Thinking about gender

 Cisgender people legitimately think "If I'd had the option to transition when I was young, I would have, and I'd regret it" is an actual argument against trans rights. Here's why it's not.

Firstly, and most importantly, people have a right to make choices about their own bodies and lives which they may regret. People have a right to make bad choices. People have a right to change their minds. Restricting people's autonomy and freedom to "protect" them from "regret" is tyrannical and wrong, period, no exceptions.

But secondly, and almost as importantly, people rarely transition on a whim. They think about it. And that's the real threat here: Thinking about it.

Most cisgender people feel in some way that we "don't fit" into our assigned gender roles, because, well, assigned gender roles don't really fit anyone. Transphobes have conjured a specter of danger that if gender transitioning is socially acceptable, all people who don't conform to the roles and stereotypes of their birth-assigned gender will be pressured into transitioning to the other binary gender, instead of being accepted as masculine cis girls or feminine cis boys.

But you know who is most accepting of gender non-conformity? The trans community. Most transgender people will be the first to affirm that men can wear dresses, women can grow beards, everyone can be any combination of masculine, feminine, both, or neither that feels right to them. The people telling cis boys who like pink that they're "not real boys" and cis girls who like trucks that they're "not real girls" are cis people, not trans people.

So the real risk isn't that the big scary Trans Agenda will forcibly conscript gender-non-conforming cis youth into its ranks. The real risk is that people will think about it. People will think about the idea that gender is socially constructed, not biological destiny. If trans people become more visible and socially accepted, no cisgender woman is going to go out and change her name and schedule SRS to her eternal regret just because she doesn't like makeup, and no trans person wants her to. But she might start thinking about gender. She might start thinking that she doesn't HAVE to be a woman. She can be a different gender. She can be a gender that isn't male or female. She can be more than one gender. She can be no gender. And after thinking about it, she might decide that actually, she's perfectly happy being a cisgender woman, and that's fine too. But she'll have thought about it. And that act of thinking about it puts just the tiniest crack in gender essentialism.

Trans people's rights are NOT about cis people's self-discovery journeys. Trans people deserve rights on their own merits. The correct argument for trans rights is "Because trans people are people, and all people deserve rights."

But I wanted to unpack this myth of the trans community somehow being a threat to gender-non-conforming cis people's identities, or that trans acceptance will somehow "seduce" the poor, confused gender-non-conforming cis people. It won't. But it will make people think more about the arbitrary nature of gender, and that's the real threat.