Transgender Women Are Women: It Doesn't Cost Cisgendered People Anything to Acknowledge Gender Identity

It costs cisgendered people nothing to acknowledge another person's gender identity. Literally nothing. It doesn’t lessen your rights in any way. It doesn’t hurt you. It doesn’t even lessen your own identity as male or female. It costs you zero dollars to be nice.

According to a memo obtained by The New York Times, The Department of Health and Human services argued that, “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

There are 1.4 million transgender Americans who will be negatively affected if that narrow conception becomes public policy. For anyone who wants to state that sex, as determined by biological organs, isn’t quite the same as gender, which is defined by societal roles, yes, that’s true, but passports don’t make that distinction. They just ask what your sex is. Parker Molloy has a good thread on this if you want to get more perspective on this issue.


I am somewhat familiar with most of the reasons people claim transgender people should be “othered” in society—whether it’s that they’re mentally ill, or dangerous, or somehow the real misogynists. I can assure you that all of those reasons are really wrong.

First of all, there’s no way transgenderism can be “defined out of existence,” as The New York Times wrote. Transgender people exist. 

They’ve existed since the beginning of time. In ancient Greece, the intersex goddess Cybele was worshipped by trans priests. Christina, the 17th Century Queen/King of Sweden presented as a man, and likely would identify as trans today. A personal heroine of mine is Lucy Hicks Anderson. 

She was born in 1886, and began presenting as a girl at a young age, choosing to wear dresses to school. She—and this is surprising—had a family doctor who said that was fine, and her mother should raise her as a girl. And it was! For a while, at least. She was beloved in society and married twice. However, when it was found that she had been born with male sex organs in 1944, she was accused of perjuring herself (by stating that there would be no legal objections to her marriage). She told reporters at her trial, "I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman. I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.”

If I kept referencing notable transgender people in history, there would be enough to fill a book. These stories aren’t hard to find. The fact that they don’t make it into schoolbooks doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means that schoolbooks leave an awful lot out.

So anyone who thinks that people are choosing to present as a gender not assigned to them at birth because it’s “fashionable” in the 21st century is going to have to take it up with the priests of Cybele.

The very notion that being transgender is a casual choice or a feeling that you might regret later is somewhat hilarious to me in 2018. As a trans woman, I can honestly say that I have been this way all my life. I used to wear dresses and high heels. I even had a boyfriend when I was 6. It doesn't cost anyone anything to acknowledge that I know who I am and how I feel..