Like pretty much every other trans person on the planet, I watched Will Ferrell’s Netflix documentary Will & Harper. It’s a road trip featuring the titular duo, the Hollywood actor and his recently transitioned friend. Niko Stratis, a writer who is also trans, posted an interesting review that doesn’t gloss over the film’s flaws but makes it clear why it’s worth watching.

I think the experience of being trans on the road is different if you’re joined by a movie star, and a camera crew, and (probably) security. But I also don’t think all of those things negate how it feels to be sitting in a steakhouse in Texas while hundreds of people take photos of you to post insulting shit on Twitter with.

…I see myself a lot in corners of this movie. Harper wants to feel at home in her life as a trans woman, wants to hold onto the shades of the past she holds as important truths to her. She wants to drink shit beer, go to dive bars and race tracks and mud pits. It’s only that now when she does, she would prefer to wear a dress and heels when she does this and this should all be afforded her, she deserves that same as anyone, but we know this is not always going to be true, and confronting the way that the world has shut doors to you is a hard truth in transition for a lot of us who lived with relative ease and privilege. 

Jude Doyle’s piece on “the transgender tipping point” spurred one of its quoted experts, Julia Serano, to expand on her comments. As ever with Serano, this is worth reading: Revisiting The “Transgender Tipping Point” Ten Years Later.

I do believe there was a truly positive development for trans people taking place in the early 2010s that is potentially worthy of the moniker “tipping point.” For most of my life, the trans experience was typified by isolation and invisibility. Most of us grew up not knowing any other trans people and this sense of isolation was reinforced by how infrequently trans people and issues were covered in the media. Even as an adult, it was really hard to find trans community, especially if you weren’t living in a major city. Gender-affirming care was also extremely difficult to access, both because there were very few providers and most adhered to a strict gatekeeping system wherein only a select few “true transsexuals” (people who would be “passable” and heteronormative post-transition) were allowed to transition. This only added to the sense that very few trans people existed.

What changed, as Serano goes on to explain, was twofold. One, the internet suddenly enabled us to find information and support that was previously hard or even impossible to find. And healthcare, previously very hostile, moved to a more informed and evidence-based model that understood transness wasn’t a disorder to be cured but just part of human nature.

Those two changes were seismic; we got to see that we were not alone, and that we were not broken. And naturally that meant that more of us felt able to come out and be who we are.

As Serano says, the tipping point in the media was a confection, and it mistook trans visibility for trans acceptance. But there was a very real tipping point for trans and non-binary people in “trans autonomy and agency, where gender-diverse people could finally speak for ourselves and choose our own trans trajectories.”

Despite the best efforts of the media, and the UK media in particular, there has been a massive shift in trans visibility – and with that visibility comes understanding and acceptance. Serano points out that at the time of the “tipping point” article, just 9% of Americans said they knew somebody who was trans. By 2021 it was 42%. That means more trans and gender non-conforming people can see that they’re not alone, and that more people who aren’t trans can see that we’re no different from them.

As I’ve written endlessly, hatred thrives on ignorance; it’s one of the reasons the bigots want to ban any form of trans representation, and prevent us from living normal lives. But that genie isn’t going back into its bottle.

Jude Doyle is on superb form in this piece looking back at the famous “Transgender Tipping Point” cover of TIME. As the piece says, it often feels like we’ve tipped vertiginously backwards with open bigotry against us running unchecked in the press, politics and social media. Who’d have thought ten years ago that in 2024, “transphobe” would not just be a career option but a very lucrative one?

As one of the contributors, Katherine Cross, told Doyle, not all trans people were thrilled with the TIME cover. “there was a fear that this meant the Eye of Sauron was upon us, that whatever safety was afforded by the shadows of public ignorance was well and truly gone now.” Those fears proved to be well founded, and warnings by other marginalised people – people who knew very well that increased visibility often means little more than painting a target on people’s backs – were sadly prescient.

Doyle interviews another excellent writer, Parker Molloy, and the two discuss the way in which mainstream media effectively threw trans people to the wolves.

“The media, once eager to spotlight our stories for clicks and headlines, has largely abandoned us, leaving trans people to fend off a wave of hostility on our own. It feels bleak,” Molloy says. “It feels like we’re on our own, and I just have a hard time imagining things getting better in the near future.”

Doyle somehow manages to remain optimistic, and there are positives: we have a much wider and better informed community than we did ten years ago, and despite the bigots’ best efforts trans and non-binary people are not going to return to the bad old days when the world could pretend we didn’t exist.