Trans Exodus: The Inevitability of Liberation

‘“Look, the Israelites are too many and too mighty for us! We must handle them carefully, lest they multiply and then, if we happen to be at war, join our enemies and fight against us, so as to escape from the country.” So they put them under captains of the labour gangs, to crush them with heavy loads… But the more they were crushed, the more they multiplied and expanded, till the Egyptians dreaded the Israelites’ - Exodus 1:9-12

Recently I have been relating the biblical story of Exodus to the current societal climate around trans people. As someone invested within the Abrahamic stories it appears to me a great tragedy that the archetypal story of liberation has been rendered relatively inaccessible from the trans community, it must be considered a mighty sin for historical Christian hatred and discrimination to have tarnished God’s reputation. Especially when it appears to me that it is something transcendental and religious which is a deeply needed source of strength and comfort during times of persecution. Something spiritual is needed to allow one to help avoid the torment of the material injustices of the world, and a narrative is needed for one’s suffering to be understood within a larger tapestry of events, one in which suffering is the path to salvation.

But it was the opening passage of Exodus cited above which gripped my attention, as it seemed to precisely capture the conditions of trans liberation. For it seems contrastingly that the growing trans population is intertwined with the increasingly hostile attitude taken within the media and online. Whilst you would not have expected to see mainstream trans communities or ‘influencers’ twenty years ago, neither would you have expected to see an ‘arms race of transphobia’ to have been initiated between the candidates vying to become Prime Minister - popularity fuelled resentment. Not that older attitudes were progressive, but as isolated rather than societal incidences it wasn’t threatening, and therefore active hostility didn’t dominate public spheres. I remember some newspaper headlines I saw about Christine Jorgensen in the 1940’s: “Ex-GI becomes blonde beauty”, “Nature’s error forced girl to live as a boy”, “Dear mom and dad, son wrote, I’ve now become your daughter” - in isolation it could be seen as a mere curiosity, a juicy bit of tabloid gossip. But now that oppressions’ pressure has been applied, progress has not faltered, but accelerated. Partly causal, for oppression promotes the creation of community and activism, with hatred and injustice eliciting sympathy and wider-group support. Partly momentum, for when trans people become significant enough to be profitable to hate, it was too late to prevent fate. Regardless, the trans community will continue to grow, although it cannot be known how much more the pharaoh shall crack the whip before his hatred is deposed.

For within growth comes the increasing visibility of transgender people, through which transphobia shall fundamentally be overthrown. The history that is being overturned is the intertwinement of gender and sex, in that to claim that they are separate was as ludicrous as to say that ‘hot’ isn’t ‘warm’, conceptually there was no way to articulate the distinction because to most it was imperceivable. This could only be plausibly upheld when people didn’t encounter gender nonconformity regularly in everyday life. How are you supposed to form a distinction between gender and sex when it was such a rare phenomenon? And it is this foundation upon which the modern transphobic catchphrase of “men are men, and women are women” stems from. For the issue is portrayed as one of factuality, when in reality there cannot be any disputation of the fact - trans people exist. Evidently they must exist if the right-wing media are able to drag us around in the dirt every five minutes. How can they deny the existence of people that they clearly can see and understand enough to criticise? For the truth is that it is not a matter of facts at all, but how we define and organise those facts. The right-wing media do not deny the existence of trans people at all, for they quite easily identify “men who are pretending to be women”, but they have to translate gender non-conformity into a different ‘categorisation language’ as to uphold the gender binary - of which they do so dismissively to undermine the legitimacy of transgender concepts.

Foundationally all such conceptualisations and cultural understanding stems from objective facts, and the expansion of the trans community will soon ensure that the factuality of gender nonconformity is so undeniable as to amount to denial being absurd. For one of the uncomfortable truths of our current age is that the binary account of gender is still successful, or at least successful as of up to extraordinarily recently. Concepts such as ‘gender’ are somewhere between fact and tool, in that they are a balancing act between actual truth and what’s useful for interpretation. A map makes little attempt to capture how a country actually looks in person, and yet if it wasn’t based upon how the country actually was it would be useless. The map’s functionality in helping people navigate foreign environments is essentially tied to material reality, but will shed any element of reality which is irrelevant to its use. Concepts such as ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ fulfil the same objective of organising and abstracting facts into understandable and useful concepts, which gendered terms specifically are utilised for understanding oneself, and making sense of one's social environment. I am certain that a significant factor for the prominence of the “women are women” narrative is that it has been presented as a unified fact, of which has genuinely been verified through experience. For practically every living generation prior to the late-millennials, the biological-binary account of gender genuinely functioned almost perfectly, people appeared to be split cleanly into men and women, and hence the conceptualisation could make sense of the world. Not that the account was true, for it was merely a self-fulfilling prophecy: of course you can understand the world successfully through a certain account when you remove any language which would point to a possible alternative reality, hence preventing the actualisation of people who would have been trans if they knew what that meant. But can you truly blame an older generation for being sceptical about attempts to undermine the biological-binary account that they themselves believed to have verified personally, to be replaced by a vague and abstract new concept of gender which hasn't been successfully and coherently articulated yet?

