Peter Coates
2 min readApr 30, 2023

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I think you miss a key point when you divide the issue into pro-trans and anti-trans. To be sure, there are a few Neanderthals whom it is fair to call anti-trans, but the majority of those you unite under that label are not against trans people at all. Mainstream culture has welcomed and absorbed many liberation movements already but there's a fundamental difference that sets the trans movement apart. For many decades, non-white peoples, Jews, Catholics, women, gay, lesbians, the disabled, etc. saw that there was a club of insiders with special privileges, but the corresponding liberation movements were fundamentally conservative movements in the sense that their goal wasn't to destroy the club, but to be let in as equals. That goal is actually the opposite of revolution; far from wanting the club abolished, all of the great liberation movements wanted it enlarged. The only thing approaching radical in this program is that in the limit, a club that is all inclusive ceases to be a club at all. Even the earliest of the liberation movements, e.g., abolition, was in that sense deeply conservative. The trans movement (as opposed to trans individuals) is profoundly different in that it doesn't seek admission to the club, but instead demands that the club be remade completely. It's one thing to be ask the non-trans majority to accept trans people in the same way that the non-gay majority was asked to accept gay people. It's another thing entirely to ask that the 99% of non trans people completely change the way they perceive gender itself. That's a political program of an entirely different order, and one that even the most inclusive and egalitarian person can be against.

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Peter Coates
Peter Coates

Written by Peter Coates

I was an artist until my thirties when I discovered computers and jumped ship for a few decades. Now I'm back to it. You can probably find some on instagram.

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