It's been a year to date since I stopped trying to apply for regular work on the grounds that it wasn't worth the effort and started building this little consultancy of mine, and an awful lot has changed since I first made that choice. On the whole, the experience has been good and validating, if exhausting, but there have been a few things that I've found striking, particularly when interacting with the business community. Namely, a lot of people in the community seem to enjoy having me around and want me to keep trying, but also seem to be invested in me not actually succeeding. In hindsight, this also reflects an awful lot of the interview experiences I had in the tech space before I gave all of that up: people who seem really keen on me existing and being in the process and doing well in it, but who were also invested in me not getting the role. The weird thing is that often enough, it's not explicit bigots doing this: it's people who think of themselves as broadly liberal, open-minded and kind people. So this raises the question: why is this happening? It sucks to deal with, I would prefer not to have to deal with it, and to do that, I have to understand it. And I have a decent hypothesis for why this keeps happening.
Ursula LeGuin once wrote a fairly well-known short story called The ones who walk away from Omelas. I'll not bore you all with the full details, but the basic idea is that LeGuin writes a utopian city into being, just generally full of good things and the full value of life. She then calls the reader out for being unwilling to believe in the possibility of a utopia without darkness, and posits a small cellar in the city where a child lives alone, in squalor and darkness, forbidden from being given any aid or comfort. LeGuin's point, more than anything, was to point out that there's no particular reason why anyone needs to suffer to have a good society: there's no mechanism for how the child is linked to the city, and I believe that's a deliberate choice on LeGuin's part, in a similar way in which the central technology of Snowpiercer not fucking working is a commentary on modern capitalism. Regrettably, the idea that good things need to be paid for with the suffering of an underclass seems to be weirdly baked into the subconscious of a lot of people, to the point where, if nobody is suffering, they will covertly and overtly act to make sure that someone is, in order to preserve their understanding of the world.
This, in a word, is why I believe that the resurgence of transphobia has taken on the aspect that it has in the last few years. We've made significant social progress over the last fifty years, and while there's still a lot of work to do, people of colour, women and first nations groups have had their lot significantly improved over this time, to the extent that they can't reasonably be seen as providing expiatory suffering any more. It's important to note that it doesn't actually take that much improvement to get to this point: these groups don't need to be all that well-off or safe, just well-positioned enough that most of society thinks they have agency and can throw a punch. Of course, the more bigoted parts of society will then label them as dangerous, crazy or predatory, but the less bigoted parts of society will, to an extent, genuinely grasp that enjoying the suffering of these groups is wrong. The response from many more liberal people to Trump's DEI purges is illustrative: there has been an actual state change in how a lot of Americans think about black people and women, and it's no longer considered appropriate, however racist you are, to do the To Kill a Mockingbird Miss Merriweather spiel.
“Oh child, those poor Mrunas,” she said, and was off. Few other questions would be necessary.
Mrs. Merriweather’s large brown eyes always filled with tears when she considered the oppressed. “Living in that jungle with nobody but J. Grimes Everett,” she said. “Not a white person’ll go near ’em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.”
Trans people, however, are a comparatively new phenomenon, at least in the way we express in the modern world (this is to say that while we've always existed, the modern conception of us is genuinely a new thing). We're also fairly isolated, largely due to the nature of transness as something that isn't really passed down from parent to child in the way a lot of identities are, and we, at present, have a very limited sense of history. It's easy, therefore, for people to make us into what they want us to be, at least in their own minds. It's easy, in a word, to shove us into the Omelas hole without having to worry too much about what we think, what we might do or whether we might fight back. This is something that it's hard to say about any other group at present: there's too much unity, too much history, too much of a sense that these are people that can do their own shit. And this means that it's easy to maintain soft bigotry about us without necessarily being challenged on it socially in the way that other forms of soft bigotry are: in most other cases, the bigotry has since either dissipated or hardened (these days, alas, a lot of hardening seems to be going on).
It seems, therefore, that a lot of broadly socially liberal centrist people believe that having a bunch of trans people in the Omelas hole is necessary for society to work. They'd never direct explicit hostility at trans people or even believe that they're hateful, and yet, they believe, unconsciously and on some tacit level, that trans people have to suffer. They'll let that belief subconsciously control a large part of their behaviour, whether that's tacitly supporting transphobic legislation, employment discrimination or even just being quietly but consistently weird about interacting with trans people. And what this means for us is that, while we're facing down massive amounts of hostility from people who want us simply dead, we're also dealing with a whole bunch of soft, obstructive bigotry from people who don't outwardly hate us, but who think we have to suffer to make the world work. The general Omelas-attitude expresses more concretely in two forms: infantilisation and sadism.
