Opinion | More Visible L.G.B.T. People Isn’t a Curiosity or a Crisis — It’s Normal

When I asked K.J. Rawson, an associate professor of English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Northeastern University and the director of the Digital Transgender Archive, if he’d noticed this phenomenon of the “too many trans people” trope, he told me that it reminded him of the sideshow era of the 19th and 20th century — where so-called freaks could proliferate and thrive, provided they stayed within the circus tent. Then, he said, there was an idea that “a certain amount of gender transgression was spectacular. As long as it’s still in that realm, it’s OK and it’s entertainment.” But he told me that when L.G.B.T. people stop being sources of entertainment and start being neighbors, coffee shop owners and even teachers, “I think that then those are the moments where you start to see far more anxiety about how much power these spaces can generate.”

As for the idea that some trans people are just victims of a social trend, Hugh Ryan, a scholar of L.G.B.T. history, traced it back to the work of 19th-century sexologists in an interview with me. According to Ryan, they drew a distinction between “inverts,” who are what they are, and those who exhibit “acquired inversion” — otherwise straight or cisgender people who began to identify as L.G.B.T. because of the influence of others.

Isaac Schorr put it similarly in National Review: “To suggest that social suggestibility could be playing a role in the skyrocketing numbers of young girls’ expressing their desire to become males, for example, is not of course to say that gay and transgender people would not exist without these topics’ being discussed in the public square. It’s only to say that people, and especially young people, are susceptible to being influenced on all manner of issues, especially when the arguments they’re hearing come from people in positions of authority — such as teachers — and are presented as truth.”

This fear is based on an understanding of gender and sexuality as alarmingly fragile, easily undone by a gay teacher or a trans TikTok influencer. But the vast majority of people are straight and cisgender, and the vast majority will no doubt be so in the future. And that will be good, because heterosexuality is good. And so is homosexuality, bisexuality and being transgender.

There’s been an objective increase in the number of visible L.G.B.T. people in the last decade. But the discomfort with that visibility isn’t an objective fact of life. There is no maximum number of people on earth who can be trans before we face civilizational ruin or planetary collapse. This is the first time in American history in which gay and trans people have been able to live as themselves in any real way, with jobs and marriages and dogs and cats and visibility. And when others panic about rising numbers and fret about what “causes” people to be trans (or queer in general), the not-so-hidden message is that repression might be necessary to stop them, as if the temptations of trans life are too alluring otherwise and might entice “normal” people too much. Yes, more people are trans now than they were a few years ago. And that’s … normal.