Concede Nothing

We, as trans people, are in a dark and trying time. Every day brings news of new depredations and new violations of our rights. Another bathroom bill. Another attack on trans sports inclusion. Another pronouncement from the Oval Office about how our basic rights and dignity are “insanity.” 

The global fascist movement has made trans people part of the centerpiece of their worldwide assault on democracy. Billionaires spend their wealth on demonizing and denigrating us: Elon Musk routed $50 million to a PAC whose advertising centered on anti-trans messaging, and J. K. Rowling has advanced from a £70,000 donation to For Women Scotland to a standing private fund bankrolling litigation against our rights. And the worst part is that it seems this is occurring to the applause, or at least the approval, of a not-insignificant portion of the population. In light of this, the question of what we as trans people must do, and how we as trans people must organize, is open and pressing.

Recently I read an article titled “I Do Not Need You To Believe I Am A Woman” written by Cassie Pritchard, a fellow trans woman who is prominent on X (formerly known as Twitter). Pritchard makes the argument that a political case for trans inclusion need not rest on the argument that we trans women are in fact women. That we can argue for, say, bathroom inclusion, not on the grounds of “trans women are women, and should use the women’s bathroom”, but on the fact that the practical effect of bathroom policing would impact cisgender women who are not gender conforming. Pritchard draws a broader analogy with religious rights: “Most Muslim or Mormon Americans don’t premise their rights and dignity on everyone necessarily sharing their religious convictions, but on a mutual ethic of noninterference and nondiscrimination.” She argues that this ethic can sustain most trans rights, including bathroom access, nondiscrimination, and even youth transition—though sports inclusion must be abandoned, she feels.

Yet I truly believe that abandoning that core principle of our politics is not only a surrender to the fascist transphobic wave, but fundamentally undermines the practical goal of trans inclusion that Pritchard believes will be advanced via reframing our rights from a moral claim to a pragmatic one.

The science

The first issue with conceding the ontological claim that trans people are not the gender we say we are is that from a scientific perspective, it is simply not true. Sex is multi-component; chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, morphological. And when one considers the reality of hormonal transition, as well as the way hormones sex the body, this only supports that position. The development of sexed characteristics is driven overwhelmingly by estradiol or testosterone levels, up to and including reproductive capacity. Chromosomal configuration is simply a blueprint for the actual work of sexual development, and that blueprint can be overridden. 

When a trans person transitions, and takes the hormone matching their gender identity, every aspect of their body changes, from physical strength, to secondary sex characteristics, to gait, to hair production, to bone growth, in some cases, even vocal intonation (primarily for trans men). It is true that it does not alter reproductive capacity beyond in some cases making it more difficult, but a definition of sex based on current reproductive capacity immediately excludes hundreds of millions of cisgender women, and a definition of sex based on “inherent” or “natural” reproductive capacity is a thought-terminating cliché that backports patriarchal social taxonomy onto the human body. Actual reproductive capacities are a meaningful, personal issue for many millions of people, cis and trans. What reproductive capacities your body was “designed” to have is meaningless metaphysics leveraged for socially conservative ends. It is one thing to discuss gametes, and it is another to define personhood by them.

The politics

Pritchard frames these matters largely through the lens of polling, citing majorities of voters said to oppose youth gender-affirming care and the teaching of gender identity in schools, and to support forcing trans people to use bathrooms corresponding with their assigned “natal” sex. Pritchard then contrasts that to majorities who are said to oppose anti-trans discrimination in housing and employment, suggesting that the fight to define trans people as our stated gender is lost, but the fight for legal anti-discrimination can be won.

And to be fair, the polls are alarming. It’s clear that, as polled, the public does not, at least fully, agree with the ontological case we make about gender, and that is reflected in the fact that polling questions that center around “whether a trans person should have access to accommodations of their gender,” even a noticeable number of self-identified Democrats, a majority of independents, and nearly all Republicans do not agree. It does seem intuitive to argue that, for the purposes of immediate defense of trans rights, falling back on the idea of “live and let live”—an approach that was often associated with gay rights advocacy—is a defensible fallback position. And it’s important to remember that Pritchard is not advocating that we ourselves change substantive positions, as such—what she calls for is in many ways a reframing.

