u/NiConcussions

>At 12 years old, upon returning home from school, I saw my dad sitting in the living room. I immediately knew something was wrong.

>“Come here,” he said, with my computer in his lap. He proceeded to show me the pictures of men kissing that he had found in my search history.

>“If you live this way, either you’re gonna kill yourself or someone’s going to go out and kill you for it,” he told me. “And neither of those things matter because God will never love you again.”

>I couldn’t say anything. In our world, my dad was the one with the answers. He was an elder in our church, the second-highest rung in authority and the highest form of control. If he said it, it had to be true.

>For the next two years, I pretended like my feelings weren’t there. I felt like I was just waiting for the rest of my life to collapse. I knew being gay wasn’t an option.

>So when I found conversion therapy at 15, it felt like the answer. I didn’t know it would cause me to spend the next seven years of my life undoing myself.

>When I published an article in December about how trans women in state prisons have been affected by the Trump presidency, I got a lot of backlash for writing sympathetically about some of my sources. To be clear, some of these women did commit very serious and repugnant crimes, but I don’t regret sympathetically covering the terrible mistreatment they faced. Reduxx, an anti-trans publication, published a critique of my article which repeatedly misgenders my sources; far-right influencer Andy Ngo posted my name and face on X; and angry commenters called me an “evil freak,” “sick person” and—lest you assume these folks limit their bigotry just to trans people—a “Jewish ghoul” and a “literal goblin.”

>As unpleasant as this was, I try not to let it faze me. My main reaction to this whole debacle has been one of intrigue: Of all the controversial topics I’ve covered, this is the one that really struck a nerve with people.

>I think that’s partly because the discourse around trans rights often fixates on the moral quality of trans people. The far-right proclaims that we don’t deserve rights because we are groomers, violent, sexually deviant, mentally ill and/or delusional.

>In most cases, trans people and our allies respond by saying that we are not any of these things and therefore we do deserve rights.

>While it’s important to debunk these falsehoods, responding in kind to these arguments unfortunately plays into their game. When transphobic actors say “trans people don’t deserve rights because they’re bad people,” and LGBTQ advocates respond by saying that “trans people aren’t bad people,” they are accepting the premise that bad people don’t deserve rights.

>This is a problem for a few reasons.

>First, it’s a rhetorical weakness. Under this framework, every trans person who does something bad immediately becomes another piece of evidence against our rights. This is why the far-right have put out so much media focused on the very small number of trans shooters or sexual predators—the more examples they find, the more they can wildly overrepresent them in coverage, which leads to the erosion of public support for trans rights. For example, despite Charlie Kirk’s assassin being cis, Media Matters for America found that at least 18 right-wing publications and influencers used a misleading report to pin the attack on trans people.

>Second, it places an enormous amount of pressure on trans people to be perfect citizens: clean-cut examples that are digestible as average Americans who could be your neighbor, your doctor or your teacher. But trans people have a range of lived experiences that often don’t fit that stereotypical perfection: We’re about twice as likely to be impoverished as cis straight people, about six times as likely to be homeless and significantly more likely to suffer from depression or poor mental health. Despite this, we are still expected to be on our best behavior and play the part of perfect little angels so that we can represent the community in a “positive light.”

>On the one hand, the people who are excluded—sex workers, unhoused people, people struggling with addiction—are the very people who are the most affected by anti-trans attacks. And on the other hand, the few who are deemed presentable enough to have a platform are subjected to greater scrutiny than most people, and are often forced to flatten our complex human experiences into digestible, morally uncomplicated packages.

>The stakes are high: In many cases, our careers and safety are at risk if we, say, have the wrong reaction to a notorious bigot’s death or grade a Christian student’s paper in a way that doesn’t align with their religious beliefs.

>Third, as a small minority of the population, we don’t get to choose what the definition of a “bad person” is. The anti-trans movement is skilled at twisting the narrative to depict our existence as an immoral ideology devoted to committing harm: We’re “invading women’s spaces” or “mutilating” and “grooming” children. When a trans politician from Minnesota spoke against online age verification laws, right-wing media claimed she supported giving porn to kids, and that narrative spread like wildfire. Even if we play by the rules, they often change them to make us lose.

>Queer movements have a bad habit of ceding rhetorical ground by propping up the most “normal” and “respectable” people and leaving the rest out in the cold—often excluding trans people as a whole. Despite their now-legendary status, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were shunned and treated as pariahs by the gay rights movement only a few years after they helped start it at the Stonewall Riots in 1969.

>The idea was that trans people were simply too stigmatized and that they’d stall the progress of gay rights. That fell apart, though, when the AIDS crisis hit and the cultural backlash reversed years of progress and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

>In the late 2000s and early 2010s, it happened again. While gay rights made a splash on the national stage, so-called allies blasted trans people for daring to be upset when we were excluded from anti-discrimination bills or had our issues delayed on the House floor. While the strategy of sweeping the most stigmatized queer people under the rug got some huge wins in the short term, it gave the anti-LGBTQ movement an obvious line of attack by leaving trans people vulnerable.

>And here we are in 2026, where trans people are under greater attack than ever and cis gays are having the rights they fought for rolled back.

>I know I’m a few days late for Trans Day of Visibility. But if there’s one thing I’m reflecting on this week, it’s that real representation means visibility for everyone. Trans people deserve to be as complicated as any other group of people without our rights being threatened. Of course we should continue to celebrate the trans celebrities, lawyers and human rights advocates who currently stand in the spotlight. But we cannot neglect the trans people who do sex work, who’ve been incarcerated, who don’t look or act how people think they should. These are, after all, the very people who built our movement in the first place.

>We do not deserve to live because we are perfect, because we’re “just like everyone else”—we deserve to live because we’re human.

>We can’t fall into the trap of watering ourselves down to seem more palatable or “normal.” Because when any one of us is abandoned, we all lose.

On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order that banned all forms of gender-affirming care for trans people in federal prisons. Six months later, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) from enforcing the order. This block is still in effect today.

Despite the judge’s order, Uncloseted Media’s Hope Pisoni spoke with eight incarcerated trans people and reviewed legal statements by several more over the course of a monthslong investigation that found that the BOP is still denying access to gender-affirming accommodations at prisons across the country. Pisoni also found that the women who stood up for themselves reported being met with intense retaliation, from lengthened sentences to physical violence.