The first issue is the consistent infantilisation of trans people. It's important that the person in the hole in Omelas is a child, both for the story to work and in the internal logic of the story. The reason is that children have limited agency: an adult in the hole can fight, they can try and rally others to their cause... in an extremity, they at least have the ability to interpret their situation. A child can't do any of this, so their suffering is, in the eyes of the people who hold this view, that much more valid and authentic. It's important that the victim be powerless and unable to change their state. It's no surprise, therefore, that much soft bigotry directed at targets that aren't children aims to infantilise: black people in the American South antebellum were often made out to be like children, incapable of higher understanding and fit only for slavery, and women have always been seen as more childish than men in patriarchal spaces, even when it requires the model of adulthood being used to be completely incoherent. With trans people, the pattern has been more subtle, but it's very much happening. The constant fixation on trans youth and healthcare for them is a big part of it: a large part of this is, of course, creating a sense that we're a threat to children or a corrupting influence, which is a different dynamic. That said, the fact that we constantly talk about trans people in the context of youth or children does form a very strong association: the end situation for our soft bigots is that trans adults simply aren't prototypical trans people any more, and the very idea of transness becomes associated with childishness and immaturity.
It's thus no surprise that it's been a striking part of my experience ever since I learned enough to reasonably call myself a senior engineer that people, on the whole, simply refuse to perceive trans people as being fully adult. At best, we might be treated as older teenagers, worth basic politeness but certainly not worthy of being treated as equals or having our ideas treated with respect. At worst, we're delusional toddlers that need to be disciplined into conforming with our birth gender. At no point is full adult dignity on the table. And of course, this is self-reinforcing: we are denied senior roles or proper work, which means that the only trans people that people tend to meet are underemployed. We're consistently ignored and treated with indignity, leading to anger, which then becomes reinterpreted as immaturity on our part. And thanks to this, we consistently have trouble hitting normal life milestones like a house and a family (this is, admittedly, a much more far-reaching problem), which only reinforces the idea that there's something fundamentally immature about us.
We can, for the moment, set aside the bigots: they're bad, but we understand them well enough. Infantilisation coming from people nominally on our side, however, is much more of a problem. If we aren't full adults, than we certainly can't be assigned to leadership roles or even senior positions. At best, we might end up in a permanent loop of junior roles, forever being stopped just before we're allowed to advance further. At worst, we'll slowly but surely be pushed out of the fields we work in and into whatever work society is willing to let us have, which usually isn't good. And of course, nobody's going to actually reflect about this: there's nothing they could possibly have done wrong, and because nobody's feeling actual hatred or distaste, just pity, it doesn't even flag as being possibly bigoted.
Even when we are allowed work at the level of our skills and experience, we're almost never listened to in a meaningful way. Our input is treated as fundamentally unserious, and oftentimes simply disappears into the void somewhere. We're frequently blamed for failures that we explicitly warned people about, and more often than not, credit is quite shamelessly taken for work that we've done (I'll never forget the time that my boss put his name on a media article that I did the vast bulk of the work for). People will go to any effort to avoid taking us seriously as equals to them.
The obsession with our pain is another, somewhat related issue. The fact of the matter, unfortunately, is that sadistic traits are remarkably common in the population: as much as 10% of the population flags for clinically noticeable sadistic traits, and this is almost certainly an underreporting: sadistic tendencies that don't line up with the diagnostic traits for the personality disorder won't flag. A disturbingly high number of people, in short, enjoy watching others suffer. Now, obviously your MAGA types and the equivalents in other countries can just hurt people. But what if you're burdened with the self-image of wanting to think of yourself as a good, kind person? In that case, you might latch on to a marginalised group and outwardly support them, even "care so much about their suffering", while making sure to attempt to foil any efforts they might make to actually change things. That way, you have a convenient, ready supply of suffering on tap that you can enjoy voyeuristically, all while appearing to the outside world to be supportive of the cause.
The issue, of course, is that if you're doing that you have every incentive to keep us suffering so that you can keep getting off on our pain. This means that one might be very supportive of trans applicants in the interview process, and very enthusiastic all the way through, but never to the point of actually hiring them. You might try and speak politely and in favour of trans people in business situations, but you'd never actually work with a trans-owned business. Existing as a trans person in this environment is way worse than just having constant hostility directed at you: with regular bigots, you at least know that you just have to give up and look after yourself as best as you can. This shit, by contrast, creates a cruel kind of optimism: you know that you could succeed, and that there's a chance, but you just can't get there, and you're consistently being gaslit into thinking that more effort might fix the problem. In this situation, not only are we being fucked over, but we're being actively prevented from taking steps that might fix the problem, or even being allowed to make a decision to either disengage or keep fighting with full knowledge of the situation.
When you add the sadism to the infantilisation dynamic, you wind up with a deeply toxic environment for trans people: one in which we're treated in a similar way to the way aid agencies treat refugees from insufficiently western countries. In short, we exist to be helped or victimised: we're stripped of agency or the ability to control our own fate. When we're given work or a platform or whatever, it's always a favour granted to us by the benevolent leaders, and never, ever something that's deserved. We are, at all times and in all places, the undeserving sufferers who might get some kindness occasionally, but who never deserve the dignity and opportunities that our supposed "betters" do.
