They Are Teaching You to Fear the Trans Community
Look at the screenshots accompanying this article. Different people. Different posts. Seemingly different topics: bathrooms, schools, children, women’s rights, safety, privacy, fairness, protection.
What do they all have in common?
Maybe you caught it immediately. Maybe you didn’t. Either way, I need you to see it now, because once you do, an enormous amount of what passes for “debate” about transgender people starts looking very different.
You are being taught to fear trans people.
Story after story places transgender people next to the same emotional triggers: danger, children, women, invasion, deception, unfairness, loss, threat. A trans woman uses a bathroom, and somebody else’s privacy is supposedly at risk. A trans teacher goes to work, and children are being “exposed” to something. A trans athlete becomes evidence that women’s sports are under attack. A trans child becomes evidence that their parents are groomers.
The details change, but the underlying lesson remains the same: there is something you value, and trans people are threatening it.
That is why, this September, Sisterhood Not Cisterhood is joining Trans Empowerment Project’s #LouderWithLove campaign to teach people how to recognize these patterns, understand why they work, and interrupt them. Suicide prevention includes changing the environment people are being asked to survive in long before somebody reaches a crisis point.
Once you see the pattern, you start seeing it everywhere
There is a well-established phenomenon in psychology called the illusory truth effect. In plain language, repeated information tends to feel more credible and familiar than information we encounter only once. Research has found that repetition can increase belief in misinformation even when claims initially seem implausible or contradict things people already know.
Think about what that means in practice. You see a story about a trans woman in a bathroom. Then a story about a trans athlete. Then a story about a trans prisoner. Then a teacher. Then a child. Then a trans woman accused of a crime. Then another bathroom, another athlete, another school board meeting. Nobody has to put a giant graphic on your screen saying TRANS PEOPLE ARE DANGEROUS, because the association is already being built for you.
Protection language makes that association especially powerful: protect women, protect children, protect privacy, protect fairness. It gives us someone to care about while quietly telling us who we should fear.
One of the screenshots that pushed me toward this campaign involved a transgender elementary-school music teacher. Adults described a “biological male music teacher who presents as a woman,” scrutinized her clothing and makeup, and centered a child who reportedly felt uncomfortable around her. Strip away all of that framing and ask the question I want you to start asking every time you encounter one of these stories: What did the trans person actually do?
Children are extraordinarily capable of accepting new information about the world around them. A child who encounters a transgender teacher can simply be told that some people are transgender, people come in all kinds of bodies, and this woman is her music teacher. On the other hand, adults can also teach that child that she is looking at a “man in a dress,” that something deceptive or inappropriate is happening, and that children should have been protected from seeing her.
If adults teach a child that a particular kind of person is dangerous, they cannot then point to the child’s resulting fear as proof that they were right.
The same question matters when a trans person actually does something harmful. We should absolutely hold that individual accountable. But cisgender people commit crimes every day without every other cis person being required to establish why they should still be allowed near bathrooms, schools, or children. An entire community does not owe us collective innocence in exchange for being allowed to exist.
Cis women, they’re doing this in our name
For cis women in particular, I need us to notice how often we are told trans people are taking something from us: our bathrooms, sports, privacy, safety, language, even the word woman itself. That framing turns another woman’s inclusion into our loss.
I am one of the women these people keep claiming to protect, and they do not speak for me. My womanhood does not shrink because a trans woman’s womanhood is recognized. I don’t become less safe because she is safe. My privacy does not require her humiliation, and my rights do not become stronger when hers become weaker.
You don’t protect me by hurting her.
Sisterhood Not Cisterhood exists because I refuse to accept the premise that cis women and trans women belong in opposing camps. When someone says, “We don’t want trans women in our bathrooms,” cis women can answer: You don’t speak for me.
In fact, we need to be doing that.
We also need to understand where policing womanhood leads. Cis women have already been questioned, investigated, and confronted because they looked too masculine, had facial hair, muscular bodies, deep voices, or simply failed somebody else’s visual inspection of femininity. I have personally known cis women who were approached and intimidated in restrooms because a stranger assumed they were transgender.
Stop for a second and think about how profoundly messed up that is.
When did we decide strangers should be entitled to inspect another woman while she is trying to use the bathroom and determine whether her body sufficiently proves her right to pee? Once we empower people to decide which women look suspicious enough to investigate, every woman who falls outside somebody’s personal template of femininity becomes potentially inspectable.
You do not make women safer by empowering strangers to police their bodies.
We need to talk about where this can lead
Anti-trans rhetoric routinely describes transgender people as deceptive, dangerous, predatory, mentally ill, fraudulent, or inappropriate around children. Psychological research on dehumanization gives us good reason to take that seriously: dehumanization has consequences for empathy, moral judgment, social exclusion, aggression, and what treatment of another group people become willing to tolerate.
And yes, we need to talk about genocide. I know what happens when that word enters a conversation. People get uncomfortable. They worry that saying it is too extreme. They start reaching for reassurance that things could never really get that bad.
