with respect to society’s gender categories.

• Individual experiences that provoke gender dysphoria need not be severe—and often aren’t—but they all constitute microaggressions against one’s identity.

• Critically, the collective weight of these microaggressions adds up to significant trauma, and to the attendant complex PTSD that comes from repeated, endless, inescapable, and ongoing trauma.

The specific way dysphoria feels is basically impossible to describe. What I can tell you is a) it’s awful, and b) it only gets worse the longer you live with it. It will eventually destroy you. I know, because it almost destroyed me.

This puts gender dysphoria in the same category as the knee replacement. We transition because the gender dysphoria is an insurmountable impediment to being happy.

Yes, trans people can pursue happiness “the normal way”, and many of us do. I did. I stayed in school, got a good job, got a house, got a spouse, had some kids. You could not have scripted a more cisgendered, heterosexually-normative path to follow towards happiness than the one I followed.

The problem was I did it under the weight of gender dysphoria: I did it while enduring a level of cPTSD that made it genuinely impossible to be happy. The simple act of coping with my dysphoria, every moment of every day, cost me so much of my mental and emotional energy that there was nothing left over for anything else. Nothing left over for actually living my life and enjoying it.

It’s like trying to enjoy a walk on a nice spring day when every step is agony.

That’s what gender dysphoria does: it robs you of the possibility of being happy.

We transition because this is how we regain that possibility. Because this is how any of the “normal” happiness pursuits can in fact bring us some happiness. And because gender transitioning is the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria (that’s another huge subject you can google if you don’t understand it already).

As American as apple pie

These ideas—that happiness is an innate good, that the purpose of life is happiness, that going after as much happiness as you can get while you’re still on this earth, and that a person’s ability to do that is fundamental to their existence as a human being—are not new at all. You may recognize this quote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

—Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, 1776

Emphasis mine, but warranted.

Life and liberty, you will note, are prerequisites for that pursuit. The very document that established our nation, in its most nascent moments, is rooted in and motivated by the idea that what we do, we do for happiness. That happiness is a good in itself, worthy of pursuit for its own sake, and the inalienable right of everyone.

The trans agenda is simply to pursue happiness.

I am not cis, but so far as I can tell, this is exactly the same as the cisgender agenda. This, too, is what cis people are out there doing. Cis or trans, we all just live our lives, trying to make the best choices we can for ourselves, in the hope that the outcomes of those choices will bring us happiness.

The only difference is that trans people have to do a bunch of transition stuff before happiness is even possible.