The Problem with Trans

Kathleen Truelove had everything. She was the most beloved children’s author in the world. Her books had been turned into films, a Broadway musical, and a theme park—the sort she had always dreamed of getting lost in as a child. She lived in an actual castle now with a drawbridge and a moat and a turret. She had an entire wing filled floor to ceiling with books, and an indoor swimming pool. A far cry from her humble beginnings when she’d scribbled her stories on napkins in between shifts at her local caff. She had more money now than she’d ever dreamed possible. And yet there was still something that unsettled her, a growing unease that kept plucking away at her happiness like a loose thread.

Every day, as she went about her usual routine, a report would come on the news or she would see an article in the paper or a friend would mutter something under her breath: the transgenders. And a chill would prick its way down her spine.

Not that long ago, no one had been talking about them at all. They were like unicorns. She might have seen one on the tube, out of the corner of her eye. Or on a late-night talk show. But now they were everywhere—trying to use the toilets or join the sports teams—like a growing tidal wave that threatened to drown the entire world.

She had lesbian friends. She went vegan with them sometimes and talked about feminism. She had gay friends, too. They did her hair and bought her expensive wines she had never heard of. She loved the gays and she was proud of loving them. But they were easy. They didn’t demand anything from her, didn’t insist the world rebuild itself in their image. Unlike the transgenders who suddenly had everyone wrapped around their cloying fingers.

It was ridiculous! Everyone knew there were only men and women, penises and vaginas, immutable and inviolate. The transgenders couldn’t change biology. But no one wanted to admit this. Everywhere she looked, people, ordinary people like her, were tying themselves in knots to cater to this mad fantasy that you could be whatever you wanted to be.

So she turned to the only thing that had never failed her: the internet. She read articles and studies, watched YouTube videos, and lurked on forums until her eyes burned and her shoulders ached. Then she found the blog.

The Problem with Trans. 

Something unfurled inside her, warm and thrumming, because that was it, wasn’t it? There was a problem with all of this, only the others couldn’t see it. She clicked on the link to the latest post.

The problem with trans is they’re stealing women’s spaces.

The problem with trans is they’re erasing the gays.

The problem with trans is they’re brainwashing our children.

She found herself nodding as she read along. Yes, yes! The blogger called herself MUD, a pseudonym because of the death threats. And there were hundreds of comments below clamoring to proclaim their agreement, hundreds who had sensed this growing threat as she had and were not afraid to speak out. It was a bloody relief!

She phoned her publicist. “I need to make a statement.” 

She needed to take a stand. So she logged onto Twitter and dipped her toes into the debate.

The transgenders are not who they say they are. I will not be silenced. #truth

She fully expected a backlash and there was one. Several of her movie leads went against her. The studio issued a lukewarm statement of dismay. But there were other voices, too, natal women like her, biological women, lesbians, a surprising number of men. They had all experienced something like her own panic at the thought of this rising tide, a shudder in the dark, a sense that the world was unraveling around them.

Her daughter, Izzie, was confused. “Mum, why did you say those things? You know my friend Connor is trans.”

Izzie had brought Connor home a few times, a girl, Kathleen had thought, with short hair and boyish clothes.

“You really hurt him.” Izzie was nearly in tears now and Kathleen’s fear sharpened. It was contagious, some people thought, a disease of the mind. Put one transgender in a school and dozens would spring out of the floorboards like mushrooms. If Connor had it, would her daughter also succumb? Izzie had liked playing with trucks as a young girl, she had avoided skirts for years. Maybe even now the contagion was working on her, making her hate her female body.

“I don’t think you should see Connor right now. She’s a little confused, but if you–”

“He, Mum, he. God!” Izzie stomped off to her room but that was all right. Kathleen was protecting her just like she would from drugs or STIs or a tattoo she would always regret. That was what mothers did.

There was a new post from MUD.

The problem with trans is they’re destroying science.

The problem with trans is they’re putting rapists in the locker rooms.

The problem with trans is they’re stealing our children’s skins.

Kathleen shivered. Bile rose in her throat. She had been right, then, to keep Connor away.

As she drifted off to sleep that night, she dreamed of some other child holding up her daughter’s skin, wrapping it around itself, distorting the shape, dancing wildly.

She woke with her heart beating out of rhythm, drenched in sweat, unable to erase that horrible image from her mind. The transgenders, mutilating children. Kathleen had been something of a tomboy herself growing up. How close had she come to losing her own skin, only thirty years earlier?

She logged on to her website this time, determined to be heard. The words poured out of her in a rush, every fear, every resentment, and all her glorious facts, the fruit of her harried research. She pressed Post with a feeling of triumph.

In Defense of Natal Women: A New Manifesto.

“Don’t you think,” said her husband, David, “you’re taking this a little too far? Can’t you just let people be themselves?”

She startled away from him as if he had slapped her.

“I’m standing up for women,” she said. “For women who bleed, for moon women. I’m standing up for children.”

“Yes, but Connor,” said David. “He’s a sweet kid.”

