A 

common misconception about 
“coming out” is that it represents 
a clean break, where there is a de-

finitive moment when you’re in the closet 
and when you’re fully out in public. Most 
queer people will tell you that coming out is 
instead something you have to do over and 
over — that the people you will meet will 
most likely assume you’re straight until you 
inform them otherwise. 

This conception of coming out might be 

more true for trans people, especially trans 
women, than anyone else: It’s hard to avoid 
being “read” as trans. Even if I wanted to 
go “stealth” — that is, to pass as a cisgen-
der woman 100% of the time — I probably 
couldn’t. Too much about me gives me away: 
my broad shoulders, my deep voice, the fa-
cial hair that’s difficult to hide without gau-
dy amounts of makeup. 

Transition is a slower, more tentative pro-

cess than a lot of people think it is. I experi-
mented for about a year with all sorts of vari-
ants on my name, pronouns and dress; even 
when I had pretty firmly decided on formal 
transition, I only told a few people about it 
at first. I wasn’t able to get on hormone re-
placement therapy and pursue electrolysis 
until nearly a year after that. For a long time, 
I was called “sir” by service workers, and 
acquaintances and friends of friends mostly 
called me by my deadname. 

There are a lot of potential stories I could 

extract from this process, but it mostly feels 
amorphous and tentative, even now. I’m 
still unsure what being trans is supposed to 
“mean.” A friend once asked me how I knew 
that I wanted to be a woman, and I wasn’t sure 
how to answer, or if I even had a good answer 
at all. 

Even if I can’t speak to what it might mean 

to be a woman in some metaphysical way, I 
can speak more confidently about being treat-
ed differently as a woman. A few months af-
ter starting hormones, I was walking home at 
about 2 a.m. from a party, and a man caught 
up to me. He walked alongside me for a block 
or so, asking if I would just stop to, “have a 
conversation.” He wanted to know if he could, 
“ask me a question.” I was kind of tipsy and 
kept demurring without saying very much, 
trying to make it clear from my body language 
that I wanted him to leave me alone. He even-
tually did. 

I had never experienced anything remotely 

like that, and while it wasn’t earth-shattering, 
something changed for me after. I’ve only had 
a small handful of things like this happen to 
me since then, but I still noticed that I felt 
a little less safe in public, and started to feel 
more nervous about walking somewhere on 
my own.

This is normal, probably; it is the sort of 

harassment cis women are privy to and have 
experienced for much longer than I have. 
But I know that among trans women, I’m not 
even remotely the worst off. My parents didn’t 
reject me, I didn’t lose my job and I live in a 
place that is relatively accepting of people like 

me. I’m reminded of this every day when I 
log onto Twitter and see people crowdfund-
ing transition expenses, food, housing and 
emergency medical care. Though I see the 
names of murdered trans women proliferate 
on social media, it seems like most cis people 
are generally unaware of how many of us find 
ourselves in sudden need of help, how often 
we find ourselves shut out of society. It seems 
like most people don’t know how precarious 
our lives are. 

The way trans people are talked about in 

public might give you a different idea. The 
amount of discourse around the issue of our 
existence in the media seems grotesquely out 
of proportion given that trans people amount 
to less than 1% of the U.S. population. We’ve 
become a sort of sticking point in the culture 
war, now that it’s becoming increasingly ap-
parent that rights for cis white gays and lesbi-
ans have been, for the moment, asserted and 
accepted in public life. Conservatives who 
want to win mainstream appeal have found 
that trans people are an easier target than 
our gay counterparts. This strategy has been 
particularly effective in the UK, where the 
most virulent transphobia is now more or less 
mainstream. In the U.S., the mainstream me-
dia is less saturated with this sort of rhetoric, 
but we see legislative debates about trans ac-
cess to bathrooms, locker rooms and school 
athletics.

It’s frustrating to find oneself on the other 

end of this, especially given that trans people 
are not often allowed a seat at the media ap-
paratus or the legislative debates to which we 

are subject. When we are given a voice, the 
case for our continued existence is framed 
as one side of a “debate.” For most of us, the 
recourse we have is to continually check the 
news, watching as the specter made of our 
community is endlessly scrutinized. 
I

t’s been a weird couple of weeks to be 
trans. One of the more high-profile 
celebrities who have revealed them-

selves to be transphobic is the author J.K. 
Rowling, who posted a nearly 4,000 word es-
say on her website on June 10 titled “J.K. Row-
ling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking 
out on Sex and Gender Issues.” The original 
title of the piece was “TERF Wars,” the acro-
nym standing for “trans-exclusionary radi-
cal feminist.” I’ve always found the label of 
TERF to be a little dubious, because it allows 
transphobes to claim the legacy and historical 
cause of feminism, which J.K. Rowling at least 
purports to do. 

