The wish is to preserve the notion that sex identity and the privileges accorded male humans are essential, ordained, real, and true. The secret knowledge is that male supremacy is enforced by power and is not biologically essential or determined. The secret understanding is that masculinity has to be learned and male supremacy has to be propped up by policing any threats to its control and understanding of itself. Females, homosexuals, trans people, gender fluid people, people who defy gendered dress codes, etc., all of these people threaten the notion that maleness is a single, biologically determined thing. Everyone on the planet by now knows it is not. Everyone knows you have to protect it all the time or the truth of everyone’s hybrid nature will force a redistribution of power between the sexes everywhere humans exist. The closer the awareness that male supremacy is not real, the higher the degree of panic. The higher the degree of panic, the more brutal the enforcements on gender separation and the quarantining of bodies, lest maleness itself be contaminated and fatally weakened by proximity to femaleness and other non-binary bodies. The panic suggests to those fighting the hardest that the contamination has already happened. The attack is the denial of knowledge that really can’t be deleted.

The threat to all trans people is also a threat to all female humans, whether or not they acknowledge it. Any woman and any feminist who does not see her predicament as intimately linked to the predicament of transpeople has a sadly enfeebled understanding of patriarchy.