Back in April of last year, Delaware County was finally brought into national spotlight for something other than meth or corruption. Well, international spotlight as a matter of fact. In a nutshell, County Council member Ryan Webb made a joke about gender pronouns, and as a result got his 9 ½ seconds of fame on Fox News, Piers Morgan, Sky News, and at-least a couple of Daily Wire segments. A couple months ago I wanted to have my own interview with Webb, and he was happy to do it. He wore his campaign hat (literally) and sat down for an interview which he knew was for a left leaning paper, but had zero clue that he’d be talking to Muncie’s own Transexual Menace.TM
Between his rendezvous with Matt Walsh last year and his campaign for County Council now, it’s been obvious to us in the local trans community that beyond the 10,000th joke about sexually identifying as a battleship, he has zero to say against trans people otherwise. He had his own fun making the rounds in conservative media, while his wife lost her bid for City Council because of the social media stunt he pulled. The local GOP doesn’t want to call him out directly out of cowardice, yet they also hate the public embarrassment. Let’s also not forget the hypocrisy coming from the local business stooges, because they say they worry about public embarrassment being brought to Muncie yet are largely silent when we’re faced with one like this.
Anyhow, when I approached meeting him I was set on confronting his actual views. If he was set to drive across the country for his fame as America’s Transphobic Councilman, what would his answers be about healthcare, food insecurity, or housing as they affect trans individuals? What would his reaction be to the Trans Panic Defense? If he truly believes there isn’t discrimination or hate happening towards the LGBTQ+ community, how would he react to my own experiences?
Now, I don’t think we’re all obligated to tell our horror stories just to protect our rights. What I do want to emphasize is what keeps being forgotten, the idea that there are pockets of communities. Between now and when I came out as trans at the start of 2023, I’ve lived both in Bloomington and Muncie. I was an IU student studying film, and it really wasn’t a surprise that I ran into almost zero issues in my department. Between that and where I am now, holding a new job at another university, I worked at a liquor store immediately after moving back to Muncie. The college town dynamic creates an environment where one side, the university, is perceived as that progressive/liberal haven, and yet not far from it at my work the vast majority of people I served were flag wavers, hard hats, and fiery jacks. There were prone to be bad moments, though in their defense the vast majority of South Siders could tolerate me better than those pretentious Patagonia vests in the North.
All in all, I don’t fully know the background of the people who threatened me and called me faggot while I worked there, but those moments still stuck with me all the same. And with a job like that sucking out all my energy, who could blame me for acting like a rough and tumble killjoy most of the time? I’m bringing up this experience because people like Webb have to pretend that these incidents of hate crimes are made up and don’t happen. I brought up to him how I’ve been called “faggot” and “dude” when I worked there, and somehow this was a surprise to him. In fairness, he did livestream that night and tell his followers not to be dicks and call trans people faggot (which still didn’t stop him in the livestream from calling me a man intentionally).
I explained to him the Trans Panic Defense, he denied it was real. I asked him to explain how Autogynephilia isn’t outdated science, he eventually gave up and said it’s just an opinion. I was curious how he’d respond if I asked what he thought about the government providing free gender-affirming care to veterans, and in that moment, he clearly had to battle between pissing off veterans, by denying their access to the healthcare they were promised going into combat, and proving to his base how much he hates trans people. After a big pause, he finally let out a yes. It just proved to me that for Webb, regurgitating his talking points only works when you reduce trans activism down to respecting pronouns, and creating a strawman where we want people fired from their jobs for making such a wretched mistake of misgendering someone. For the worldview of people like him to appeal to anyone, you have to erase our material demands or avoid thinking about what those demands are to begin with.
In the process of deciding what to do with the interview or what this piece would become, I turned to Shon Faye’s book “The Transgender Issue.” There were two things she tried accomplishing in it, the first being (with regards to discourse in the U.K.) trying to reframe the “transgender question” or “transgender issue” into one for our rights instead of an inherently dismissive conversation. And two, it was about making our demands seen as universal and not constantly framed as miniscule. In fact, she stated wonderfully that the
“overlap between the needs of different marginalized people must be stressed because the illusion that trans people’s concerns are niche and highly complex is often a way to disempower them. The emphasis on the ‘minority’ status of minorities keeps them focused on explaining their difference in public discourse, so that they can be continuously batted away as an aberration or minor concern.”1
Changing the Right’s narrative, whether it be through connecting our needs with other marginalized groups or the needs of a broader working class, is vital for us to gain solidarity with our cis counterparts. The variety of experiences documented in her book paint a vastly different picture than most conservative rhetoric we have to sit through, and I was able to connect the experience of myself and other friends in the trans community with what she described.
