Like most trans women, my day-to-day life is rather more mundane than the media of decades past might have led one to believe: I get up in the mornings early enough to get ready for work, but not early enough to prepare a healthy breakfast. I procrastinate on chores and emails by watching inane television. I try to get 10,000 steps a day, but fail more often than I care to admit.

I used to go to parties and wear glamorous outfits in my 20s, but nowadays I’m mostly a yoga pants and sweater-dress kind of girl. I have bills to pay, teeth to brush. To tell the truth, I’m rather ordinary, and my sense is that most trans people are too, despite the presence of some extraordinary challenges (and the need for extraordinary resilience) in our lives.

This is why, lately, whenever I’m on the internet and caught in the now-omnipresent deluge of frenzied rhetoric about how trans women’s chest hair—or whatever—is a threat to society several orders of magnitude larger than the COVID pandemic and the climate crisis combined, all I can think of is Rachel McAdams’s legendary line from the cult classic teen movie Mean Girls:

“And I was like, why are you so obsessed with me?”

Earlier this month, United States congresswoman Nancy Mace launched a series of vociferous attacks on her trans colleague Sarah McBride, introducing legislation intended to ban trans people from using sex-segregated spaces such as bathrooms and changing rooms that do not correspond with their assigned sex at birth in any federally owned facility in the U.S.

Mace has repeatedly commented on McBride’s body in the news, making statements such as:

“This is an assault on women, a man being a biological man, a man with a penis, male genitalia—being in a women’s locker room is an assault on women” and “It is offensive that a man in a skirt could ever think [she’s] my equal, that |her| challenges are the same as mine. They’re not. [She’s] forcing [her] genitals into women’s restrooms, into dressing rooms, into locker rooms.”

Notably, McBride has indicated that she does not intend to use women’s restrooms in Congress, nor, to my knowledge, has she ever discussed genitalia—hers or anyone else’s—in a public forum. I can’t help but think that if anyone other than a trans woman had their hypothetical private parts spontaneously made the subject of an international bullying campaign by a coworker, it would be considered sexual harassment.

Yet McBride is indeed a trans woman, and by dint of that crime, she carries the same expectation as the rest of us do: to meekly accept the fact that the sexual boundary-crossings we experience on a daily basis from the rest of society—including those carried out by cis women—are not only a cultural norm but also our fault simply because we exist.

Transphobic hysteria has, throughout the 20th century, had a persistent and disturbing thread of sexual objectification of trans women and transfeminine people woven into it. The “gender critical” movement, like the trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) and anti-gay movements before it, is fixated on our bodies and a series of disturbing stereotypes, fears and fantasies that reject the possibility that we are actual people.

This sexual fixation is embedded in cultural expressions of transphobia over the decades. In the 1990s, films like The Crying Game and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective went out of their way to portray the idea of men having sex with trans women as a sensationalized nightmare. Meanwhile, the fields of psychiatry and psychology developed byzantine psychosexual theories about why trans women exist—theories that included as “science” the theorists’ personal evaluations of their research subjects’ attractiveness, as in the case of J. Michael Bailey, who included extensive commentary about his opinions of trans women’s sexual appeal in his infamous treatise on transsexualism, The Man Who Would Be Queen.

Today, the “gender critical” movement’s demands that children’s sports teams be subjected to invasive body monitoring in order to weed out trans athletes while trans-exclusionary feminists fanatically post pictures of trans women on social media in order to feverishly hyper-analyze and denigrate our physical appearances (which honestly doesn’t seem like the very most feminist thing to do). U.S. congresswomen lose their minds ranting on nation television about the hypothetical penis of a person they probably haven’t even met yet.

“The anti-trans movement is enabled by society’s refusal to recognize that what is happening to us is culturally sanctioned mass sexual harassment.”

