I'm trans. The trans community's illiberalism is putting our rights at risk.

Victor Thorne is a rising junior at Grinnell College and a FIRE Summer Intern.

In recent years, the transgender community has gained a reputation for championing cancel culture. Unfortunately, this is largely true. 

In FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, a sample of 454 students who identified as nonbinary overwhelmingly reported support for illiberal protest tactics. (The survey does not have a separate category for female-to-male or male-to-female transitioners.) Almost nine in ten (86%) nonbinary students, compared to 63% of students overall, said that it could be acceptable to shout down a campus speaker. Seventy-three percent of nonbinary students showed some level of tolerance for physically blocking others from attending a speech, while only 45% of students overall said the same. Most shockingly, 53% — more than half! — of nonbinary students did not categorically oppose the use of physical violence to stop a speech. Compare that to 27% of students overall. 

This illiberalism doesn’t only hurt some dominant majority. It hurts everyone. I am trans myself, and my identity has not saved me from ending up on the wrong end of trans activism. 

In order to protect our future, trans activists must look to the successful social movements of the past — and embrace free speech.

In the fall of my sophomore year, frustrated with the ideological conformity at my school, Grinnell College, I started a free speech club. Since identity politics are so prominent at Grinnell, I naïvely hoped that my identity and the visible diversity of the club’s members would help protect us from backlash. I was wrong. Instead, I was shunned and insulted by a huge portion of people on campus who thought calls for free speech, no matter who made them and why, were a pretense for spreading hate. At one point an administrator even threatened to deregister my club. 

But one incident in particular stands out from the rest. A month or so into the semester, members of the campus trans group showed up to one of our meetings. One student was friendly, and said they came out of curiosity. Another, however, said that they and their friends were here “to decide” whether we were “Nazis.” I was taken aback — none of us had ever said anything to suggest that, and in my view, it was pretty clear just by looking at us that we all had very good reason to oppose fascism. I, of course, responded that we weren’t. The student retorted that they were here to decide this for us. 

Knowing how badly I was treated for simply believing in free speech and civil debate, I can only imagine what might happen to someone who more directly challenges activist orthodoxy. Someone like Carole Hooven, a former Harvard University evolutionary biologist specializing in sex differences, who I recently met at the FIRE Student Network Conference. 

At the conference, Carole and I had a long conversation about her ideas. She was nothing but kind to me and showed an obvious passion for finding the truth. But the same woman who insisted that seeking the truth should not stop anyone from treating others with kindness and respect, and who urged me not to listen to people who spoke from a place of hate instead of curiosity, was harassed out of a job by trans activists simply for saying that scientists should use the words “male” and “female” in their work. Carole’s case is particularly upsetting, but it’s only one of many stories in which trans activists whipped up a mob and sometimes even tried to ruin people’s lives over often-minor disagreements. 

For example, journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal came under attack for writing about detransitioners — people who decide to stop or reverse a gender transition. In Katie’s case, the backlash was so intense that she moved cities to escape it — protesters even graffitied her employer’s door. In the U.K., which does not have America’s speech protections, police used hate speech laws to investigate citizens who made offensive comments about trans people online. And perhaps most famously, author JK Rowling received, in her own words, “so many death threats [she] could paper the house with them” for her comments on trans issues. I don’t endorse Rowling’s opinions, but threatening someone with murder to suppress speech you hate and fear is beyond the pale.

In such a context, it comes as little surprise that Americans are becoming less progressive on trans issues. 

There are good arguments for pro-trans positions, but to convince anyone of their merits, we have to actually express them in conversation with those who disagree.

From 2017 to 2024, the share of Americans who believed that a person can change their gender declined from 45% to 34%. Blanket bans on trans-related medical treatments for adolescents — the same treatments that took me from dropping out of high school to becoming a FIRE intern — were nonexistent in the U.S. until 2021 and are now the law of the land in 25 states. In his 2016 presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump emphasized his support for the LGBT community and initially opposed a bill in my home state of North Carolina’s bill that restricted trans people’s ability to use the bathroom of their choice — before partially backtracking but maintaining that he would not enforce such a policy on his own property. Now, he rails against “the left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children” and promises voters that, if elected, he will “sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” 

Advocating for our rights through censorship and cancel culture is winning us no friends. But gay and lesbian history shows us that censorship is not the only way. 

FIRE Senior Fellow James Kirchick, a journalist who wrote a book on gay history in Washington, D.C., points out that “every advance gay people have made in this country has been the result of the exercise of free expression.” 

‘So to Speak’ podcast: ‘The First Amendment created gay America’

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“Every advance gay people have made in this country has been the result of the exercise of free expression,” argues writer James Kirchick, author of the New York Times bestseller, “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”

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Until the last decade or so, the LGBT community was known for its intelligent self-defense and biting humor. I recall the battle for gay marriage was won in large part because of the repeated failure of opponents to articulate their reasoning in a way that made sense to secular audiences. Gay activists of days past believed that truth was on their side and fought for the right to speak it. Trans activists of today suppress their critics and claim it is not their job to educate them. To the average person, such a deep lack of faith in one’s own position comes across as unsympathetic and unpersuasive. 

There are good arguments for pro-trans positions, but to convince anyone of their merits, we have to actually express them in conversation with those who disagree. What’s more, we cannot resort to forcibly suppressing the views of our ideological opponents. 

In order to protect our future, trans activists must look to the successful social movements of the past — and embrace free speech.