Around the time I worked at the liquor store, I would definitely describe everything for me as volatile. Beyond just the job I had to manage moving, school, finding a new job, and my gender transition I was less than a year into. But between my coworkers and I it was volatile for all of us. Our hours got cut at the same time, and keeping full-time pay was no longer guaranteed by the company but we had to jump between different stores like they were short-term gigs. How does Faye characterize transition and work? She writes:
“A trans person’s ability to rely on their legal protections is dependent on the broader landscape of worker’s rights. The employers most at liberty to discriminate against trans people will be those offering low-paid jobs with precarious conditioners.”2
Even the issues I run into that are unique to my experience can only be understood fully if you relate said social issues with universal economic ones. I came to that realization especially from the Ruth Wilson Gilmore quote going around in my social circles a few years ago: “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.” I have to believe that it works in a somewhat similar way in my circumstance. Faye continues:
“The experience of being trans is shaped by social class. While there are middle-class trans people, the vast majority are working class – just as the vast majority of the total population is working class. Trans workers are often employed in lower paid and more precarious jobs, with a high risk of discrimination and bullying in the workplace. As a result, trans political struggle is part of a wider class struggle. Despite this, trans politics is commonly misrepresented as coddled, bourgeois and anti-working class.”3
As for why our demands aren’t being stated firmly by the opponents of right-wing politicians is the same reason as to why politicians aren’t pushing harder for the minimum wage, debt forgiveness, or free healthcare. Corporate Democrats, in their infinite wisdom, moan constantly about how they’re losing voters thanks to those pesky radical demands, slogans like “defund the police” or terms like “birthing person,” yet will decidedly never look in the mirror at the fact that they are alienating the material interests of voters. Those voters would be enthusiastic to back a candidate helping their class interests, and yet the blame gets directed to our supposed “embarrassing optics.”
For that matter, they will only meet the quota on trans rights if it maintains their relevancy, but for them to paint that picture of the party being pure advocates of our cause is nothing more than historical revisionism. I for one still haven’t recovered from how media outlets fawned over Dianne Feinstein the day she died. In late ‘70s San Francisco, Harvey Milk himself considered her to be “The Wicked Witch of the West” as she proclaimed that landlords would be forced into having their properties turned into S&M clubs by gay tenants, and continued to insist that the gay community was “imposing” their sexuality onto straight people.4
It falls onto us to create such a coalition, an idea that politicians supposedly on our side have largely ignored. I would also add here that considering most of our needs fall under healthcare, this should be our focal point. We are all impacted by an overwhelmed system with long waiting lists, insurance companies that are impossible to navigate, and the all too common severe medical debt. Let alone life threatening, this makes any kind of treatment discouraging.
What personally drew me away from transitioning earlier on (other than this propagated idea that I would be “damaging” my body by switching hormones) was a general fear over seeking medical attention to begin with. I always internalized this notion that seeking help was only for the most urgent problems, and that only limited what I considered to be urgent. I didn’t do regular check ups, it took years for me to finally cave to any psych meds, most physical pain I was feeling wasn’t addressed, and I hardly even tried to speak on my own behalf when I talked to doctors. And come to think of it, many of us push ourselves away from seeking medical help one way or another. Whether it be shame over our conditions or fear of learning what we don’t already know, and god forbid how to even handle the financial burden. Could that fear even be one factor of why in the U.S. we haven’t been able to make healthcare demands in the past few decades?5
The way I feel about receiving gender affirming care is all the same in how I believe no one should have to deal with chronic pain. When any one of us has to deal with any serious health scare, we don’t get to ask our providers how we can feel great or better than before, but instead we’re only compelled to ask for the bare minimum to survive. And so what many of us in the trans community are calling for isn’t only for power over our own autonomy, but to rethink how healthcare in general is thought of.
Advocating for our rights can only work through this, and refusing to see how these issues connect will never fix the core problems. And not only to oppose anti-trans legislation as it comes, but to focus generally on opening people to a new way of understanding trans politics. As for how to communicate this and persuade, I may not be giving a definitive answer here, but I certainly don’t want the rhetoric of hardline conservatives going unchallenged in this regard.
Notes
1. Faye, Shon. The Transgender Issue. (Penguin Books. 2021) pg. 62
2. Faye, pg. 118.
3. Faye, pg 119.
4. Based on memory, the article linked in this sentence was changed by Politico to reflect more positively on Feinstein.
5. Lily Alexadre. “Trans Youth: When Our Doctors Hurt Us,” YouTube Video, 18:05, August 2nd, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZILGGTzJRWE. Around the 14:00 mark Lily Alexandre also mentions “The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory & Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health” in the video. The conversation here is important to what I’ve expressed in this piece.
I have forwarded this to everyone I know. A really informative read
This is a really well done piece. You’ve boiled the issue down to its heart so clearly!