I am not going to give you that reassurance.
In February 2025, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security warned that actions by the United States government were “in line with a genocidal process against the transgender community” that it said had been developing for more than a decade. Four months later, the Institute issued another Red Flag Alert warning that the process had “rapidly escalated.”
Genocide Watch identifies discrimination, dehumanization, polarization, and persecution among the processes societies should recognize and interrupt before mass violence reaches its worst possible endpoint. We should therefore be willing to sit with something terrifying: genocide is a possible outcome of unchecked anti-trans dehumanization, political scapegoating, discrimination, and state repression.
We do not know what the endpoint of the current trajectory will be. We do know that organizations whose work centers genocide prevention have looked at what is happening to trans people and sounded alarms using the language of genocidal process, escalation, and erasure.
That should scare us.
The answer to an early warning is not to keep sanding down the language until everybody feels comfortable again. History does not become history only after the bodies are counted. Every atrocity had a period when ordinary people could still tell themselves that surely it would never go that far.
Trans people are telling us they are frightened. Genocide-prevention institutions are sounding alarms. Governments are restricting healthcare, legal recognition, and participation in public life while the surrounding culture increasingly portrays trans people as threats to children, women, and society.
We do not need to know exactly how far this will go before deciding that our job is to stop it from going farther.
Less than three weeks ago, I experienced the hate first-hand
Less than three weeks ago, on my birthday, I made a Facebook post criticizing J.K. Rowling. I expected roughly the same audience most of my personal posts receive: a few friends, maybe a handful of reactions, and then Facebook would quietly bury it with everything else I post. After I made the post, I put my phone down and continued celebrating my birthday.
The next morning, I woke up to a pile of notifications. At first, I genuinely thought they were belated birthday messages or something of the sort.
They were very much not birthday messages.
My post had escaped my normal little corner of Facebook. It had been shared repeatedly, and hundreds of strangers were suddenly in my comments. Before I understood how large the pile-on had become, I laughed at a few of them. I even responded sarcastically to some. I have been online a long time, and a few random a-holes calling me something stupid is not particularly novel.
Then I saw how many comments there were, and I started reading. And reading. And reading.
The screenshots are still on my phone. I can still remember some of the comments almost word for word. These are not scars I have spent years polishing into a nice little story about resilience. I remember waking up expecting to continue my birthday celebrations through the weekend and feeling my mental health deteriorate in real time as I realized what hundreds of strangers were saying about me.
They attacked my body, appearance, intelligence, mental health, sexuality, and politics. They questioned whether I was a woman. They used slurs and normalized violence. Some echoed things previous abusers had said to me, and every comment became another tiny cut.
Somehow, they also started attacking me over trans people. I hadn’t mentioned trans people, bathrooms, sports, trans kids, pronouns, or gender-affirming care. I criticized J.K. Rowling, and the hate machine supplied everything else.
In less than 24 hours the number of comments had exceeded 700, and I wasn’t laughing anymore. I had expected to spend the weekend celebrating my birthday and instead ended up in a severe mental-health crisis. My husband eventually restricted the comments, deleted some of the worst ones, got me away from social media, and spent his time reminding me of all the things about myself that strangers had spent the day trying to make me forget.
I had support. I knew those people were wrong. I am a cis woman whose womanhood has never been questioned by society, and it still hurt like hell. I had spent years watching this machinery operate against trans people; Sisterhood Not Cisterhood exists because I already understood the harm. What those few days gave me was a visceral understanding of what hundreds of tiny cuts can do even when you know the knife is made of lies.
And I couldn’t stop thinking about trans people who experience this simply because they exist in public.
This is a suicide-prevention issue
The Trevor Project’s 2025 U.S. National Survey found that 86% of transgender and nonbinary young people surveyed had noticed harmful rhetoric about LGBTQ+ people during the previous year, and 40% had seriously considered suicide. Across LGBTQ+ young people, those who experienced in-person or online bullying reported attempting suicide at more than three times the rate of those who had not been bullied.
Trans identity does not inherently make somebody suicidal. People live inside environments, and rejection, discrimination, victimization, belonging, and support are part of those environments. Suicide prevention has to begin before somebody is already drowning by asking what kind of water we are making them swim through every day.
That brings me to those of us who call ourselves allies.
I need more from allies
I know plenty of people who support trans rights. They buy the shirt, share the Pride graphic, put the flag in their bio, and tell you they love their trans friends. I know far fewer cis people who regularly speak publicly about trans inclusion.
There is always a reason. They’re busy. They’re afraid of saying the wrong thing or being corrected. They don’t want to speak over trans people. They don’t want to confront their relatives. They definitely don’t want the Facebook mob turning toward them.
At some point, fear of doing allyship imperfectly becomes an excuse for not doing it at all.
