Transidphobia is Recycled Transphobia

All transidphobia – whether it’s opposition to transage identities, transrace, transspecies, or anything else – is recycled transphobia, and that fact needs to be more widely known.

If you’re someone with a transid hoping to learn how to argue in defense of yourself, I hope this post will be useful to you – feel free to link to it as education, even. And if you’re someone opposed to transids, who’s been linked to this post or just stumbled across it, I hope to change your mind, or at least make you consider some new perspectives.

The simple truth is, the arguments raised to justify opposition to transids, whether any, some, or all, are virtually always directly equivalent to a transphobic argument. Beings opposed to transids often argue otherwise, so let’s comprehensively go through each of them in turn and examine how:

"No one actually has a transid, these are just internet trolls trying to make the LGBTQ+ look bad."

While the argument itself doesn’t have a transphobic equivalent, the idea it’s based on firmly does. This idea is adopting a defensive (in the negative sense) position against bigoted right-wing talking points that hold identification with a different age, species, or race as absurd in the same way identification with a different gender is.

Hurtful jokes like “what’s next, people identifying as dogs?” don’t demonstrate that being transspecies is fundamentally different from being transgender, they only demonstrate that we’re all in the same boat and have the same enemies. And there are many of us (me included) who can demonstrate that we’re real beings, and serious about our identities.

"No one actually has a transid, these are just people adopting labels they think will benefit them."

This is directly equivalent to the assertion that transgender women are just trying to get into women’s spaces to be creeps, or get special treatment and attention for being girls.

While every group has extreme outliers, with virtually no exceptions, no one is faking being transage to get close to children, and no one is faking being transrace to benefit from affirmative action policies. That wouldn’t even make sense, since such a strategy doesn’t actually work – anyone attempting something like that would never admit to their identity not being cis. But it not making sense doesn’t stop it from being a common knee-jerk reaction, based on rationalization of unease felt when faced with someone different.

In the longer term, any policy-level affirmation of transids would require a comprehensive re-examination of how policies intended to combat marginalization and protect the vulnerable need to be reframed to ensure support is going where it’s most needed, based on the needs themselves rather than on what categories of being are broadly presumed to have them. This would be a lot of effort, but it would be very possible, and also have the side benefit of ensuring that support reaches beings who currently fall through the cracks due to overly-rigid criteria, as well as preventing “benefit shopping” based on self-identification alone.

“If transids were real, people with them wouldn’t be such a tiny minority.”

It’s a very well-established fact that lack of exposure to education about gender identity results in many beings who would otherwise realize that they’re transgender never being able to identify the source of the dissatisfaction they feel about their gender, or only doing so after much longer. Furthermore, in environments where openly identifying as transgender risks severe social consequences, beings who know they’re transgender are still likely to hide it, the same way beings with transids commonly hide them due to intense stigma.

Also, the subject of transids suffers from very severely limited online information, misinformation, and transid-adjacent communities being heavily fragmented. For example, transage beings may end up in social spaces focused on little/caregiver dynamics, ABDL, age regression, or ageplay without ever becoming aware that any community supportive of age identity by that name even exists. This also contributes to the impression that transids are far less common than they actually are.

“Transids aren’t recognized by science.”

At one point, transgender identity wasn’t well recognized by science either, and even today, gender-affirming care and therapy still have a long way to go. Nevertheless, transgender identities clearly existed before they were studied. Scientific progress takes time, and because scientists are just beings like any others aside from having specialized education, scientific progress is often dependent on social progress to have enough support to be viable. Just because it hasn’t gotten there yet doesn’t mean there’s nothing more to discover.

“Transids can’t be valid because you can’t transition your age/race/species.”

“Transition” isn’t limited to identity-affirming medical care and updating official documents. Beings can transition aspects of their presentation, and how supportive friends treat them, without requiring broader frameworks of support – my friends all acknowledge me as a child, for example.

Furthermore, strictly in terms of medical care, for most of history, this was also true of gender. Transfeminine beings only recently have any medical transition path other than castration, and transmasculine beings had no options at all. But that doesn’t mean their identities weren’t valid until hormone replacement therapy and gender confirmation surgeries became commonly available; transition for non-gender aspects of one’s body are just something that hasn’t been developed yet, partly because it poses even greater medical challenges, and partly because there isn’t currently sufficient funding and social support, just as is the case with scientific understanding.

“Transids have no basis in measurable brain differences like transgender identity does.”

Defining transgender identity based on “brain differences” is transmedicalism, and already hotly contested as an outmoded, scientifically dubious, and overly-narrow conception of gender identity. This argument is just that same transmedicalism recycled, and yet, many beings explicitly opposed to transmedicalism continue to make the exact same argument when it comes to transids, not seeing the double standard.

“Transids are appropriation of the identities of the less privileged by the more privileged.”

This is equivalent to the TERF take that transgender women are actually men trying to lay claim to womanhood as an extension of male privilege. The reality is that if it’s not an egalitarian environment already and privilege is in play (as it is most of the time), openly identifying as having a transid, just as with being transgender, means losing any privilege previously held and ending up in a less favorable position compared to cis peers as well.

“Transids enshrine harmful stereotypes and social constructs.”

Especially commonly used against transrace identities, this is highly comparable to opposition of transgender identity as part of broader opposition to gender identity as a whole, i.e., radical gender abolitionism. It’s true that racial categorization is used to cause great harm, but so is gender categorization; there are still jurisdictions on Earth where women aren’t legally permitted to travel freely without a male chaperone.

The solution to systematic marginalization is not to make us all the same, whether that relates to gender or anything else; culture and identity are stifled by homogeneity and thrive on diversity, recognizing what makes us different – social construct or not – and celebrating all of those differences, in defiance of bigoted attempts to rank some above others.

“People claiming to have transids clearly demonstrate traits that contradict their self-identification.”

It’s important to recognize that identity isn’t monolithic and stereotypes aren’t binding. Transgender women don’t have to like pink, transage children don’t have to like crayons, and transpecies dogs don’t have to like digging holes. At its core, identity is identity, it’s how you see yourself, not how well you conform to stereotypes. And with few exceptions, most beings wouldn’t try to invalidate someone’s gender identity based on on them not being exactly equivalent in every way to someone cisgender and very stereotypical – so why do that with any other identity?

Ultimately, whether transgender or transid, we have a common enemy in the idea that biology dictates identity (bioessentialism). To be any kind of trans is to value the right to personal autonomy, self-identification, and internal experience, and to hold that each being’s opinion about who they are should always take precedence over what anyone else thinks. In addition to that, a huge number of beings with transids are transgender and/or non-binary as well.

We should be standing together against the regressive ideology that threatens us both, not divided against each other based on our differences. That’s exactly what fascists are hoping for, but we don’t need to give them what they want – we can do better, and build a future that’s truly for everyone. By recognizing the underlying principles we all share and acting according to those principles, not based on knee-jerk reactions or social conditioning, we can bring these double standards to an end, together.