And yet the mere public existence of trans people undermines the factual basis of this conceptualisation. As aforementioned it is a fact that trans people exist, so increasingly you need some way to organise the post gender revolution world. And increasingly the biological-binary account is going to become insufficient in organising the external environment, for attempting to understand people on the basis of their biology will lead to an unsuccessful understanding of people and how to interact with them. First people began to realise such a concept was insufficient for understanding and organising their internal selves, from this the trans population expanded, and from that cisgender people will be forced to concede that previous concepts are insufficient in understanding other people - and then the gender revolution shall be complete. Attempts to fight such a movement is akin to fighting the passage of time, if liberation is predetermined then why rebel against it?

‘Surely, those who annoy Allah and His Messenger are cursed by Allah in this world and in the Hereafter, and He has prepared for them a humiliating punishment.’ - Quran 33:57.

And what a humiliating punishment it is that the world has prepared for unrepentant transphobes! Look at them tear apart their own families because of their hateful ignorance! Their disrespectful nature against trans children leads to tension and conflict with their supportive family members, and a sense of familial shame amongst fellow transphobes. Their intolerance excludes them in their wider communities, and increasingly segregates them into small conventicles of hate. Watch them dedicate themselves to hatred and venom, which they lather and bathe themselves in. And what a stupidly self-destructive thing to dedicate yourself towards! Whilst transgender people do open themselves up to discrimination and exclusion, they do so out of a necessity to maintain one’s authenticity and self-respect, and they have a higher meaning through which to weather worldly prejudice. The transphobes unintentionally dedicate themselves not in support of something, but in opposition to the inevitable. They will eventually suffer materially, and they will have no purpose or principles to fall back on, for hate’s bitterness provides no respite. Just as God sent increasingly harsh punishments against Pharaoh for continuing to enslave the Israelites, so will the punishment for transphobes deepen with time. Extending from what was stated prior, as trans people become increasingly mainstream, transphobes shall become increasingly marginalised and socially unaccepted. But the unbelievers who refuse to accept these signs will increasingly entrench themselves in hate, through which they will destroy many relations and connections that are deeply valuable. Of which if they ever become aware of their evil, will have to suffer guilt proportional to the damage they had caused, their debt increases by the day. At least for most people their sins will be forgotten through time, but an even greater punishment has been prepared for every politician who takes cheap shots at trans people for political support. The light of historical hindsight will reveal you for what you are: machiavellians who would sacrifice all integrity for a scrap of power, you are no ruler, for who would needlessly attack their own people merely to gain a piece of popularity. And they shall cry out “But how were we supposed to have known the truth? The signs were unclear!” without realising that the truth was not the point, but that they lacked compassion for people they did not understand, try and deny that you were unaware of the virtue of love!

‘The Eternal said to Moses, “The Pharoah will not listen to you - that my marvellous deeds may be multiplied in the Land of Egypt.” So Moses an Aaron performed all these marvels in front of the Pharaoh; but the Eternal made the Pharaoh stubborn, and he would not let the Israelites go from his land” - Exodus 11:9-10

Knowledge of transgender people existing as an objective fact of the world is merely the first step, the significance of what it means to be transgender and the adjacent culture and virtues which develop around the community are yet to be formed. What do we want being trans to mean? No that question shall not do, for who are mere humans like us to know what we want. What should we want being trans to mean? For whilst we are liberators we have the comfort of knowing our cause is just, but with freedom comes the freedom to cause harm. My personal fear is that since the narrative of oppression is inherent within that of liberation, that we may fall upon ‘our enemies’ with knives of hatred and retribution. That in articulating our existence as trans people we will overwrite the even higher unity of humanity. That we will forget the very compassion and virtue which we built our freedom upon as soon as we get the upper hand against the slave-drivers. This struggle shouldn't merely be a lesson for mainstream society, but also for ourselves - don’t forget it was the very struggle against discrimination which developed our community, and an articulation of who we are. Do not fall into sectarianism and do your best to treat everyone with kindness, unless one day the world decides to levy such punishments against yourself.