Trans People Shouldn’t Have to be Perfect to be Visible
Spencer Macnaughton | Uncloseted Media Weekly Newsletter
A guest post by Hope Pisoni
When I published an article in December about how trans women in state prisons have been affected by the Trump presidency, I got a lot of backlash for writing sympathetically about some of my sources. To be clear, some of these women did commit very serious and repugnant crimes, but I don’t regret sympathetically covering the terrible mistreatment they faced. Reduxx, an anti-trans publication, published a critique of my article which repeatedly misgenders my sources; far-right influencer Andy Ngo posted my name and face on X; and angry commenters called me an “evil freak,” “sick person” and—lest you assume these folks limit their bigotry just to trans people—a “Jewish ghoul” and a “literal goblin.”
As unpleasant as this was, I try not to let it faze me. My main reaction to this whole debacle has been one of intrigue: Of all the controversial topics I’ve covered, this is the one that really struck a nerve with people.
I think that’s partly because the discourse around trans rights often fixates on the moral quality of trans people. The far-right proclaims that we don’t deserve rights because we are groomers, violent, sexually deviant, mentally ill and/or delusional.
In most cases, trans people and our allies respond by saying that we are not any of these things and therefore we do deserve rights.
While it’s important to debunk these falsehoods, responding in kind to these arguments unfortunately plays into their game. When transphobic actors say “trans people don’t deserve rights because they’re bad people,” and LGBTQ advocates respond by saying that “trans people aren’t bad people,” they are accepting the premise that bad people don’t deserve rights.
This is a problem for a few reasons.
First, it’s a rhetorical weakness. Under this framework, every trans person who does something bad immediately becomes another piece of evidence against our rights. This is why the far-right have put out so much media focused on the very small number of trans shooters or sexual predators—the more examples they find, the more they can wildly overrepresent them in coverage, which leads to the erosion of public support for trans rights. For example, despite Charlie Kirk’s assassin being cis, Media Matters for America found that at least 18 right-wing publications and influencers used a misleading report to pin the attack on trans people.
Second, it places an enormous amount of pressure on trans people to be perfect citizens: clean-cut examples that are digestible as average Americans who could be your neighbor, your doctor or your teacher. But trans people have a range of lived experiences that often don’t fit that stereotypical perfection: We’re about twice as likely to be impoverished as cis straight people, about six times as likely to be homeless and significantly more likely to suffer from depression or poor mental health. Despite this, we are still expected to be on our best behavior and play the part of perfect little angels so that we can represent the community in a “positive light.”
On the one hand, the people who are excluded—sex workers, unhoused people, people struggling with addiction—are the very people who are the most affected by anti-trans attacks. And on the other hand, the few who are deemed presentable enough to have a platform are subjected to greater scrutiny than most people, and are often forced to flatten our complex human experiences into digestible, morally uncomplicated packages.
The stakes are high: In many cases, our careers and safety are at risk if we, say, have the wrong reaction to a notorious bigot’s death or grade a Christian student’s paper in a way that doesn’t align with their religious beliefs.
Third, as a small minority of the population, we don’t get to choose what the definition of a “bad person” is. The anti-trans movement is skilled at twisting the narrative to depict our existence as an immoral ideology devoted to committing harm: We’re “invading women’s spaces” or “mutilating” and “grooming” children. When a trans politician from Minnesota spoke against online age verification laws, right-wing media claimed she supported giving porn to kids, and that narrative spread like wildfire. Even if we play by the rules, they often change them to make us lose.
Queer movements have a bad habit of ceding rhetorical ground by propping up the most “normal” and “respectable” people and leaving the rest out in the cold—often excluding trans people as a whole. Despite their now-legendary status, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were shunned and treated as pariahs by the gay rights movement only a few years after they helped start it at the Stonewall Riots in 1969.
The idea was that trans people were simply too stigmatized and that they’d stall the progress of gay rights. That fell apart, though, when the AIDS crisis hit and the cultural backlash reversed years of progress and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, it happened again. While gay rights made a splash on the national stage, so-called allies blasted trans people for daring to be upset when we were excluded from anti-discrimination bills or had our issues delayed on the House floor. While the strategy of sweeping the most stigmatized queer people under the rug got some huge wins in the short term, it gave the anti-LGBTQ movement an obvious line of attack by leaving trans people vulnerable.
And here we are in 2026, where trans people are under greater attack than ever and cis gays are having the rights they fought for rolled back.
I know I’m a few days late for Trans Day of Visibility. But if there’s one thing I’m reflecting on this week, it’s that real representation means visibility for everyone. Trans people deserve to be as complicated as any other group of people without our rights being threatened. Of course we should continue to celebrate the trans celebrities, lawyers and human rights advocates who currently stand in the spotlight. But we cannot neglect the trans people who do sex work, who’ve been incarcerated, who don’t look or act how people think they should. These are, after all, the very people who built our movement in the first place.
We do not deserve to live because we are perfect, because we’re “just like everyone else”—we deserve to live because we’re human.
We can’t fall into the trap of watering ourselves down to seem more palatable or “normal.” Because when any one of us is abandoned, we all lose.
![Our Journalist Spoke with Eight Trans Women in Prison. Here’s What She Found [WATCH]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ga4Z!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb81c463d-b728-4a37-bb21-3c44f18e93a2_720x360.png)
A quick reminder to everyone that you should subscribe to our YouTube channel! We’ll be publishing episodes of our new podcast “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton” every Wednesday. If you look now, you’ll see yesterday’s episode, where Spencer talks with me about my investigation into the Bureau of Prisons’ widespread denial of gender-affirming care for trans people. You can also watch shorts featuring our coverage of breaking news events, including on-the-ground reporting at Saturday’s No Kings protest in NYC.
Last week, Sam Donndelinger appeared on The Buckeye Flame’s This News is So Gay podcast to talk about her recent story on how ICE crackdowns are impacting Latino Americans’ ability to access HIV care. You can listen here.
Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:
🆕 SATURDAY: What does the Supreme Court ruling overturning the conversion therapy ban in Colorado look like in real life? For one survivor, it’s personal, painful, and impossible to ignore. In this deeply personal essay, we hear a survivor recount years of trauma and reflect on what this ruling means for queer youth.
🆕 WEDNESDAY: In the third episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Lucas Pearson shares the story behind his ketamine addiction. He reveal how party culture, unresolved trauma, and unregulated access shaped his path.
Thanks for reading! Spencer will be back next week. Feel free to email him with questions, complaints and story ideas! spencer@unclosetedmedia.com
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