Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

Chattel slavery and racial segregation have marked America in many more obvious ways, but for the purposes of this book, the most significant are that they have invited false analogies between race and sex, and poisoned words and phrases such as ‘exclusion’, ‘segregation’ and ‘separate but equal’. It has become close to impossible for left-leaning Americans to articulate arguments based on material differences between the sexes. For them, all ‘discrimination’ is patterned on white privilege and black oppression. The word’s original meaning of acknowledging difference is almost completely inaccessible. And so the bathroom wars were mentally slotted into a narrative in which bigots attempted to exclude a marginalised group and were beaten back. This is not me reaching for effect; analogies with the civil-rights era are routinely deployed in support of gender self-identification.