Every election cycle, in every democratic country whose politics I follow, there is a pattern that appears. It starts with conservative, religious, and authoritarian politicans and public figures demonising trans people. We are all told that if transgender rights are not immediately curtailed there will be dire consequences for society. Transgender people must be permitted to use only the bathrooms corresponding to our birth sex. Transgender health care must be strictly regulated or banned. Transgender people must not be allowed to move about in the world without being forcibly outed by our own state-issued documentation. Transgender participation in sport must be stopped. Our names, bodies, and movement must be controlled by the state, immediately, lest our entire civilization collapse. Laws are passed targeting us, media campaigns are mounted against us, and an endless procession of grifters join in the feeding frenzy to prevent any form of transgender participation in society from being allowed.
And when you are the target for a hate campaign of this scale, it is terrifying.
Naturally, there is a response to this organised hate campaign. Most obviously trans people raise our objections to all this, arguing that we actually should be allowed to have basic human rights. But of course this is largely ignored. The one group of people who are not permitted a voice in "the transgender debate" are trans people ourselves. Transgender people don't get to write opinion pieces in major newspapers, almost none of us are in a position to stand for public office, we are mostly very poor and cannot spend money to exert influence, and there are so few of us that our votes aren't worth politicians attention. We are not part of the conversation about our rights.
But there is pushback that comes from other people. Progressives, on the whole, tend not to think that stripping a tiny minority of our rights is a good idea. Some politicians on the left react to that by openly supporting transgender people. Others do not, deciding that it is in their electoral interests to join in the campaign against us. It is a constant, grinding effort to try to reward the former and not the latter.
In the middle of all this there is one argument that gets made by cisgender progressives that causes me quite a lot of frustration. When faced with evidence of a massive, organised hate campaign targeting trans people, the reaction of an astonishingly large number of progressives is this:
This is a distraction from the real issues! Don't fall for it!
Every time I see this my heart sinks, and I feel like the world is falling out from underneath me. Among people who claim to be on my side, it is apparently understood that my civil rights are a distraction from more important things like the price of petrol. What am I supposed to think when I hear you say this? Is that really how little my life is worth?
Whose distraction?
Every time that I see a cisgender progressive make the argument from distraction, I am reminded of the very famous quote about distraction by Toni Morrison:
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
She is of course correct. This is what racism does. It's also what transphobia does. Somebody says your identity is a sexual perversion and you spend twenty years proving that it is not. Somebody says you have an unfair advantage in sports and you have scientists working on that. They will say that your people didn't even exist before 1975 and you pull up the police records of us being arrested in the 19th century. And so on and so forth, forever and ever amen. Morrison is absolutely, completely correct about racism and her argument generalises cleanly to transphobia: none of this is necessary, and there will always be one more thing.
But notice what Toni Morrison is not saying. At no point has she argued that racism is a distraction for white people. She's saying specifically that racism creates a distraction for Black folks, because they are the ones being targeted and they are the people who get forced to defend themselves. She not giving white people social licence to ignore racism at all, she is arguing that Black folks deserve the right not to have to constantly defend themselves from racist nonsense.
And once again, I think her claim generalises to the transgender context. Transphobia is a distraction. It's a distraction for me, the transgender woman who has written half a dozen blog posts on this blog this month alone and neglected her main blog because of the unrelenting horror that has unfolded in her online life due to the fact that the US midterm elections are approaching and it's making cis people behave very poorly. I don't mind that I have this blog, and there are a lot of things I want to use it to speak about, but at the same time it is very clear that all of my energy is being pulled away from my art/code/statistics blog thanks to the unmitigated horror show surrounding transgender rights in 2026.
Transphobia in politics is a distraction. It is a distraction for us, the transgender people who it targets. I absolutely have better things to do with my time, and I'm being pulled away from that work because of the hate campaign against us. For you, however, the cisgender person who is supposedly on our side? No, I'm sorry, I am not willing to accept that as an excuse for your apathy.
You cannot defeat injustice by ignoring it
At its core, the "transgender rights are a distraction" argument is an open display of contempt. It is a statement that our rights are not worth your attention. That you personally are willing to allow a targeted hate campaign to go unopposed. You somehow believe that if you close your eyes and pretend that elections are all about the price of eggs, everything will be okay. The bad people will be defeated by sheer economic power of your kitchen-table politics and everyone will live happily ever after without you ever needing to take a stand on the principle that everyone deserves to have their civil rights respected.
And I have to ask you: when in history has this ever worked? Do you think that racism was happily defeated in 1962 by a mythical version of Martin Luther King giving a pretty speech about having a dream, and we all held hands and sang about our shared humanity? Or did he perhaps have something quite a bit more pointed to say about the necessity of taking direct action? Rather famously, per Letter from Birmingham Jail, his view was very much the latter:
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
The hatred and animus openly on display towards transgender people has striking commonalities to the injustices that Dr King speaks of in this passage. Bathroom ban laws are segregation: they restrict the movements of transgender people and limit our scope to live any life outside our own homes. Sports ban laws prevent us from joining our own communities. Stripping us of meaningful documentation limits our opportunities for employment, housing, and so on. Removing our access to healthcare is a threat to our very existence. It might not yet be a full Jim Crow situation for us but segregation and elimination is what conservatives are hoping to impose upon transgender people.
And I have to ask you: is our segregation from society a distraction that can be defeated by ignoring it? Do you believe that our enemies will cease and desist simply because you choose not to talk about the subject? Are our lives less important to you than the price of eggs? Because when you call transgender rights a "distraction from the real issues" this is what we hear.
Civil rights are not, and never have been, a distraction. You should know this by now.