But, in my opinion, I do not think trying to reframe these issues in a manner more palatable to cis society will work nearly as well as it might seem. In addition, this approach ignores several key factors.

Firstly, these polls are by no means static. Pritchard acknowledges that a majority of respondents opposed bathroom bans ten years ago, and polling was far more mixed on trans inclusion in sports well into the latter part of the 2010s. What happened? Nothing less than a massive, concerted, pervasive propaganda operation by the political right, designed to present trans inclusion as somehow contrary to “common sense” and “nature,” demonize trans people, especially trans women, and win back lost social and cultural ground in the wake of social conservative defeats on issues such as gay marriage and feminism. There has been no corresponding social or political push in the opposite direction. If anything, in the wake of Kamala Harris’s 2024 electoral loss, there have been a multitude of voices arguing that trans rights are an electoral liability, with some alleged liberals even using the bigoted language “biological men” (a phrase that itself only exploded in popularity as a result of the inorganic backlash to trans rights) to refer to transgender women. 

Secondly, this ignores the reality that conservatives are continuing to demonize trans people. The Trans Legislation Tracker counts 813 bills under consideration across 43 states in 2026 alone. With 2025 being the sixth consecutive record-breaking year by that metric, we can say the conservative assault has only been escalating. Conservatives continue to depict trans women as a threat to society, potential predators, and even terrorists. When Charlie Kirk was killed, right-wing influencers moved immediately to blame us, promoting unverified claims that the then-unidentified shooter was trans. When it transpired that this was false, they did not drop the charge but moved the goalposts, seizing on the fact that the suspect’s roommate was a trans woman to indict “transgender ideology” instead.

Once we see that public opinion changes and that anti-trans attacks from the right are escalating, why should we feel confident that the “pro-civil rights” polling results will continue to hold, when we already know that opinions on trans people can be moved by regular demonization and constant propaganda?

Consider the situation in the United Kingdom. As Toby Buckle has documented at length in these pages, in the space of a few years the UK moved from a broadly inclusive status quo to being the most aggressively anti-trans developed democracy in the world, without a single vote in Parliament, real press scrutiny (in fact, quite the opposite, as UK elite media ran transphobic article after transphobic article), and, as of the final EHRC Code of Practice update, without the bathroom ban ever having been examined within a human rights framework. 

The proximate legal cause of the UK’s dramatic shift was the UK Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling in For Women Scotland, which held that “sex,” “man,” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex regardless of a Gender Recognition Certificate. But the political cause was a decade of center-left refusal to defend trans rights qua trans rights. The UK center-left, including Labour and media elites, were captured by “reactionary centrism,” or the idea that center-left parties should concede on social issues to “take them off the table.” 

But getting social issues off the table never, ever happens—the reactionaries merely up the ante, because what they really want is the elimination of the disfavored group, and we inconveniently refuse to go away.

Did the Labour party at least benefit politically by abandoning trans rights? Oh, no, absolutely not. Buckle notes that, having won on trans rights, the UK’s far right has simply moved on to its next target, while the Labour electoral coalition has exploded, splintered, disintegrated—pick a word. If the pragmatic case for conceding on trans recognition was that it would help at the polls, I would call it already refuted.

Meanwhile, Labour’s cave-in “strategy” has been a disaster for trans people. The UK now has more onerous bathroom laws than any US state, because the new rules—backed by Labour—mandate exclusion. Facilities with gendered bathrooms must bar trans people from the bathroom that matches their identity and presentation, and indeed from all gendered spaces. You, a private citizen or organization, are not permitted inclusive policies even if you want them. Meanwhile, across the NHS system, patients seen for a first assessment for gender dysphoria in as of late 2025  had waited an average of six years and ten months. 

The policy

The biggest problem for Pritchard’s argument is the idea that we can separate anti-discrimination from ontology. The state cannot be neutral on sex the way it can be on religion (and even that neutrality is questionable—after all, the federal government does not carve out Eid or Yom Kippur as a day off, and neither do most state and local governments).