To a girl who is honestly just trying to live her life and not be the centre of a global sex panic, the whole thing is concerning and frankly absurd. The contemporary anti-trans movement is fuelled in large part by a deeply bizarre and extremely unhealthy sexual obsession with trans women that is enabled by mainstream society’s stone-faced refusal to recognize that what is happening to us is a form of culturally sanctioned mass sexual harassment.

A key feature of the discrimination that trans women and transfeminine people experience is that any given place and any given time it’s open season on our bodies: Any amount of private and public speculation, questioning, commentary, criticism and theorizing about our genitals, secondary sex characteristics, facial features, sexual functioning and fashion sense is considered permissible and appropriate. For decades, it was considered de rigeur to ask trans women extensive questions about our private parts on TV talk shows such as Jerry Springer, Tyra Banks, Oprah and Katie Couric. I’ve been asked such questions on podcast and radio appearances—and also in more than one workplace. This casual dehumanization and hypersexualization of trans women is so commonplace as to go almost entirely unnoticed even among supposedly liberal and feminist circles—today, behaviour that would be considered creepy, shocking and harmful if perpetrated against a cis woman is proudly trumpeted on social and traditional media.

As a trans woman writer who works in the public sphere, almost all of my colleagues know that a common occupational hazard for us is being targeted by the “gender critical” movement, whose proponents will frequently comb furiously through trans women’s entire social media history searching for any photo of us in a swimsuit, wearing a halter top, or an otherwise “sexual” photo to back up the claim that we are dangerous perverts. This behaviour when levelled against cis women is today rightly denounced as slut shaming (and, again, creepy) in progressive and liberal circles but considered just “part of the deal” of existing when it comes to trans women.

In those instances where someone protests, the behaviour is justified as being a “defence” against the sexual perversions of trans women and trans fems (which we apparently perpetrate against others by existing in public). In other words, a classic case of the Deflect/Attack/Reverse Victim and Offender (DARVO) gaslighting technique frequently employed by serial abusers.

A social paradigm in the sexual objectification and demonization of trans women is justified as “protection” is one that has serious implications not only for transfeminine people but for all vulnerable members of society. Though trans women and trans fems are the targets, children of all genders and many cisgender women are also impacted by these obsessive attitudes and their accompanying actions.

This is because in the rush to discover and root out transfeminine bodies from society, practices of body surveillance and body policing, as well as a general rollback of bodily autonomy are already tightening their hold on society. As mentioned previously, adults are now taking it upon themselves to invigilate the bodies of children in gym classes and sports—and several elite adult women athletes who are not trans have recently found themselves on the receiving end of public humiliation and denigration because of suspected trans or intersex identity.

Similarly, as anti-trans hysteria grows, cis women who don’t fit conventional stereotypes of femininity are finding themselves less and less safe using public washrooms and changing rooms, the precise opposite of what the “gender critical” movement claims to champion. In their crusade to protect cis women and children from the supposedly sexually predatory trans community, gender critical activists themselves are subjecting whole swaths of the population to sexual harassment.

This disturbing irony is not unique, but rather a common feature of sex panics—New York University legal scholar and professor of Art Law, First Amendment Law and Feminist Jurisprudence Amy Adler points out in her work on pornography law that the zeal to catch predators often becomes a vehicle through which society’s collective predatory tendencies are unleashed. In the field of psychotherapy, this is called projective identification, the phenomenon through which we ascribe our own rejected qualities onto others.

I can understand and empathize with people who are unfamiliar with trans folks and have questions or even concerns. The unfamiliar is always frightening, and fear-mongering stereotypes about us have been around for decades. For the most part, I believe that dialogue and bridge-building are key to not only forwarding the trans rights movement but a better and safer world for all of us to live in.

However, meaningful dialogue requires a commitment to mutual respect and dignity, and believe it or not, it’s just not respectful or dignified to go on public tirades about the private parts of an entire population of human beings. As the kids say, it’s not very mindful, not very demure. We trans women and trans fems can only hope that the rest of society takes a collective deep breath, and perhaps a good, long look in the mirror.