This story originally appeared in our Queer Issue on June 4, 2025.

Let’s start with a few straightforward feminist statements: Women amount to more than the sex they were born into. Sexualization dehumanizes. Genitalia should not decide how we move through the world. Bodies do not have inherent meaning, but are assigned cultural roles that limit who and what a person can be.

They’re simple, uncontroversial concepts that don’t even apply exclusively to women. But our understanding of these ideas crumbles when a person happens to be trans. A five- to six-inch barrier is in the way.

Dick. On the crudest level, it comes down to dick. Often in the comment sections. Where dick should be. Who has dick. What having dick means. We have a lot of notions about dick. It’s an obvious symbol of male power. The world spins on the tip of it, its size corresponding to the level of authority one should have. It’s funny big and funnier small. It’s a blade glinting in the shadows. A loaded gun behind a zipper. An object of rape.

We have our notions about trans women too. Mental instability. Creepiness. In The Silence of the Lambs, Buffalo Bill is not scary or unique because he abducts women and cuts them up. It’s because he turns them into clothes, a simultaneous act of body snatching and necrophiliac rape. He slips into this flesh cocoon and attempts to transform. It’s all the more grotesque because he fails. He’s not “beautiful” Bill: He’s mannish, old, and wearing a suit made of young women.

Buffalo Bill is not trans, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) carefully notes. But as a representation of every ugly feeling the culture holds for transgender women, he’s dead on.

And in The Silence of the Lambs, what scene is scariest? Probably when Bill dances to “Goodbye Horses” by the mirror wearing a human scalp, with hair. That should be the horrifying detail. But in my experience, people remember the dick tucked behind his thighs. (Out of curiosity, I Googled “Buffalo Bill mirror.” The third result was a post on r/moviedetails: “It only took me 28 years to notice it ... Buffalo Bill IS WEARING A WOMAN’S SCALP”).

Buffalo Bill is also a psychopath. All “cross-dressing” killers are, from Norman Bates (Psycho) to Angela (Sleepaway Camp) and Bobbi (Dressed to Kill). The “why” is obvious. They’re wearing the wrong clothes. What’s under them? This is our image of trans women. In the dark corners of the American mind, it’s Buffalo Bill demanding to use a bathroom or locker room with its daughters. Conservatives say they want “biological” boys out of girls’ spaces because it’s “common sense.” Religion plays a role, as does disgust, and a paranoia that everything is pedophilic. But the subtextual penis casts a long shadow. The danger of that penis and its attachment to someone they see as sick and delusional, even if that person is a child.

If trans women are mentally ill, and dicks are dangerous rape objects, a trans woman in the bathroom is a lunatic with a gun. No evidence to the contrary can cast away faith that that threat is real.

But even dick is just a symbol for an even deeper belief that sex is immutable and that our bodies seal our fates and futures. Penis is just the crass, physical shorthand for gender essentialism. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, and in this universe, interplanetary travel is impossible.

Judith Butler wrote in Who’s Afraid of Gender? that “a specter-infused hypothetical” has been used to stoke panic about trans women: Someone who has a penis, or once had a penis, will rape, because either the penis, or the socialization of people with penises, is the cause of rape. This is the argument for putting trans women in men’s prisons. A dick will inevitably rape. Or a man’s dick could drive him to become trans so it can rape. These hypothetical men and hypothetical crimes are enough to justify a trans woman’s suffering, and her possible rape, in a men’s prison, because she is violent by virtue of her birth.

Body parts are not conscious. But at least by men, the penis is thought to have a “mind of its own.” Like “boys will be boys,” the sentiment shifts responsibility from men to dicks. 

This is inherited by trans women. Even if trans women let go of their dicks, the assumption is that their dick never lets go of them. Because they are “really” men, they have an inherently abusive psychology or simply can’t help themselves. But like cis women, trans women are routinely sexualized as women by men. They’re victims of male violence and killed by their male domestic partners. This is disregarded: Dick weighs more than lived experience. Masculinity is too powerful, too insurmountable, too inborn an essence for “self-identification” to conquer.

This is basic sexism in masquerade. In our culture, masculinity is valued as a natural state of being, while femininity is an affectation. In Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon can’t be a good lawyer. She wears pink. Trans women experience this twofold. They’re “fake” women, applying a femininity that is in itself artificial. 

The day-to-day experiences of trans and cis women are more similar than they are different. Certainly, they’re not one-to-one. Abortion rights? Trans women do not claim that struggle as their own. Chauvinism? Medical neglect? Male violence? Rape? All women share these problems, and it is better to unite to stop these things from happening.

We lose ourselves in the difference. Every marginalized group reckons with its own unique set of challenges and double standards. Acknowledging this can make us angry, as if it makes our own hardships less significant. We can either accept that these experiences differ, and then work toward understanding, or get all sanctimonious and fight over the human rights wishbone while the powerful boof gravy under the table. That’s what’s perverse. Nobody wants genitals to define their life. If our rights are not a limited quantity, is it really worth letting a little dick get in the way?

I suspect many cis people see trans rights as a sideshow. All counts are estimates, but they concern 1 percent of the population. The right openly sees trans people as the downfall of their Western Civilization. Some on the left, especially Democrats, see them as a liability or a burden to the cause. As Republicans salivate over keeping a few kids from playing volleyball, Democrats wonder openly if conceding on trans rights is their return ticket to power.

This is a terrible mistake. To borrow from Butler again, once you sacrifice one vulnerable minority, no matter how small, you’re operating in a fascist logic.