This environment is basically impossible for us to function in. For a start, it basically excludes any possibility that we might win out in an interview process on basis of merit: it's simply impossible for us to actually compute as meritorious in an interviewer's mind more often than not. In this situation, if we ever win out in an interview process, it's going to be out of pity and the role we're likely to get is going to be deeply unnecessary and pointless. The situation is similar in the business world: role fixation kicks in, and it becomes completely incomprehensible to one's potential clients that you even could be capable: after all, you're a poor, suffering trans child that doesn't know what they want or need, never mind how to write SQL. It's also the case that children, in the eyes of these people, don't need the truth and need to be sheltered from difficult realities (pay no mind to the fact that we deal with way worse shit than anything our interlocutors do on a regular basis). Thus, being trans in the modern economy is, at least in my experience, a matter of being repeatedly, blatantly and shamelessly lied to. We're lied to about why we don't get offered roles, even when there's something blatantly, obviously wrong with the whole process. We're lied to about why people don't want to work with us and wind up tearing ourselves to shreds trying to fix ourselves and our businesses to no avail. We're lied to when we need help from the state and are told that this is all our fault. In the eyes of these people, we don't deserve the basic courtesy of being told the truth.
And all this is nothing compared to the anger and dismissiveness that comes out when we challenge this perception of us. We almost always wind up labelled as being irrational, "woke" or downright crazy the moment we push back against this perception of us, and let people know that we both can and want to live valuable, worthwhile lives. In the extreme, these supposed "centrists" often wind up falling in with the outright fascists because we were mean to them or something. We aren't actually human to these people: we're a pretty image that they want to feel bad for while not interacting with them at all. And the moment we stop being what these people want us to be, we're condemned.
So, how do we go about changing this? If you're a sympathetic cis person, this is easy enough: I think it's mostly just a matter of understanding that pity or infantilisation are just as unhelpful emotions to have about us as actual hate or disgust is, and making the effort to see us as adults who are on a level playing field with you and deserve adult dignity. For people who don't actually dislike us, this is probably the single biggest way in which anti-trans bigotry expresses itself. For trans people, it's a little harder. After all, the majority of people who hold these attitudes are, by virtue of holding them, going to dismiss anything we have to say, and I genuinely don't think that putting effort into changing hearts and minds like this is going to work as a short-term workplace strategy (it's important long-term work, but it won't solve the "a lot of us are poor and unemployed despite being very skilled" problem). There is, however, one option that might actually work.
Neoconservatives on Bluesky have, since the Trump regime was installed, often been startlingly supportive of trans rights, and importantly, have done so in a way that actually signals respect for us as adults. Take, for example, this post by Bill Kristol:
These people are certainly not liberal or leftist in the way that I am: in fact, the last time I went onto the Bulwark in order to do some research for this piece, I immediately got rather annoyed by a lot of the content. However, they're still publishing cogent, sensible defenses of trans rights, like this one here, which I won't lie, still annoys me, but it's good that it is, on balance, being published. And well... to put it bluntly, this leaves me feeling a lot more respected as a human trying to make her way in the world than any amount of faintly supportive liberal shit. These people care about me not because they like me much or because they think there's something morally virtuous about my suffering, but because, whatever I do or whoever I am, they have core principles that they hold to and that they think should be applied universally. There is, therefore, clearly a body of people who are, for one reason or another, willing to defend us, and who (for reasons that I would probably have had apoplexy about a few years back, but never mind that) have considerable institutional power and resources. Finally, they tend to actually care about our skills and character significantly more than many of the vaguely liberal people in positions of power whom we might otherwise work with.
We should, therefore, be investing considerably in coalition-building with supportive neoconservatives. This is obviously a stretch for a lot of the more leftist members of our coalition, but for those of us who can, it's absolutely worth the effort. The support of the Bill Kristols of the world can let us survive long enough and with enough dignity to work out our differences later, and when fighting fascists, we need all the allies we can get. While I'm not entirely sure what co-operation might look like at the moment, here are a few of my initial thoughts:
- Messaging around employing trans people from neoconservative perspectives is likely to land better and be more effective than the same stuff from vaguely liberal sources. If we can encourage neoconservative outlets to talk about employing trans people in a way that will land in the business community, this could have a massive impact.
- Sharing platforms and networks with trans people is a massive thing that the neoconservative crowd could do. This doesn't necessarily have to involve being "woke" or anything: introductions can be on the basis that these people are genuinely skilled and good at what they do, regardless of identity or political position.
- Neoconservatives have access to funding that a lot of us on the left simply don't. While I don't think many trans people would be happy about funding think tanks and similar that would take an explicitly neoconservative slant, I believe that a non-partisan think-tank working towards the better integration of trans people into our societies could fly. After all, the more of us work in regular jobs, have regular lives and the more we're generally treated well, the more we tend to moderate our positions. A lot of the "wokeness" that neoconservatives dislike is a direct product of our situation being shit.
At this point, we don't have to agree on much for this to be worth doing: given how abysmal our unemployment rates are, we need to be able to get a fair hearing, and this could be an excellent way of making that happen. We're in a situation where a lot of progressive and neoconservative talking points align remarkably well, and that is something that we can make use of. Let's give it a go.
And Bill, if you're reading this: thank you for your support of us in a very trying time, and I hope you've picked up some more ideas about how you and people whom you know can continue to support us.