“She’s a thirteen-year-old girl. She probably doesn’t even know what she wants to be when she grows up!”

The international backlash to her manifesto was immense, but the support of her fellow natal women buoyed her spirits. She was speaking out for the voiceless, standing up for the powerless. She was a modern-day Joan of Arc.

She checked back in with MUD. 

The problem with trans is they have nictitating eyelids.

The problem with trans is they have tentacles under their clothes.

The problem with trans is their blood burns like acid.

She struggled to catch her breath. She had never noticed the nictitating eyelids but then she had never looked closely at Connor’s eyes.

Now when she left her castle and went into town, she wore a hoodie and studied everyone very carefully. MUD had said you couldn’t always tell who was a transgender and who was not, but it was obvious to anyone who knew the signs.

A young woman walked towards her in a billowing sea green skirt. Kathleen couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark sunglasses but there was just a hint of stubble on her jaw and, there, where her skirt had swirled against her legs, was that a tentacle?

Kathleen muffled a scream against the back of her hand and stumbled across the busy street, a lorry swerving out of its way to avoid her.

“I’m taking you out of school,” she said to her daughter.

“What? No!” Izzie backed away from her.

“I have to keep you safe.”

“Come on,” said David. “You know she loves school.”

Kathleen squeezed the stem of her wineglass until it snapped. “You don’t understand. This is a war. And I’m on the right side, okay, the right side.”

David’s face flushed and he turned away from her. They slept in separate rooms after that. She was starting to lose friends, too, but that was all right because her publisher hadn’t dropped her. They were never going to drop her. She made them too much money. And it was all coming clear now. What she really needed to do was write a book, not a blog post, or a series of contentious tweets. She would lay out the whole truth before it was too late.

She locked herself in her turret office and opened her computer.

The problem with trans is they devour souls.

The problem with trans is they can make you one of them with a glance.

The problem with trans is they have four rows of razor-sharp teeth.

She stopped leaving the castle altogether. She couldn’t bear the thought of stepping into a bathroom and not knowing, were those smiling women who nodded at her over the sink really men? Were they watching her with that strange white film over their eyes, waiting for her to drop her guard?

“I’m leaving you,” David called through the keyhole of her locked office door. “This is too much for me.”

But she didn’t answer. A new fear had started to bloom and writhe inside her. How did she know he wasn’t already one of them? They could have surgeries, after all. He had never had his chromosomes tested.

“Mum?” Her daughter’s voice echoed from the other side of the door. “Mum, we’re worried about you.”

Kathleen cringed away from the sound. Was that really her daughter calling her? Or was one of them trying to lure her out, already wearing her daughter’s skin?

Kathleen wrote on, losing track of the days, only leaving her office to eat the dwindling supply of food her husband had left her. The castle was empty, the kitchen piled with dirty plates and trash. She didn’t dare let in any of the cleaners. Her publisher called and left messages that went unanswered. She had to finish the book. Then she would tell the whole world the truth. Then she would be safe.

Because now, every time she dared to look out the turret window, she saw the transgenders gathered in the gardens below, staring up at her. Their skin glowed faintly phosphorescent. Sometimes their tongues would flick free of their mouths as if tasting the air. And she knew she was running out of time.

She would rush back to her desk, then, to write even more furiously.

Sometimes someone would cross the drawbridge and pound on the door or lean against the doorbell and her heart would spasm in her chest until they went away again.

She stopped sleeping and lay awake all night thinking of her childhood, of how divorced she had felt from being a woman, sexless almost, and ashamed. It terrified her to think that any part of her could have once been like the transgenders and that all those girls, girls like Connor, were now rushing to them for escape.

“It isn’t worth it,” she whispered to herself. “If they only waited a little longer, they would be fine like me. I am perfectly fine.” She stared up at the cracks in the ceiling.

By now she was almost at the end of the book and when she finished, she could make all of this stop. The world would rally to her cause, see reason. They had to because there were more and more of them out there now, the transgenders, and even MUD, poor beautiful MUD had gone silent.

The turret roof had started to leak. The ceiling bulged in one corner of the room. The garden grew more and more unkempt and a tree toppled across the moat in an especially violent storm. Kathleen ignored it all.

She was just finishing the last chapter when they came. She could hear them climbing up the stairs, tentacles sucking at the stone floors. She barricaded the door and sat crouched in the corner, laptop before her like a shield. She was so close. But they could walk through walls now, how had she not known that? They melted through the wallpaper, fingers grown sharp like talons.

“No,” she said. “I won’t let you take this from me.”

“You can’t stop us,” they hissed with one sibilant voice. “We’re the future.”

“But you aren’t even real!” she shouted. “You’ve never been real!”

They glided towards her. “We’ve always been here. We will always be here.”

She screamed once, shrill like a rabbit caught in the jaws of a fox, and the computer fell from her hands.

When the authorities finally broke down the door, there was nothing left of her. Only the laptop and an open document: The Problem with Trans by Kathleen Truelove. The pages were all blank.

END