The Final Struggle for Equal Recognition

Across the Western world, trans rights are under attack, from bathrooms, to sports, to basic medical care. We treat these attacks one-by-one, talking one day about the inherent privacy of bathroom stalls, the next about bones and muscle growth, the third about the proven safety of hormone therapy. We have missed the forest for the trees. While we talk about legal rights, legal protections, and so forth, there is precious little discussion about what trans politics is about. 

When we rail against sports bans and other supposedly “niche” topics, many cis people are given to wonder what about these topics provokes so much anger within our community. Aren’t these just technical policy topics, and the subject of reasonable disagreement? This befuddlement is due to a failure to engage with the hard core of the trans political project: recognition. This is what we mean when we say: “We are who we say we are.” The public recognition of identity is about more than this or that policy detail. It is not a technocratic question. It is a matter of fundamental equal citizenship.

The End of History, but for whom?

Francis Fukuyama, the author of one of the most controversial political treatises of the post-Cold War era, The End of History and the Last Man, is also one of that era’s most misunderstood political thinkers. In many cases, it is clear that both his detractors and his supporters have not read his work. Doing so leads me to a mixed take. He is, importantly, correct that the governmental form of Western liberal democracy produces the best results. And, in theory, it is the system most disposed to provide material prosperity, political stability, and universal recognition to the entire breadth of the population. 

But Fukuyama fails to understand that Western liberal democracy has not been extended to the full breadth of the population. In his later works, he speaks of “getting to Denmark,” as if full liberalism had already been achieved, on Earth, just north of Germany. But the liberal ideal has not been reached, not in Denmark or anywhere—certainly not for everyone. Even if we grant that, with the benefit of Fukuyama’s teaching, we now know the telos of History—and if so, what an accomplishment that is—how can we possibly ignore all the copious evidence that we have not yet realized it? 

There are those who have not gotten the benefit of material prosperity, political stability, and universal recognition. Black people. Hispanic people. Women. Disabled people. Immigrants. Workers. Queer and trans people. And, as it turns out, they make up most of humanity, not only in the world but in these United States, these United States that I and Fukuyama share citizenship of. In theory, in an outline drawn on a whiteboard, or words on a Constitution, liberal democracy is founded upon universal rights and recognition. E Pluribus Unum. All People Are Created Equal. In practice, in four-dimensional Actual Life, that has been far, far from the case. Indeed, our society has actually justified its most sordid oppressions through the lens of freedom. One need only refer to the history of “states’ rights” in the United States. 

When Fukuyama declared the End of History in 1992, he did so when it was still effectively illegal to be gay in much of the nation, when being transgender was considered a step away from being a serial killer, and when, despite the monumental achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, a Black man was beaten in the streets by the police who were supposed to protect him, and the Black people that protested those officers’ acquittal were made into the villains. There were still two states that considered a married woman the sexual property of her husband when considering the crime of rape.

If liberal democracy is supposed to allow ample opportunities for recognition, autonomy, and material prosperity, it should have been obvious to anyone who wasn’t a white man that we had not yet achieved it.

Recognition: The dialectic of isothymia versus megalothymia

Over the long breadth of history these subaltern classes have, through sustained organizing, activism, and resistance, slowly pushed the envelope of inclusion, of recognition, of who gets to be full participants in society. This fits broadly within Fukuyama’s concept of isothymia, a derivative of the Platonic concept of thymos, which is the desire to be respected, recognized, and honored for who one is. Subaltern groups not only sought legal rights and equal access to the institutions of liberal democracy, but sought recognition as equals within society. From Emancipation, to the 19th Amendment, to the labor movement, to Civil Rights, to feminism, to gay rights, to disability rights, to trans rights, people who have been denied recognition have fought to attain that recognition—and the resources, formal and informal, that flow from recognition. 

