Is the Trans Backlash Really Inevitable?

I don't think so. And we can still fix it.

Recently, there has been a very vocal backlash to the LGBT community. I've been predicting that this could happen as far as five years ago, when LGBT activists chose to go for confrontation rather than consensus on almost every issue. I reasoned that an LGBT backlash at this time would be particularly bad for trans people, because there was still a lot of misunderstanding about trans issues in the mainstream. What I was mainly worried about was that, if a backlash happened, and attitudes on both sides became hardened, it would be much more difficult to get a healthy discussion going on trans issues.

Nowadays, many LGBT activists say that the backlash is an inevitable part of advancing LGBT rights. In particular, the trans visibility of the past ten years was bound to cause some backlash. Besides the fact that most trans people never asked for visibility, I think this is a lazy and unethical answer. It is lazy because there's always a better way to do things. You've just got to think harder. It is ethically unacceptable, because it affects real lives in the real world. In particular, we are talking about trans people already suffering from gender dysphoria. The current backlash is very bad for their mental health, and I think good people should at least be able to agree that it should have been avoided at all costs in hindsight.

Could the current backlash have been avoided? I think the honest answer is yes. The trans acceptance movement could have opted for a more consensus based approach. The activists could have been more willing to give people the chance to understand and be allies. They could have dealt with controversies in a more mature way. It would have required a lot of discipline, and refusal to give into emotional frustration, but it could have been done. There would still have been people who are inherently vehemently anti-trans who are not changeable, but we would only have to win over people in the middle anyway, so we could safely ignore the vehemently anti-trans crowd. Trans acceptance would have been advanced a lot quicker that way.

Rather than arguing about the past, I think the most important thing to do now is to get things back on track. It is not too late to aim for the future that we might have had. Public attitudes towards trans people are still fluid, and we can still fix things. It is therefore not too late to adopt the aforementioned more mature approach. Let's start doing it today.