Last week, I posted a provocatively worded pair of tweets making a series of points. The second of these—“there is no such thing as a designer vagina under communism”—was reposted to Bluesky over and over for more than a week. I received a lot of pushback, both public and private. Some of it was thoughtful and well-intentioned, including this article by Abigail Thorn that I think is worth reading.
Because that last line got the most attention, I want to walk through the entire thing. Each statement came from a real observation, even if the way I phrased it was meant to provoke thought rather than comfort.
1. “I believe the far left is preying on the desperation of trans people in their search for revolutionary cannon fodder, and it is hurting people.”
This is based on my personal experience of watching viral doomer tweets and Substack essays create massive anxiety and depression in our community. I think that’s intentional to some degree. There are people who dream of a revolution to overthrow the liberal order, and they have a vested interest in convincing us that only collapse will save us—that everything short of revolution is betrayal.
What happens is that trans people, already desperate and scared, become easy recruits. We’re told to reject incremental progress, to abandon electoral politics, to disengage from anything that isn’t radical enough. It’s a seductive story: burn it down, and then things will finally be fair.
But it’s also a story that leaves us more isolated and hopeless—and easier to manipulate.
I’ve watched as trans women who get involved in militia activity or self-styled “defense groups” are used by the government and right-wing media to frame us all as violent and dangerous. The YouTubers egging them on make ad revenue and build their brands while facing few consequences themselves. The people who actually show up to protest with rifles are the ones who get doxxed, arrested, or worse.
When people start profiting off our despair, that’s not solidarity. That’s exploitation.
2. “We cannot afford to eschew electoralism, nor can we take peace for granted.”
I’ve watched with horror the combination of increasingly violent rhetoric in American politics with the devastation in Ukraine and Gaza. To think that a war here would somehow be cleaner or kinder is the work of fantasy.
We have no idea what would rise from the ashes.
Even though things feel grim in the United States right now, more trans people than ever are gaining access to lifesaving medication and surgery—largely because of reforms made through the democratic process, like the Affordable Care Act. That’s what progress looks like: slow, uneven, frustrating, but real.
My own facial feminization surgery took eleven hours. Eleven hours of anesthesia. A team of surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and recovery staff. Expensive equipment. Power. Clean water. Sterile supplies. None of those things survive a war intact.
If the hospitals are being bombed, you’re not getting your tracheal shave. You’re praying your hormones are still being manufactured somewhere, by someone, in a factory that hasn’t been turned into rubble.
3. “Transsexualism in America as we conceive of it is bourgeois—the product of a society that venerates the freedom of the individual to choose.”
This was another line that drew anger, and I understand why. It’s hard to hear the word bourgeois applied to something that feels so personal and hard-won.
But what I meant was this: the modern American conception of transness—of becoming a woman or man in the way we imagine it—is built on the liberal idea that the individual has the right to define their own truth.
Even with the recent backsliding in this country, we still prize individual self-expression to a degree that’s extraordinary by global standards. A society that prioritizes the collective good above all else is likely to emphasize fitting in, not self-discovery. It is less likely to create space for those who cannot or will not conform.
Trans people exist in every culture. Sometimes, in non-Western societies, they are more visible or integrated—but often as a third sex, a social role outside womanhood or manhood, rather than within it. That is not better or worse; it is simply different. But it underscores that our particular vision of transition—the one that includes access to hormones, surgeries, names, and pronouns as tools of self-actualization—is distinctly tied to liberal individualism.
We should be honest about that. And we should protect it.
4. “There is no designer vagina under communism, I’m sorry.”
This line was my most provocative—and my most misunderstood.
I’m aware that countries like Cuba theoretically guarantee gender-affirming care. But theory is not the same as practice. Those guarantees are only meaningful if the system has the surpluses, infrastructure, and incentives to make them real.
After the tweet went viral, I talked to people who had grown up under communist regimes. They described rations so limited that milk after the age of seven was considered a luxury. They talked about bribing officials to get soap, and turning to the black market for everything else.
A society that treats milk as a luxury will almost certainly treat breast implants the same way, no matter how much they might ease dysphoria. And because of the scarcity, the most talented surgeons—the ones capable of eleven-hour reconstructions, microsurgery, or complex facial work—often leave. They go where they can earn enough to support their families, or simply where they can practice without bureaucratic interference.
That’s not ideology. That’s human nature.
When we imagine a revolution that abolishes capitalism, we should at least be honest about what it would cost. Every surplus we rely on—the anesthesiologist’s steady hands, the specialized titanium screws, the sterile gloves—comes from a system that produces abundance. Without it, we’re not liberated. We’re limited.
While things for trans people have been really scary and frustrating in recent memory, there isn’t another time or place in history where I’d rather be trans than Seattle in 2025. I can walk down the street holding my partner’s hand. I can get my hormones at the pharmacy. I can recover from surgery with clean running water and antibiotics and Wi-Fi.
Things could be better. But they could always be worse.
Liberal democracy is fragile and flawed, but it’s the only framework we’ve found that consistently expands freedom instead of constraining it. We shouldn’t let despair or aesthetic radicalism convince us to throw it away.
