The Key to Winning Trans Rights | An Asian Trans View

Today, I want to talk about an ugly truth: there is a trans moral panic out there. People are scared that trans people and trans issues are going to upset the order of society. It's like how there was a major moral panic around gay marriage back when I was in college, which saw the majority of US states, as well as other Western countries like Australia, moving swiftly to ban gay marriage. Luckily, the gay marriage movement was able to overcome this moral panic relatively quickly, which ultimately led to the vast majority of Western countries legalizing gay marriage over the next 15 years.

So how do we deal with the trans moral panic? I think it's important to look at what causes moral panics. I believe that, at a basic level, all moral panics are caused by a fear about damage to social institutions, commonly held values, and ultimately what keeps the social consensus going. In sociology, the theories that examine social consensus are called 'consensus theory'. They used to be dominant, before the rise of conflict theory in the 1970s. I believe the neglect of consensus theory in Western sociology in recent decades has contributed to an inability to examine and overcome moral panics.

There are many forms of consensus theory, but the most famous and influential school of consensus theory has to be Talcott Parsons's functionalism. Indeed, back in the post-war era, sociology and Parsonian functionalism were almost synonymous. Parsonian functionalism examines society using a functional lens. It is based on the idea that society needs to fulfill certain functions, namely adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and pattern maintenance. Parsons showed how institutions and social norms allowed society to fulfill these functions. Although Parson's analyses were criticized for being too focused on the 1950s middle class, I think we can apply a similar analysis to today's problems and learn a lot from it. The thing I like most about functionalism is how it understands that every society needs to fulfill certain functions, how complex systems are required to make it all work, and how important it is to appreciate things when they work well.

I know it's unfair that we have to face this current moment of backlash, but if we want to advance trans acceptance and trans rights, it's up to us to find a way out. I think if we want to overcome the trans moral panic, we need to show that we are able to work with society, and the complex components that maintain it. We need to show that trans rights will not damage things people hold dear. And it's true: trans rights do not pose a threat at all to these things. Postmodern ideology might pose a threat to these things, but it's actually completely separate from trans issues, and we need to make that clear. At the end of the day, the marriage equality movement was able to convince the public that gay marriage wouldn't harm families and marriages. I guess, now, it's up to us to show that trans rights, similarly, wouldn't harm things people hold dear. And learning a bit of consensus theory could help us a lot in this regard.