Opposing this movement is the other side of thymos: megalothymia, another concept that Fukuyama derived from Plato. If isothymia is the desire for equal recognition, to be seen as equal to others, megalothymia is the desire to be seen as superior to others. Megalothymia isn’t, despite the dialectic framing, all bad. The drive to be the best thinker or writer is a form of megalothymia. So is the drive to perform better than one’s peers at school or at work. Even wanting to be the best at a game or hobby fits the concept. 

The problem is that the society we live in—what can broadly be called class society—has for thousands of years, operated almost entirely along the principles of megalothymia, and specifically, the type of megalothymia that is not tied to individual merit or personal achievement, but to social dominance. Patriarchy, the dominance of men over non-men; racial supremacy, the dominance and exploitation of racial/national out-groups by racial/national in-groups; class dominance, the rule of the powerful over the non-powerful, whether that is aristocracy over peasantry, emperor over subjects, or bourgeoisie over worker. This is a form of megalothymia that does not seek the recognition of individual excellence freely achieved in a society of equals, but rather the form of malignant megalothymia that seeks to force recognition by way of mere force, through domination and exclusion.

But over the last two and a half centuries, this has begun to change. As much as liberal democracy betrayed its own principles from the start by countenancing these oppressive forces, it was within the framework of liberal democracy that isothymia began to win over these forces.

However, that victory would not come easily. The social and political structures of malignant megalothymia were built on structural violence. As demands for recognition began to be grudgingly, haltingly accepted by society, as subaltern classes began to seek change, so too a reactionary backlash formed in response. The instability of early 20th-century capitalism produced both a socialist push for worker control and autonomy and a reactionary backlash that eventually led to the first wave of fascism. In the United States, the Civil Rights Act, followed by the feminist and gay rights movements, were met with the Nixon and Reagan landslides in the ’70s and ’80s. The era of MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the “trans tipping point” was followed by the neofascist era of Donald Trump. To restore the status quo of dominance, the megalothymic forces of society opted to abandon the rule of law and liberal democracy entirely.

Who is the Last Man?

Fukuyama did predict that liberal democracy could be undermined even in its hour of triumph. The proverbial Last Man, a Nietzschean concept repurposed for modern conditions, would tear down the liberal democratic framework no matter how much prosperity it had delivered him. But Fukuyama failed to predict who the Last Man would turn out to be: not the bored children of a contented middle class, but precisely those who succeeded most spectacularly within liberal democratic capitalism. It would be pithy to say the Last Man is Donald Trump. Yet if one were to single out an individual to be the Last Man, it is Elon Musk. 

Musk is a man who literally had it all, who had wealth, power, fame, seen by the public as sort of a real-life Tony Stark from Iron Man. Believe it or not, Musk was once associated with a sort of liberal futurism built around electric cars and space exploration. Then his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, came out as trans. Their ensuing estrangement and the grievance he built around it crystallized his alignment with the fascist right. He began ranting about the “woke mind virus,” poured millions of dollars into anti-transgender campaigns, and used his vast monetary and social influence to help Trump get elected in 2024, and once again to defend the GOP majority in 2026, though this time, his malignant spending, much of it once again fixated on the demonization of trans people like me, was drowned by the monumental Blue Wave.

Thus did the isothymia of Musk’s trans daughter—her desire to be recognized for who she is, rather than participating in the structures of mere dominance patriarchy demanded—clash with the megalothymia that Musk sought from being able to control the makeup of his family. And this clash led his drive to tear down a system that had made him the richest man in the world. He now promotes race science on the erstwhile Twitter (which he renamed to X, yet another act of megalothymia), he now supports racist pogroms, he now spreads the most vile propaganda about trans people and racial minorities.

But crowning Elon Musk the Last Man is not the major use to which we should put the idea. We better use Fukuyama’s categories to state that the Last Man is malignant megalothymia itself—expressed through the closed society, through the closed border, through racism, through cisnormativity, through brute economic exploitation. It was not economic anxiety but malignant megalothymia that drove millions of people, mostly but not entirely men, mostly but not entirely white, to strive to tear down the liberal democratic system that had produced untold prosperity for them. They would rather burn down the house than share in its bounty on equal terms. They saw the subaltern’s demand for isothymic recognition as coming at their expense.

