IF 2014 WAS ‘the Transgender Tipping Point’ for the West, then 2025 is set to go down as the year of the backlash. Within hours of taking office in January, Donald Trump began to dismantle trans and gender-diverse people’s rights. First, he signed an executive order, ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’, in which the new administration dictated that US federal agencies must focus on a narrowed and biologically contestable interpretation of sex as an ‘immutable biological classification as either male or female’ that is determined ‘at conception’.

Since then, he’s banned trans girls and women from participating in women’s sports and threatened international trans athletes with being charged with fraud. He’s banned trans people from serving in the military, restricted access to gender-affirming healthcare for under nineteens and ended hard-won workplace protections for transgender people. He’s even removed any reference to key Stonewall figures such as Marsha P Johnson from the Stonewall National Monument website.

Successfully recasting trans women as monstrous bogeymen, hiding out in the toilets, Trump’s hateful strategy has seen trans and cisgender women alike harassed and thrown out of public restrooms. Reports of LGBTIQA+ passport and visa holders being denied entry or being mistreated by US customs officials have led several European countries to issue an official travel warning to their trans citizens.

While this declaration of war on ‘gender ideology’ is relatively new in the United States, political and religious figures from Ghana to Bulgaria have been campaigning against trans people in the name of protecting the ‘natural family’ for more than a decade.

Here in Australia, Queensland has paused gender-affirming health to under eighteens. In the lead-up to the election, the federal government sought to neutralise the issue by initiating their own national review. One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson then called for a parliamentary inquiry into medical treatments for transgender children, which eighteen Coalition senators voted for. While many have welcomed the landslide return of the Albanese government on 3 May 2025 as a repudiation of the politics of hate, we must remember that this government doesn’t have a strong track record of advancing the rights of queer and trans Australians. In 2023, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese failed to call out blatant anti-trans rhetoric when journalist Piers Morgan asked him ‘what is a woman?’, a well-known ‘gotcha’ question used by anti-transgender activists to marginalise trans women. Last year, Albanese broke his election promise to legislate to protect LGBTIQA+ staff and students from discrimination at religious schools when he shelved the much-discussed Religious Discrimination Bill. Just last month, in a devastating blow for the British trans community, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the meaning of sex for the purposes of discrimination protections is confined to so-called ‘biological sex’. If the decision is upheld, trans people across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales will lose their anti-discrimination protections under the Equality Act 2010.

A near future in the West in which access to gender-affirming surgery and cross-sex hormones is outlawed is no longer unimaginable. Those of us who have updated our sex markers on our passports have begun to wonder if they will be soon declared invalid with the stroke of a pen. It’s already happening in the US and the UK, once the global torch bearers of queer liberation. Why couldn’t it happen here too?

IT’S NOT YET clear what this political moment calls for. What’s the best thing to do when you’re the subject of a moral panic? For a generation, we’ve argued with each other about the need for unity and the perils of following the gay and lesbian community into the fickle embrace of rainbow capitalism.

Some have worked tirelessly to be the ‘good trans’ patient, educator and role model, smiling and approachable, ready to forgive the minor transgressions of pronoun slippage, intrusive questioning and a lack of medical knowledge. Others have set up organisations to campaign for our rights, setting up petitions, phone trees and meetings with ministers. Some have patiently engaged in law reform, sought to humanise our communities though careful messaging and showing up to endless parliamentary inquiries and government roundtables. A few of us have even carved out a place for ourselves in the media, writing tell-all memoirs, newspaper articles and appearing in documentaries, comedy specials and Neighbours.

But as the avenue of respectability politics is increasing narrowed, some wonder if the growing visibility of trans people in mainstream culture has been such a great thing. Perhaps visibility without power is fool’s gold.

Maybe it’s time to lean in to the dark power of radical unacceptability and embrace the monstrosity that others see within us.

BACK IN 1994, Susan Stryker (who went on to write the seminal 2008 book Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution) published an adaptation of her groundbreaking conference speech ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’. In this text, she allegorises her transness using Frankenstein’s creature, identifying with the rage the creature feels after it’s outcast for being an ‘unnatural’, human-made entity. This speech inspired subsequent generations of trans thinkers to explore various tropes of the monstrous to articulate their sense of being in a world dominated by binary, gendered norms. In his controversial 2019 address to a psychiatry conference, the Spanish trans writer and philosopher Paul B Preciado argued in ‘Can the Monster Speak?’ that existing outside the gender binary was not pathological but liberatory. The Gen Z trans Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay has brought this line of inquiry into moviemaking in horror flicks such as 2023’s T-Blockers and Satranic Panic.

Our best course of action may just prove to be radical unacceptability. And if it isn’t, well, life might at least be more fun on the dark side. There are so many archetypes to lean into:  

TRANS AS VAMPIRE: Never seen in daylight, they will infect you with the woke mind virus at your next community event. You will forever mourn your lost humanity but will at least be better dressed.   

TRANS AS WEREWOLF: Sprouting bulging muscles, veins and leg hair, these howling creatures may have more to fear from the villagers than they have of them. (See also: TRANS AS THE INCREDIBLE HULK: Popping out of shirts and breaking hearts, he’s yet to learn how to control his newfound testosterone-fuelled rage.)

TRANS AS CHIMERA: These mismatched beasts will expose the sheer terror of muddied waters.

TRANS AS BANSHEE: Found near graveyards and old ruins, these goth-like fairies are a harbinger of death, signalling the West’s decline. (See also: TRANS AS DIONYSUS: Ready to party until the decadent end.)

TRANS AS CONCUBUS: Dark souls waging a war against nature, they destroy reproductive capacity and lop off healthy tissue wherever they go.

TRANS AS PHOENIX: A new large-winged body arising from the ashes of the old.

(See also: TRANS AS POKEMON: Just another Jigglypuff levelling up.)

TRANS AS PENNYWISE THE CLOWN: This shapeshifting joker will pull innocent children down to their doom.  

TRANS AS SIREN: Bewitching sailors with surprising bottom halves, these creatures will lure you to certain death. (See also: TRANS AS LOKI: This trickster god might just switch sexes on you and give birth to a superhorse.)   

TRANS AS KAFKA’S GIANT COCKROACH: This foul insect will cause you to be rejected by everyone you love.

TRANS AS PSYCHO: With a raging Oedipal complex, this girl will surprise you in the shower with a fatal gender reveal. (See also: TRANS AS BLOODY MARY: Lying in wait for you in your local public toilet, this time she’s going for the family jewels).

TRANS AS WITCH: They’ll cast spells against their enemies and catalyse unnatural transformations with their heady, pungent brews. 

TRANS AS SMOKESCREEN: There are real monsters out there, in the banks and in the White House. They might be coming after us right now, but they’ll soon be coming for you.

(See also: TRANS AS CODA: Don’t forget, they burnt our books first.)  

Image by dmitrynaumov via Canva.com