There Is No Trans Community

‘C ommunity” is one of those words that have been hijacked and ruined like “preferred,” “appropriation,” and “equity,” among many others.

In the wake of the Nashville shooting, of course, we’ve heard much about the aftershocks that have affected the “trans community.”

“Fear pervades trans community amid focus on Nashville shooter’s gender identity,” reported NBC News.

“Advocates fear an escalation of hate toward trans community after Nashville shooting,” warned NPR.

Karine Jean-Pierre referred to the “trans community” being “under attack.”

There are many problems with this reaction — perhaps most fundamentally, that there is no such thing as the “trans community.”

There has been a proliferation of ersatz communities in recent years, typically marching under the collective banner of “marginalized communities.”

In an entry on “communities of color,” the website of the Human Rights Campaign captured the prevailing usage perfectly: “People of color who are also LGBTQ+ face a unique set of challenges based on their experience at the intersection of two marginalized communities in our society.”

This ideological use of the word “community” has very little or no connection to the actual phenomenon, which involves a discrete set of people, often living in close proximity, who share common practices, values, and norms.

The great German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies defined community as “an organic, natural kind of social group whose members are bound together by a sense of belonging created out of everyday contacts covering the whole range of human activities.”

Your neighborhood is a community, your church is a community, and your pickleball league is a community.

To take a random example drawn from the life of Joe DiMaggio, there’s no doubt that Isola delle Femmine off the coast of Sicily, where the DiMaggio family had fished for generations, was a community and that North Beach in San Francisco, where Giuseppe DiMaggio moved the family around the turn of the century, was an Italian-immigrant community.

There are genuine, longstanding gay communities in neighborhoods of American cities.

But there is no overarching trans community any more than there’s a white, African-American, left-handed, or red-headed community.

It’s manifestly absurd to consider a disparate group of people constituting less than one half of 1 percent of the population spread out across the entirety of the country — from diverse walks of life and in different situations regarding their trans status — as a community.

Regarding their status, according to a recent study by the Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation, some of these people may just wear the clothes of the other sex, some may have had hormone treatments or surgical procedures; some may identify in public as trans all the time, some occasionally, some never at all; some, in fact many, may not even refer to themselves as trans.

It’s even more preposterous to talk of an LGBTQ community. There are plenty of gay people who think it’s wrong to try to convince what they consider gay girls or boys that they are really members of the opposite sex. They themselves have never had any doubt about their own sex, and they are supposedly part of the same community — thanks, mostly, to a widely cited series of letters — as people convinced they are the wrong sex?

The emphasis on faux community is obviously a function of identity politics. It is an attempt to play on our natural sense that communities deserve representation, and a way to flatten all members of a large group and subsume them into a single entity that progressives, and only progressives, can speak for.

If we believe what we are told, there’s no fashionable community in America that ever has a conservative attitude or sentiment. Surely, if most trans people develop doubts about aggressive gender-affirming treatments for minors, it will never be said that the “trans community” opposes such procedures.

Of course, if someone started referring to “the white community,” and expected collective emotions attributed to it to be accepted at face value and its political and social demands to be met, this would be considered ludicrous on the one hand and noxious on the other.

America in the 21st century needs more community, just not the kind that is on offer.