Trans recognition: The hard core

It is with this backdrop that we return to the issue of transness and the ontological framework of gender.

The reason why the recent article by Cassie Pritchard was so offensive to many, including myself, is simple. Pritchard’s central claim, as I have put it previously, is “that a political case for trans inclusion need not rest on the argument that we trans women are in fact women.” Imre Lakatos is famous for proposing a theory of the methodology of scientific research programs, in which there is a hard core, the fundamental and unquestionable assumptions which can never be abandoned, or else the entire paradigm must be abandoned, coupled with a protective belt that is adaptable in the face of changing evidence or disproofs. Critically, while Lakatos states that a research program becomes degenerating when it fails to produce new ideas, he also makes clear that it is rational to hold on to the hard core as long as possible. It is my view that this theory can be applied to political programs. And it is my view that the hard, unshakable core of any trans liberation movement is that we, as trans people, are who we say we are, and we demand equal respect as such.

Everything flows downstream of the recognition of this truth. Access to healthcare. Identity marker changes. Access to facilities. Non-discrimination. None of it matters, and all of it can be taken away, without the recognition of society that trans women are women, trans men are men, and trans people who are neither are neither. That can never, ever be conceded, or we have an entirely different political program, a program that seeks to accommodate the malignant megalothymia of the oppressive gender order, not resist it. Conceding the hard core is precisely what would make the trans rights movement not only a fundamentally different movement, but an immediately degenerating movement, as it would be perpetually trying to defend against every new encroachment of rights on terms set by its opponents. We would be abandoning our fundamental isothymic struggle. That, to me, is unacceptable. 

Pritchard argues that trans people should retreat from these metaphysical claims in favor of more abstract arguments about content-neutral rights. Muslims’ freedom to practice their religion does not require the state to take on the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his teachings. Similarly, she argues, trans rights should not require the state to take a stance on the truth of our genders. As I argued in a previous essay, this is unworkable: the state already takes a stance on the metaphysics of gender in everything from antidiscrimination law to health care to sex segregation in sports. It is not an accident that every identification form has a box for “sex/gender.” By categorizing in such a way, the state already disclaims neutrality on who is in what gender box.

But there is a deeper problem. The state is more than society. Black Americans’ demand for equal recognition was not just a demand for abstract legal rights, but for the ordinary right to look white Americans in the eye and be seen as equals. And that very much did require general social acceptance of the metaphysical claim that we are in fact equal. Muslims, likewise, have agitated not just for their abstract legal rights, but also for their dignity: for the accusation of “terrorist!” to not be flung at them every time they answer the call to prayer, for suspicion and fear to not dog their steps. Likewise, our demand as trans people is to be recognized for who we are: not freaks, not deviants, but equal members of society, with all the dignity that entails.

We agitate because our identities go unrecognized. We protest because we’re not recognized as equal citizens! 

If we abandon these claims, we abandon the hard core of our movement. The implication of Pritchard’s argument is that we should accept permanent subaltern status as our “biological sex” (itself a social framework imposed upon sexed bodies) and only consider ourselves our true gender within the framework of our own communities, effectively agreeing to an epistemic Jim Crow: separate and “equal.”

Fukuyama versus Fukuyama: The theory versus the man

One of the greatest ironies is that Fukuyama would disagree with me. He concedes that fascism is the response to these isothymic demands. He concedes that the rise of reactionary populism is because of these widespread social changes. He then proceeds to blame the demands themselves; he chastises activists for making identity-based claims to recognition, as opposed to a generic claim to membership in the broader national fabric. But the latter is exactly what we are asking for! 

Fukuyama even asserts that our demands run up against the hard facts of biology, and are thus illegitimate—granting the autonomy frame in the case of abortion, then declining to extend it to gender. And his hedge around respecting our rights, even as he denies our recognition, is exactly the same move that Pritchard makes.

