Gender has been a contentious issue for years. Academics and activists alike have examined, deconstructed and critiqued it while their conservative opponents have sought to discredit their work and reinforce their own standard.

Those who do not fit neatly into the strict, traditional binary of male and female have never had a comfortable existence in the United States. Their marginalization is nothing new.

However, the current political state of the U.S. has seen the transgender community become a target of some of the most callous and vitriolic rhetoric in political discourse. Years of increased visibility have prompted a severe backlash from conservatives who frame transgender people as a threat to the traditional social order.

It is necessary to set the record straight in the midst of the accusations being made and also to acknowledge that a crackdown on the rights of transgender people signals the beginning of a larger social regression.

Historically, there is abundant precedent for the legal and social persecution of transgender people. Laws barring “cross-dressing” have a long history in the U.S. and have set a precedent for arresting, harassing and violating anyone who does not conform to arbitrary gender standards.

The echoes of these mostly defunct laws can be seen in the legislative push to restrict public spaces like restrooms and locker rooms according to biological sex. The question of how laws concerned with people’s anatomy can be enforced carries numerous troubling implications. 

Beyond bathrooms, there is also the insistence by conservative politicians and commentators that drag performances are obscene and should be prohibited. Although this obviously targets queer artists in general, it is not hard to foresee that the definition of “drag” under these bans could include transgender people simply existing in public.

There are also several ongoing efforts to restrict transgender youth from seeking gender-affirming care, and some states have already gone as far as to expand the scope of these policies to include adults.

The talking point repeatedly pushed to the forefront of this debate is that of transgender athletes who participate in women’s sports. This discourse is laden with claims about biological advantages and the unfairness to cisgender athletes, all of which paint transgender women as cheaters and worse.

Scientific investigations have consistently found no evidence of transgender women performing significantly better than their cisgender competitors after hormone treatments, but that fact has never seemed to matter to those who scrutinize transgender athletes.

At the root of the “trans panic” is the idea that cisgender women and girls are under threat of injury by transgender women, who are persistently misgendered and maligned by the conservatives who push the idea. Alongside this is the notion that transgender men are just confused women and girls who need to be stopped from doing permanent damage to their bodies.

These stereotypes have been attached to transgender people for years, but there is an underlying theme that connects this transphobic political trend to a larger push in conservative politics toward conformity at the expense of personal autonomy.

When conservative legislators, commentators and think tanks argue that gender-affirming care for transgender youth and adults should be restricted, they are arguing that individuals should not be allowed to make certain decisions about their own bodies.

When groups like Moms for Liberty insist that they have a right to raise their children without any exposure to drag queens (and transgender people by extension), they are insisting that the liberty of others should be revoked so that they can feel more comfortable in public spaces.

When activists like Riley Gaines cruelly refer to transgender women as men who overpower women in competitive sports and disregard evidence to the contrary, they are endorsing the violent stereotype of the predatory transgender woman and appealing to the emotion that this idea evokes to shut down criticism.

If sympathy for transgender people facing repression is not reason enough to worry, consider what normalizing government moral policing could invite next.

If medical professionals can be banned from providing gender-affirming care, what other forms of healthcare might legislators seek to outlaw?

If visibly transgender people can be legislated out of public life in the name of protecting the innocence of children, what or who else might children need to be protected from?

If women and girls have to prove that they are biologically female to participate in sports, who is most likely to be scrutinized for having an unfair advantage or being a danger to their competitors?

I have learned from personal experience that most Americans think of transgender people as any combination of strange, off-putting and confusing. I do not expect this perception to change overnight.

I would, however, implore everyone to think carefully about where a retraction of transgender rights leads. It would be unwise to assume storm clouds on the horizon are only a bad sign for a few.