I’m reluctant to close-read the essay and 

pick it apart piece-by-piece. Other people have 
done it better, and moreover there’s nothing 
new in it. If you’ve spent any amount of time 
reading transphobic writing — which I have, 
probably to the detriment of my mental health 
— you’ve seen all these talking points before. 
Generally, the transphobic media landscape 
operates like this: No matter how banal or 
easily refuted their points are, you keep seeing 
them crop up in another article, another fo-
rum post, another tweet thread. Sometimes it 
feels like these points are repeated so endless-
ly with the hope that people will be convinced 
by them, and more to saturate the public nar-

rative around trans people’s existence. The 
more time trans people and our allies spend 
refuting these points, the more public airtime 
they get, and the more these same talking 
points filter into public consciousness in the 
form of truisms and “common sense.” 

And so, in summary: Rowling sees trans 

women as predatory men seeking access to 
“single sex spaces,” particularly bathrooms 
and locker rooms designated for women. Her 
appraisal of trans men is essentially that they 
are women, and therefore passive victims of 
patriarchy whose transitions represent false 
solutions to the ordinary kinds of alienation 
women suffer from in adolescence and early 
adulthood. Her deterministic, essentially bi-
nary thinking is apparent, even though she 
assures us that she doesn’t categorically hate 
trans people. She’s just against what she calls 
a “theory of gender identity” or “the current 
trans activism” that persuades people to tran-
sition when they should be doing something 
else. To back this up, she points to an (un-
sourced) statistic that “between 60-90% of 
gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their 
dysphoria.” 

Her writing is couched in a peculiar appro-

priation of the language of concern. Of course, 
we are led to believe, Rowling is simply con-
cerned about trans activism going too far, 
overstepping its rightful place. To give some 
idea of what she sees as the rightful place of 
trans activism, she at one point describes a 
trans woman friend whose transition she 
deems appropriate, and contrasts it with the 
current trans activism:

“She went through a long and rigorous pro-

cess of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged 
transformation. The current explosion of 
trans activism is urging a removal of almost all 
the robust systems through which candidates 
for sex reassignment were once required to 
pass.” 

There’s a term that trans people used to use 

in the ‘70s and ‘80s known as “crash landing.” 
This referred to rejection from a gender iden-
tity clinic after this “rigorous process of evalu-
ation.” The medical establishment basically 
told these trans people that they were out of 
luck, that they couldn’t live normal lives as 
women or men, and so they should just try to 
live with the gender they were born with. One 
wonders, in this light, how many fewer trans 
people would exist if Rowling’s “rigorous pro-
cess” was the norm — if clinicians once again 
were the final arbiter of who could transition 
or not. The important thing here is that some-
one else is deciding for us. Generally, I don’t 
like those odds.

I could go on and on but I’ve already given 

Rowling too much space. I’ve encountered 
these same ideas so many times that my re-
action to her essay wasn’t even really one of 
anger. I just felt my heart sink a little bit at the 
sight of someone in such a position of influ-
ence making these kinds of statements. 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
16 — Monday, August 31, 2020 

D

ear Readers,

The Statement Magazine is a 

unique student-driven publica-

tion that is dedicated to providing long-form 
reporting, political and cultural commen-
tary, along with lighthearted narratives. We 
are committed to providing accurate and 
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We also want to voice our support for the 

journalists in the field covering the ongoing 
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and cyclical injustices harming our country. 
Many are being silenced, mainly by the po-
lice, while risking their lives in an attempt to 
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we want to acknowledge the media’s historic 
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In line with our mission and determina-

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Sincerely,

The 2020 Summer Statement Staff

Going forward: an open letter to our readers

statement

Living through the culture war about trans and queer 

BY EMILY YANG, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR & MANAGING ARTS EDITOR 

ILLUSTRATION BY CARA JHANG

Read more at 
 
MichiganDaily.com

Illustration by Cara Jhang
EMILY YANG
Statement Contributor & Man-
aging Arts Editor