But the way Fukuyama frames it is interesting. He casts the transgender movement as the “final frontier” in the denial of biology, and his distaste for gender autonomy itself helps frame the stakes for a new dialectic, one that we as trans people are at the center of. Because I believe he is actually correct in his analysis of the conditions, but for the wrong reasons: transness represents not the final frontier of “biology” or “human nature,” but a final struggle against the systems of dominance that have used “biology” to justify and sustain themselves, against the malign megalothymia of patriarchy, of the social structures that the open society has steadily eroded, through the struggle and resistance of those who have fought for recognition, autonomy, and prosperity.

This is actually where Fukuyama goes astray, despite his seemingly genuine commitment to the cause of liberalism—it is the framework of “nature” that is weaponized in defense of human-conceived and human-built social, political, and economic hierarchies. The telos that justifies domination, that justifies the “natural” order that legitimizes subjugation, is framed as neutral, objective logos, and that is the core fallacy of the reactionary. From women’s rights, to slavery, to democracy itself, oppressive social hierarchies are always framed as “natural,” “divine,” or somehow ontologically beyond human, and thus, beyond human critique. 

This is why, while strategies, tactics, and messaging can change, and while we can and must take short-term wins to improve and maintain the material conditions of trans life, and stem our ongoing oppression, epistemic accommodation to the reactionary order must be rejected. This is why we must demand recognition as trans people, with our genders recognized as legitimate, in the same way that cis genders are recognized as legitimate.

La lutte finale: The Last Man versus the Final Girl

If the Last Man is the father indignant that his “son” is actually a daughter, a car dealership owner who seeks to lord it over the town he is extracting rent from, an incel who feels entitled to coercive sexual access and coercive emotional labor, a capitalist who is offended by his workers’ demands for work life balance, then who shall rise up to oppose him? Who shall stop him from tearing apart the world that sprang from the Enlightenment and plunging us, to quote Churchill, “back into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science”?

My colleague Katherine Alejandra Cross, borrowing a trope from horror films, presents the figure of the Final Girl: the one who survives the horror and defeats the monster. She frames the struggle we are now in as the epitome of the struggle between isothymia, the demand for equal recognition, and megalothymia, the demand for hierarchical dominance and coerced, unequal recognition. And Cross’s essay does a brilliant job at encapsulating this struggle as we face it now and appealing to the hope of surviving these dark times, just as the Final Girl survives the end of the movie. I wish to expand on it: the Last Man versus the Final Girl is nothing less than the apocalyptic conclusion of a millennia-long struggle, between domination and autonomy, between liberty and tyranny. Make no mistake, the patriarchy, the so-called “extra-human order” that Reaction seeks to defend, is tyranny and always has been. And when this order is challenged, when the structural violence framed as logos is exposed as mere telos, then the reaction is violence—or in another word, fascism.

And prior to material distribution, legal representation, or even epistemic frameworks, this struggle is who gets recognition, and who does not. If liberal democracy is the best system for assuring the recognition of all, then there is no place for the rampant megalothymia of hierarchy.

Fukuyama calls our demands for recognition as trans people, freed from the shackles of biopolitics masquerading as biology, as the “final frontier.” I call it the final struggle. The overthrow of the last bastion of biopolitics, the overthrow of the extra-human order, is why reactionaries fear trans liberation. If even the sexing of the body cannot be shackled to patriarchal demands, there is nothing left to defend. If gender itself is subject to personal autonomy, everything is. 

Our oppression is built upon patriarchy, and the current reactionary moment is the violent backlash of the patriarchy. Accepting its ideological premises, seeking to appease the savage beast, will not save us. We are who we say we are. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary people are neither, both, or whatever they wish to be. And we have the right, as free and equal human beings, to exercise our autonomy over our gender at any time, because our bodies, our minds, our souls, our existences, are OUR CHOICE. We, and everyone else struggling against the deranged and destructive megalothymia of the fascists, are the Final Girl. Not just for our liberation, but for the liberation of all, we must survive and defeat the Last Man, and build the world that is safe, free, and prosperous for all humankind.

Featured Image is Naturalization Ceremony Grand Canyon, by Michael Quinn