OCTOBER 10, 2025 | OPINION | By Fiona Frankel
I will start by saying that I am a cisgender woman writing about transgender rights. I identify with the sex I was born as, as do the majority of my close friends and family. And though I interact with trans peers often at Colorado College, I cannot understand their experience to the extent that I would if I were not cisgender. This part of myself exemplifies the very point I intend to make in this article.
To contextualize, there is an extensive amount of anti-trans sentiment, action and resulting legislation occurring in the United States right now. On the day that President Trump was sworn into office, he signed Executive Order 14168, titled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, which federally defined sex as binarily male or female. Eight days later, he passed Executive Order 14187, Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, heavily limiting access to gender affirming care for Americans under age 19. Three further orders banned trans women from participating in women’s sports at all levels of education, barred trans people from joining the military and prohibited gender education and social support of trans children within schools.
This action has been somewhat supported by constituents. Last spring, though Trump’s approval ratings fluctuated around 40%, the approval ratings for his handling of “transgender issues” were over 10 points higher. A Pew Research poll found that since 2022, Americans have become increasingly against laws and policies that secure the freedoms of trans people, including the legalization of gender education in schools, protection from workplace discrimination and freedom to use the bathroom correlated with one’s gender identity. Additionally, 53% of those polled oppose healthcare companies covering medical care for gender transitions, a procedure that can cost upwards of $120,000.
The issue of transgender women participating in women’s sport has become particularly salient, one that roughly 75% of Americans currently oppose. Scarcely in this conversation does the sheer triviality of the issue arise; out of over 500,000 NCAA athletes, fewer than 10 identify as transgender, about 0.002%. Still, the concern surrounding trans athletes has infiltrated debates across the United States, from the Supreme Court to local school boards.
In an interview with Ezra Klein last June, Delaware Representative Sarah McBride, the only openly transgender member of Congress, extended a fair amount of clarity towards the growing anti-trans movement in the United States. She condemned the bigotry within these efforts, describing a “very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics.”
But McBride also attributed some of this division to a false sense of security within the LGBTQ+ community that led to this point. She expressed concern that, at its conception in the 2010s, the trans rights movement was lumped in with the LGBTQ+ acronym to create a forcefully accepting culture, regardless of how well the idea of transgender identities was fundamentally understood. Some people, McBride contends, regretted opposing gay marriage in the 1990s, and saw trans rights as a similar issue to get on the right side of from the very beginning.
Further, McBride explained how the gay rights movement gained traction in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, with straight people eventually coming around to the idea of homosexuality not only out of empathy and openness, but because they could understand what it felt like to love. Regardless of sexuality, the majority of people can understand the inability to choose who to love, and this subconscious process may have enabled easier conversations about sexual orientation.
The discussion around transgender rights differs greatly, however. There is no analogous experience for cisgender people to gender dysphoria. “The closest thing that I can compare it to,” McBride said, “was a constant feeling of homesickness, just an unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed as myself.”
Still, this discrepancy has inherently contributed to the wave of transphobia and anti-trans legislation sweeping the U.S. recently. There is a fundamental absence of ability to understand the experience of transgender people, as well as a lack of effort to do so. I am a cisgender person, with my gender identity corresponding with the sex I was born as. I am also a strong supporter of transgender rights. I believe that information on gender identity should be taught as early as elementary schools, in addition to curricula on sexuality, consent and sex. Transgender people should be permitted to serve in the military and protected in the workplace. Gender-affirming care should be covered by health insurance companies and by Medicaid.
I say all of this with the understanding that I cannot, in fact, understand the transgender experience. I will never know what it feels like to have my gender identity differ from my birth sex. And that is where my understanding ends and compassion begins. I can extend empathy, sensitivity and love to the experience of trans people, despite not harboring the same experience. It is akin to how white antiracist allies approach the experience of people of color to wholly believe in the prevalence and harms of systemic racism, or the men who participated in the Women’s March. White people will never know what it feels like to be victimized by race-based discrimination, police brutality or casual racism. (White) men will never understand the experience of fear to walk alone at night, learning to cover one’s drink or the all too conceivable UN data indicating that 97% of women have experienced sexual harassment.
So while cisgender people cannot fully understand the experience of trans people, that is not an excuse to dismiss their existence, rights and needs. It is possible to maintain support for a group of people’s right to be treated humanely, and comprehend that the limits to understanding do not have to impede on one’s compassion. Trans rights are indeed human rights: even cisgender people can understand that.