Trans people are not weapons of mass cultural destruction

Rachel Saunders
4 min readSep 1, 2024
Photo by Griffin Wooldridge: https://www.pexels.com/photo/burning-bengal-bombs-on-shabby-surface-4811240/

One artefact of the culture war being waged against trans people is the apocalyptic language levelled against them. Drag queens are labelled harbingers of doom, trans healthcare practitioners are accused of destroying LGB youth, and trans children are denied their identity because society thinks they are too young to decide for themselves. To be trans is to be a walking culture bomb, agents of chaos that will tear down western civilization. Much like gay men were labelled in generations past there is not any room for queerness in society, only a rigid conformity to the necrotic grip of the past. Trans people are the imagined phantasms of sacred conservatives, and it has been this way ever since the Old Testament.

What changed around 2015 was a shift from pity and contempt to a loathing dredged up from the depths of conservative hell. Trump’s ride down the escalator dragged up tales of Mexican rapists and dragged the right wing talking points into polite conversation. Suddenly drag queens were harbingers of doom, and then Hannah Barnes and Riley Gaines shifted the narrative by showing the world the “evils” for trans healthcare and trans women in sport. Forgetting the fact that for the past twenty years neither had been an issue. This weaponizing of trans identities to win votes was always going to be pyric because anti-trans sentiments was a niche…

--

--