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Trans flag hung in protest in Yosemite National Park: 'Trans people are natural'
(www.thepinknews.com)
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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I'm going to be that guy, and no, this isn’t a gotcha. I’m a trans ally. I support the existence, rights, and dignity of trans people. But I’m allergic to lazy thinking; even from my own side.
“Trans people are natural.” Cool sentiment. Terrible framing.
First off, “natural” is a word people use when they’ve run out of real arguments. It’s vague, emotionally loaded, and epistemologically useless.
Plenty of things are “natural”: cancer, infanticide, parasites, sexual coercion. Doesn’t make them desirable. Doesn’t make them moral. If you want to make a moral case for something, do it without the crutch of nature.
Second, let’s talk about optics. When you say “trans people are natural,” you’re not helping. You’re feeding into the exact framework used against queer and trans people for decades; the idea that something has to be “natural” to be valid.
Why are we reinforcing that standard? Why are we bending over backwards to find a species of fish that flips sexes and pretending that proves anything about human gender identity?
Transgender identity is not “natural” in the biological sense. There’s no mammalian precedent for someone born male socially transitioning to live as female with a nuanced internal experience of gender. That’s not how “natural” animal behavior works. But so what? Who gives a shit?
Being trans is a human phenomenon; emergent from consciousness, culture, language, and self-reflection. You know, all the “unnatural” stuff that makes humans interesting. The wheel isn’t natural. The internet isn’t natural. Civil rights aren’t natural.
Trans people don’t need to be validated by nature. They need to be validated by ethics. By compassion. By rational moral reasoning.
So let’s stop appealing to nature. It’s weak, it’s misleading, and it sets the movement back by anchoring it to bad philosophy.
Framing trans people as natural is direct contradiction of the common rhetoric that "trans people are unnatural" thus dangerous and you know that. You're not a trans ally. Be kind and be honest, please. This planet needs good people.
As mentioned in my post, in response to people falling for the naturalistic fallacy: "So what? Who gives a shit?"
Whether it's natural or not is simply the wrong metric by which to evaluate whether someone has a right to exist or be treated with dignity.
It’s akin to someone saying to you after you've dyed your hair, "that's not natural," and then you scramble to insist that it is.
The right response is: "So what? Who gives a shit?"
Also: how do you read this and think I'm anything but an ally? I'm explicitly advocating for compassion, dignity, and equal rights for trans people. Pushing back on bad reasoning doesn't contradict that; it strengthens it.
If your definition of “ally” means I’m required to accept weak arguments without criticism, then you don’t want allies. You want sycophants. And I’m not signing up for that.
I’m not interested in moral purity contests where allyship is contingent on uncritical agreement.