The trajectory of Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) demonstrates the problem. Bostock based its non-discrimination ruling on the idea that being fired for being trans is discrimination based on sex, without holding that trans women are women or even defining sex. On the surface, this looks like a vindication of Pritchard’s proposal. Yet in practice Bostock has proven to be weak protection, because these “metaphysical” questions keep re-introducing themselves into the legal arena.

Consider last year’s Texas v. EEOC, in which notorious right wing judge Matthew Kacsmaryk vacated an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance, promulgated to comply with Bostock, that indicated, among other things, that it was employment discrimination to  deny trans people bathroom access corresponding to their gender identity. Kacsmaryk held that the EEOC went beyond the law’s “plain text by expanding the scope of ‘sex’ beyond the biological binary: male and female.” Our adversaries will dismantle our rights using the ontological frame whether we concede it or not; compliance in advance is worse than useless.

The same weakness of Pritchard-style formalism was on display in United States v. Skrmetti, in which the Supreme Court held that Tennessee was within its rights to ban medical transition care for minors—and that this did not violate Bostock’s prohibition on sex discrimination. The Republican justices ultimately relied on precisely “metaphysical” claims to argue that the same hormones given to a cis child with an abnormal puberty are fundamentally different in kind to those same hormones given to a trans child for transition. The ontological question was not a philosophical sideshow to the discrimination question; it was the core of the question in practice.

A critical element of Skrmetti is Amy Coney Barrett’s concurrence. Her argument is that trans people cannot be a protected class, because our class in her eyes is amorphous, non-immutable, and thus contested—regardless of how low the reported detransition rate is, no matter how much we state “Death Before Detransition.” And the implication is that a contested category cannot be protected. Thus, to concede the ontological argument around our gender is to concede the possibility of the protected class framework that underpins the American equal protection framework. 

The people

Transphobia is a humanitarian crisis as well as a political crisis. It drives us from our homes, splits us from our families, undermines our job prospects and health outcomes, lowers our life expectancy, and exposes us to violence at rates far above the general population. 

We are seeing the effects of transphobic ontology in real time. Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” declares it the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes and mandates that federal facilities be segregated by sex assigned at birth. This forces trans people into the bathroom of the gender they do not identify as, regardless of gender presentation—effectively making federal facilities inaccessible to trans people. Beyond that, the Trump EEOC has moved to abandon its pending gender identity lawsuits and has since formally rescinded the guidance treating intentional misgendering as harassment, while it vigorously supports a whole-of-government attack on trans youth care regardless of state—27 states now restrict it. The conservative project called for the eradication of transgenderism from public life entirely; it never said “but we’ll stop if trans people concede somewhat.”

And yet, each and every day, more of us make the decision to say “I was defined as one gender, and I have presented to the world as one gender, but I declare that I truly am another gender.” Regardless of persecution, regardless of violence, or rejection, we make the choice to define ourselves. And the idea that pragmatism demands that we not fight on those grounds, that we accept being boxed into some kind of “other” or “third sex,” that we concede to an ignorant majority that our genders are not real, or, at the very least, to frame our politics along those lines?

The actual pragmatic view is that most of us will reject making such concessions. Most of us will not accept a politics that does not stand on the assertion that trans women are women, trans men are men, and trans non-binary people are non-binary. Most of us will see that sort of politics as yet more evidence of liberal betrayal. Cis moderates will call it smart and reasonable. But trans people will not adopt a politics of “pragmatism” if by that is meant a politics of self-denial. Rather, most of us will say that a movement that counsels such “pragmatism” is illegitimate. And a strategy that will immediately fail to garner buy-in from those affected cannot be called pragmatic, because the strategy cannot succeed without that buy-in.

So to conclude, the answer is no. Trans people are the genders we say we are, those genders are every bit as legitimate as the genders of cis people, and we will fight and organize on those grounds. The desire to find a way around this transphobic moment is understandable, just like Booker T. Washington’s desire to mitigate Jim Crow via pragmatic concessions in the face of white terror was understandable. But it was the Niagara Movement, not the Atlanta Compromise, that won civil rights. Trans people likewise will fight, uncompromisingly, through this moment, and onward to win our rights.

Featured Image is Niagara Movement Founders, by R. P. Slater