Journal Club: The Myths Driving Anti-Trans Policy
A 2025 paper analyzes the myths surrounding trans folk and the ways these myths drive anti-trans policy. Assigned Media dives into this paper and its findings.
by Veronica Esposito
Unlike other marginalized groups, transgender people are a vanishingly small fraction of the population—around 1 - 2 percent by a recent estimate made by the Williams Institute, meaning it is likely that many cis people will not have personal experiences with trans people. In addition, many trans people choose not to highlight their trans status—instead simply blending into the cisgender population—making cisgender people even less likely to have personal experience with a trans person.
Because of this, anti-trans voices have been able to capitalize on widespread ignorance about trans lives to spread falsehoods about the community. According to research made by Kelsey A. Kehoe and Heidi M. Levitt, myths about trans people are an integral part of the legislative assault on trans rights that has occurred in 2025, and likely for many years prior.
In their research paper, Kehoe and Levitt note that the myths spread about trans people have a self-reinforcing effect: as negative ideas about trans people become more prevalent, individuals from the community become more likely to hide themselves, making it less and less likely that everyday people will have the opportunity to meet a trans person and dispel some of those myths.
In order to counteract that, Kehoe and Levitt published their research paper in hopes of bringing about greater empathy for actual trans experiences—and to dispel the boogeymen conjured by hateful actors in the right wing: “We sought to counter the increasing dehumanization of trans people in political rhetoric in hopes of creating opportunity for empathic connection with these lived experiences by conducting a qualitative meta-analysis focused on trans identity development.”
Kehoe and Levitt scraped databases containing thousands of research articles, eventually narrowing down their search to 27 qualitative studies of how trans people develop their identities. They then sorted the findings of these papers into various clusters, eventually arriving at agreed truths professed by the majority of papers.
In their research, Kehoe and Levitt identified 3 primary myths underlying the bulk of anti-trans legislation released in 2025:
Myth: Gender Is Biologically Determined and Immutably Cisgender and so Trans Affirmation Is Regrettable.
Myth: Suppressing Trans Representation Makes Gender Diversity Go Away.
Myth: Trans People Seek to Manipulate Gender to Cause Harm to Women and Children
As the authors write, these myths amount to a complete reversal of what trans people know about ourselves, and what the research into trans people finds: that our internal sense of gender identity is fixed and enduring, that we we are not turned trans due to contagion from popular media, that we will persist in our transness even in the face of overwhelming cisnormativity, and that living as trans exposes us to great threat.
Essentially, Kehoe and Levitt have found that dozens of legislatures across the county are enacting laws to harm and curtail trans lives based on complete falsehoods about trans people. For instance, as they write, “bills censoring trans representation have been created based on the assumptions that restricting peoples’ ability to publicly express themselves, restricting access to materials that allow for identity exploration, and instilling fear of being outed will ‘protect’ children from becoming trans.”
In contrast to these falsehoods, they find a central truth of actual trans experience in the research: that trans people largely have to unpack and dismantle the imposed assumption that it is normal and right to be cisgender in order to begin to explore who they actually are. For instance, in one of the studies reviewed, a trans man stated that he was “trying very hard to wear and present a female, heterosexual mask.”
Once trans people begin to do the work of understanding that a cisgender life has been imposed on to them, the research shows that they frequently begin to experience greater confidence as they change the gender through which they relate to the rest of the world. As Kehoe and Levitt explain, this confidence comes from letting go of others’ expectations of how they should be and feeling the happiness of finally being able to be themselves. One nonbinary individual participating in a study described this happiness as “literally lifesaving” and “electric.”
Far from the regimented lockstep that transphobes imagine the transition process to be, the research indicates that gender exploration and transition is in fact nonlinear and creative. Kehoe and Levitt write that this is a time when trans people develop the language to express their own experience and begin to find mentors within the trans community and its allies. One African American trans man spoke in a study about the importance of finding a mentor who reflected his experience.
I mean before the only examples I had were. . . . White guys who had [transitioned]. . . . But . . . seeing people who . . . came from a similar experience. . . . It was like, “Oh yeah, no I don’t have to be lonely” I think that for me it was really important to see. . . . [It] was, just inspiring to me. “I mean it was like, yeah, they can do it, so can I.”
Through transition, trans people come to learn to navigate the challenge of dealing with the threats imposed by the cisgender world, find means of self-empowerment and autonomy, and do the work of living a life with a stigmatized identity.
The picture of the trans experience that comes about in the research is a beautiful process of opening up to oneself, finding greater and greater liberation while learning to live in an often frightening and harsh world with authenticity and realness. It is a far cry from the caricature that legislators have painted of trans people as being controlled by others and attempting to bring deception and maliciousness into their lives.
What Kehoe and Levitt’s research indicates is that the truths embodied by the trans community are powerful and consistent with American values of freedom, self-determination, and the pursuit of happiness. The more the world comes to know these truths, the more that trans people will be understood and respected. The greatest weapon in the arsenal against trans freedom are widespread efforts to pose misinformation about trans people that obscure the facts and replace them with falsehoods that are the exact opposite of what the research shows.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.