The truth about transphobia: Trans people aren't the ones denying reality

In recent years, politicians have ramped up efforts to exclude transgender people, including reducing access to gender-affirming care (GAC), preventing trans people from aligning their ID documents with their gender identity and creating intolerance in the education system.

For instance, if passed, the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act would eliminate federal funds for any education material acknowledging trans people.

While religious fundamentalism and bigotry are sometimes behind these anti-trans policies, there is another dimension I want to focus on: the rhetoric that these actions are defenses of “truth” and “scientific fact.” 

Proponents of these policies often portray themselves as champions of objective reality, combating what a 2025 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announcement referred to as “delusional ideology.” 

Let’s compare policy and rhetoric with science and see who truly deserves that label.

In a 2025 presidential action titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” President Trump attempted to establish concrete definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and to eradicate ‘gender ideology’ within the U.S. government. 

In the action, Trump condemns attacks on the “longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms,” simplifying ‘female’ to “the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” and vice versa. Gender identity is dismissed as subjective and irrelevant. 

This simplistic idea has long been scientifically disproven — a fact that the medical community responded with, to no avail. 

Assuming that sex is fully and concretely determined at conception by chromosomes ignores, for example, the possibility of a male genotype expressing itself in external features while the brain takes on a female phenotype, as shown in a 1995 study published in Nature. This is merely one of many scientific counterexamples to the President’s simplistic notion.

In addition to promoting false information about biological sex, anti-trans commentators frequently dismiss the science of gender dysphoria and GAC. 

In his video series “The Holy Sexuality Project,” Christopher Yuan opposes GAC for people with gender dysphoria, arguing that because “sex is objective and gender is subjective, you’d think we’d value conforming subjective thoughts to objective truth.” 

If he had bothered to look at the research, Yuan might have learned that conforming gender identity to match physical characteristics is practically impossible, while various types and degrees of GAC are proven to have significant positive effects for individuals with gender dysphoria. A 2024 study in The Lancet Psychiatry illustrated the detriments of conversion attempts, and a 2022 Yale report responded to unscientific criticism of GAC.

Yuan’s passion for “objective truth” seems to be missing when it contradicts his ideology in the form of scientific evidence.

The science behind this issue is far too complicated to even scratch the surface here, but that is the crux of the problem: the situation cannot be contained in binary definitions.

Old understandings of sex and gender have been undermined not by ideology but by science. “Delusional ideology” is what seeks to keep disproven scientific standards in place.

Proponents of anti-trans measures often argue that legislation is necessary to protect women in cases like sports and public bathrooms.

However, bills like Stop the Sexualization of Children Act betray that ideology is what is really being protected. The bill would amend the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act to prohibit funding for school materials and programs that contain sexually oriented material. While defining ‘sexually oriented material,’ the bill sweeps in anything that so much as mentions “gender dysphoria or transgenderism.” 

Equating those subjects with explicit sexual content makes no logical sense.

This fallacy shows bills like this are tools for ideological manipulation instead of guards against it, blatantly seeking to protect a simplistic and outdated way of viewing sex and gender instead of protecting people. Students would profit from understanding these subjects, as would the individuals whose identities are acknowledged by the material.

This is not a condemnation of anyone who is convinced by these self-proclaimed defenders of truth — I fell for their arguments in the past as well — but rather an invitation to the right side of history. 

Denying scientific findings about transgender people, gender dysphoria and GAC is a denial of reality, and creating legislation to purge those subjects from the education system is a suppression of it.