Anti-trans paranoia is stranger than fiction

It's a horrifying time to be a trans person in America. People like me have come under increased attack in politics and the media of late. We're being portrayed as an existential danger to society in exactly the same way that gays and lesbians once were.

Even though it's happening to me, as a novelist, it's a scenario that I would struggle to make plausible in my work.

One reason I love writing science fiction and fantasy is because it lets me put people into extreme situations that reveal something about who we are. I pride myself on exploring a lot of aspects of human nature, including startling generosity and horrifying cruelty.

But there's one aspect of human nature that I've always found nearly impossible to capture on the page: our tendency toward collective paranoia and scapegoating.

Not that I haven't seen it happen many times over the years, with Muslims, immigrants, the homeless and Black people. But the moment you write an angry mob into a story, it tends to turn into something out of “The Simpsons.” There's something that feels unreal about stories of regular people getting swept up in paranoia, no matter how many times we witness it in real life.

Even though I'm now on the receiving end of one of these ginned-up moral panics, I still don't know how I would make this phenomenon believable in a story.

The problem is, in a work of fiction, people need to have believable motivations — which usually means they need to appear semi-rational. We don't want to confront the idea that people can so easily rationalize extreme irrationality, especially when it comes to respected journalists and political leaders.

When I see people in positions of power sharing their paranoid fantasies about trans people, I don't recognize the strong, self-aware trans teens and adults who I've been lucky enough to know.

To hear the paranoid tell it, trans people are delusional, seduced by social media and peer pressure — or else, we're predators who stalk public restrooms. Our very existence holds the power to sway young people and destabilize society, and we want to use this awesome power to keep anyone from using basic terms like “woman.”

None of these things even remotely resemble any trans person I've ever met, and I've met thousands. (For what it's worth, I've only ever known one person who regretted transitioning.)

In a story, people would come to their senses after being confronted with evidence that they were demonizing blameless people who just want to live their lives. But in real life, it seems like no matter how often or decisively anti-trans propaganda is refuted, it just keeps coming back.

I've faced anti-trans stigma for years. Back in 2007, I interviewed for two different jobs over the phone and Skype, and was told the job was mine — until I met the employers in person — and they suddenly needed to look elsewhere. I've also been harassed, stalked and threatened.

But the past few years have felt different.

The drumbeat of anti-trans articles and rhetoric seems organized, coordinated. And I've seen the effects in my own world. A couple of years ago, a liberal cis woman who used to go out for drinks every week with a group of trans women, including myself, suddenly “came out” as a transphobe and started spouting views that wouldn't have felt out of place in right-wing media. I couldn't recognize my friend anymore, and I still don't understand.

I'm less badly affected than most trans people — I'm white, I'm middle class, I'm an adult with a decent career and I live in San Francisco — but I still find the experience debilitating. It's weird to be on the receiving end of something so senseless, and the constant stigma is more exhausting than I had thought it would be. It's less jump scares and more a slow creeping dread whose endgame remains mysterious.

Ironically, the very peer pressure that the purveyors of this moral panic are warning against is the thing that they are weaponizing: If everybody else believes that trans people are dangerous, then you will start to feel unreasonable if you don't go along with your neighbors.

And maybe that's the crux of it: While I'm trying to imagine how I would portray the mindset of people caught up in an anti-trans panic, we're trapped in a story that we can't control. Every piece of fear-mongering is also an act of storytelling, in which trans people are depicted as somehow both pathetic and threatening. So I'm going to try to fight storytelling with storytelling, and tell my own stories about the beautiful, brilliant trans people I know.

Happiness is hard to come by in this awful world, but the vast majority of trans people I know would tell you that transitioning has made them happier and more whole, in spite of the horrific abuses they've faced. Friends I've known for years, who always seemed morose and quiet, suddenly blossomed after they finally told the world they were a different gender than the one assigned to them at birth, becoming vivacious and at ease in their own skin. And I've met so many wonderful trans kids who coped with massive obstacles in order to meet their own true selves.

I just hope that eventually we'll be able to see fiction about angry mobs as more plausible — and the scary stories puddled by real-life demagogues as less so.