Welcome to the Waves, Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and social constructs galore.

And today you've got me, Soul Worthen, a homepage editor at Slate.

Right now in the US, trans people are a major bogeyman.

Their identity, trans rights, non-binary people, they're all often treated as a punchline

by the right and supposed proof that society is falling apart.

One common transphobic argument is that trans people are deceptive or even delusional

because at the end of the day sex is this concrete, fixed, unchangeable thing and trans people

are basically trying to override that reality.

So in this vision of the world, whatever it says on your birth certificate is essentially

something that will define you forever, no matter what you do after you're born.

I find this argument really offensive and frankly tiresome.

It's not some bold new claim, it's old news.

Trans activists and scholars have spent a long time and a lot of energy explaining the

nuances of sex and gender and making the case that self-identity matters more than whatever

your legal documents say.

So I went to women's college and when I first got there, the admissions policy was that

only people whose identity documents said that they were female were eligible for admission.

I was involved with student activism to get the admissions policy changed to allow trans

women to attend.

A big part of our argument was that the college should focus on self-identity rather than

relying on birth certificates because under the original admissions policy, trans men whose

documents listed them as female could attend the school, but trans women whose documents

...