Trans people are already expected to explain terminology, debunk misinformation, defend their healthcare, answer invasive questions, educate relatives, and confront people questioning their humanity. Those of us who call ourselves allies need to absorb more of that cost.
You might get corrected; then learn something and keep going. You might phrase something badly; fix it and keep going. Somebody might get angry that you spoke up. Keep showing up anyway.
Trans people themselves have told researchers that standing up for them matters. In Trevor Project’s research on supporting transgender and nonbinary young people, 85% identified “standing up for me” as something people in their lives could do to make them feel supported.
That is part of what #LouderWithLove is asking us to learn how to do. Sometimes showing up means correcting misinformation. Sometimes it means reporting abuse, documenting a threat, checking in privately, or offering to moderate somebody’s comments so they don’t have to read another hundred insults. Sometimes it means filling a comment section with enough humanity that the person being attacked can see the mob does not represent everybody.
And sometimes, especially for cis women, it means saying two very simple things:
You don’t speak for me. You don’t protect me by hurting her.
What I actually want
When I imagine what success looks like for Sisterhood Not Cisterhood and #LouderWithLove, I think about freedom. I want trans people to feel comfortable existing publicly without constantly calculating what it might cost them.
I want a trans woman to post the photo, wear the bikini, ask for makeup tips and proudly show how much she has learned. I want her to wear the dress with the frilly skirt, share the stupid meme, celebrate the haircut, talk about a terrible date, complain about work, be glamorous, be awkward, be loud, be shy, and be completely ordinary.
I want trans people to know that when somebody decides their ordinary existence is an invitation for cruelty, they will not automatically become responsible for educating, correcting and fighting every stranger who shows up. I want them to look at their comments and see allies already there. I want to see one hundred affirming comments for every hateful one.
I want #SNC to become a calling card. When somebody sees it beneath a supportive comment, I want them to know that somebody from Sisterhood Not Cisterhood is there. Our members should recognize each other and understand the assignment: support the person being targeted, add affirmation, report abuse where appropriate, offer help, and refuse to let hate occupy the entire space uncontested.
We are not building a mob to attack another mob, we are building a community of people who know how to make sure the person being hurt doesn’t have to stand there alone.
Trans people deserve to walk into a bathroom without wondering whether somebody will challenge them. They deserve to teach music without becoming a school-board controversy. They deserve to be teenagers whose biggest problem that day is an algebra test. They deserve the same boring, beautiful, messy freedom to exist that the rest of us expect for ourselves.
And those of us who really mean it when we call ourselves allies can help build that world.
Learn to see it. Then learn to interrupt it.
Over the next several weeks, Sisterhood Not Cisterhood and #LouderWithLove are going to dig deeper. We’ll teach the patterns that make anti-trans rhetoric effective, explain the psychology underneath them, and build practical tools for people who want to move from quietly supportive to actively useful.
For now, start paying attention. When you see a story involving a trans person, ask what actually happened before accepting somebody else’s framing. Notice who supposedly needs protection and who has been assigned the role of threat. Notice when one person’s actions become evidence against an entire community. Notice when somebody claims to speak for all women.
When somebody is targeted, show up. When you make a mistake, learn and come back. When a trans person tells you what support would help, listen. When hate gets repeated until it becomes familiar, help make love feel familiar too.
Make cis women standing beside trans women familiar. Make parents affirming trans kids familiar. Make trans teachers and trans neighbors familiar. Make trans joy familiar. Make seeing allies in the comments familiar. Make it so ordinary that trans people don’t have to keep wondering whether anybody is going to show up for them.
Want to keep going?
This article is only the beginning. Throughout September, we’ll be turning these ideas into practical tools you can actually use — including the “Learn to See It” downloadable guide, real-world examples and practice, and a live training on recognizing and interrupting anti-trans hate.
The best way to make sure you don’t miss any of it is to join our email list. We’ll send you the guide when it drops, the invitation to the live training, and the major resources from this campaign.
Want to talk about what you’re learning, bring us examples you’ve encountered, or practice alongside other people? Join the Sisterhood Not Cisterhood Facebook group. That’s where the conversation (and eventually our community bystander-support work) will live.
You don’t have to become an expert overnight. Just stay with us. Learn to see it. Learn to interrupt it. And when someone needs you, show up.
They are teaching people to fear the trans community. We are going to teach you to see how. And then we are going to teach you how to get #LouderWithLove.
Sources
Udry, J. & Barber, S. (2024). The illusory truth effect: A review of how repetition increases belief in misinformation. Current Opinion in Psychology. ScienceDirect
Haslam, N. & Loughnan, S. (2014). Dehumanization and Infrahumanization. Annual Review of Psychology. Annual Reviews
Genocide Watch. The Ten Stages of Genocide. Genocide Watch
Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security. (2025). Red Flag Alert for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States. February 2025 alert; Red Flag Alert 2 for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States. June 2025 alert
The Trevor Project. (2026). 2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People. National Survey; How to Best Support Transgender and Nonbinary Young People. Research Brief
