The White Lotus Is Stealth Trans Hate.
FOUR WEEKS AGO, a doctor in one of the few remaining blue states in America leaned in close to me and said: “Let’s get real.”
In the event that it became illegal for him to prescribe testosterone, he said, he wanted to know if I had any stockpiled.
I acknowledged that, for more than a year, I’d been puncturing my vials well beyond their medically advised periods so that I could have a little extra in case of emergency.
For anyone who is unaware: Testosterone is a controlled substance. I have to hand over my ID at my pharmacy every single time I pick it up, though I’ve been picking it up for more than seven years now—and though I also pick up enough gabapentin to literally kill someone, every time, ID-free.
Gabriel Mac
Testosterone therapy “causes no change in mortality risk,” even longterm. There appears to be a singular case of testosterone overdose “in the literature,” and it involved one cis male whose total plasma concentration of it was 11,400 nanograms per deciliter. For reference, the “normal” range is anywhere from 300 to 1,000 ng/dL for men under 40, and it goes down another hundred or two hundred points per decade from there.
“Do you feel okay?” my first endocrinologist asked me in 2018, after one of my blood tests showed I was at 1,600 ng/dL. I was taking a normally prescribed amount, but everyone metabolizes testosterone differently. She asked me if I was feeling angry. I immediately dropped my intake, despite sitting across from her in that room blinking as placidly as an endangered owl, saying: “I feel fine.”
Because I did. It was a low bar, but I felt better than I’d ever felt.
“Testosterone is my boyfriend,” I’ve said countless times since. Testosterone Forever, I’ve titled the book I’ve been writing about its effects (did you know that if you were born with a vagina, it might make you super, super, extra fucking wet?). As soon as I started taking it, I knew that I never wanted to stop. And now, I’ve also long had my reproductive organs entirely, mercifully removed.
Know this: I woke up feeling light as air from that extra-special hysterectomy (uterus + ovaries + cervix + fallopian tubes—somehow, there’s no one encompassing medical term for this; even “radical hysterectomy” means only uterus, cervix, and top of vagina, generally for cancer treatment). I ate the popsicle the nurse handed me, bouncing in my hospital bed delighted as fuck even though she insisted on calling me “she” no matter how many times my boyfriend and I corrected her.
I’ve yet to have a single gender-affirming surgery, out of five, without being misgendered, dehumanized, or both—though I’ve had them all in the world’s-supposedly-most-woke Bay Area.
Know that my super-special hysterectomy (™!) means that if I stop taking testosterone, I’ll go into hard, abrupt menopause.
My body had started making less estrogen when I started T; when you take enough, your ovaries sort of give up the ship. Once, when I still had them, I briefly switched from weekly higher-testosterone shots to a low-dose gel that I slathered all over my upper body daily. My T levels dipped enough that my ovaries fired up again—along with my periods, which had stopped with the shots.
My boyfriend at the time and I leaned in. One day, we painted his body with my blood when we had sex, ruining my cream bamboo sheets.
“It might be worth keeping at least one ovary if they’re not bothering you,” my surgeon at the University of California-San Francisco said during my hysterectomy consult.
When I pressed her on why she recommend this—because I’m a fact-checker for life—she conceded that it was only a vague sense doctors had that having ovaries “in the background” might be helpful for AFAB people’s health, even if we took enough testosterone to keep them dormant ’til we died.
Gabriel Mac
“They are bothering me,” I told her.
And that was the end of that.
“I’d rather go through menopause,” I told my friends, “than have my body start making estrogen again.” I’d had way more than enough of it already. And I’d still make a little, as we all do.
Because trans people and trans health have been so reviled and ignored for so long, there’s no good research on how men who’ve had their ovaries removed are affected when they can’t (or don’t) take one hormone or other. But doctors agree that they need to take some. I know transmasculine people who kept one or both of their ovaries because they wanted them. I also know transmasculine people who kept their ovaries only and expressly to avoid being impacted by a hormone-unavailability apocalypse. I remember sitting with them in support groups while they explained this decision, thinking: This is not how I will make my decision.
The morning I checked in for my procedure, in 2019, a nurse had me confirm that I wanted them to remove everything. I remember the panic that bubbled up—the What if something terrible happens—but I knew that if I woke up with even one ovary, it would ooze dysphoria, a body-racking pain that I could not live with. I wasn’t going to try just because someone might try to eradicate us someday.
“Okay,” my surgeon had said in our consult when I told her to take it all. “Okay,” the pre-op nurse said, too. That was then, before the president at the time got re-elected, his party spending $200+ million on ads about how I, a trans person, am not a person at all.
“ARE THEY WOMEN?!” one vapid character on this season’s The White Lotus (a rich teenage white dude whose personality is, I guess, “Virgin”) asks an equally vapid character (an old rich white dude who, gasp, committed fraud!).
The teenager is wide-eyed and giggling. He’s talking about the waitresses clearing their table.
I almost didn’t make it this far into the season, which started off mind-blowingly boring; the conversations among the wealthy cis-hets were so unoriginal that even Parker Posey (a rich white lady who—you’ll never believe it—takes lorazepam) couldn’t save the viewing experience. And then, a few days before my doctor fretted about the dysphoria, osteoporosis, and heart disease possibly about to be brought on by my government’s forcibly depriving me of sex hormones, The White Lotus’ high-school male—who definitely has the internet—can’t believe that there are people dressed like ladies, acting like ladies, who don’t look exactly like what he thinks is ladies-like.
They’re using the khâ particle, which in Thai signifies a female speaker, versus khráp, which signifies a male one. It’s clear that all the guests know this, as does anyone who spends more than five minutes in Thailand. Perhaps because I see trans people as human beings, I didn’t notice the waitresses in question, strong as my trans-dar is. I had to rewind to see what the cises were talking about.
“Ladyboys, maybe?” the teen’s dad says, slinging a term that is often incorrect and usually a slur. These two white men are raising amused eyebrows and smirking (trans people = inherently a joke), and then Arnold Schwarzenegger’s large-toothed son pipes in that you never know whether someone you fuck in Thailand is gonna have nuts, and he and Parker Posey laugh, and laugh.
The actual purpose of my doctor’s appointment earlier that week had been to discuss increasing my anxiety medications. I already take a significant amount, largely to control sex-abuse flashbacks and related neuropathy, but also to help me walk into stores and bars instead of off a cliff while animosity toward trans people is turned up to a trillion. Nearby, Seattle Children’s Hospital, the largest independent nonprofit children’s hospital in the region—and one of the best in the country—had recently canceled long-awaited gender-affirming surgeries for fear of losing federal funding.
“You can go to Canada to get hormones,” my doctor advised, if I couldn’t get them here in the States.
But I’m already tired. One of the evidence-based mitigators of America’s super-high trans suicidality rate is access to gender-affirming health care. Another is having trans community. Members of mine suffer crippling body pains like I do, flaring medico-emotional issues that leave them—leave us—sometimes unable to leave our houses, let alone our country. Sometimes, we just need to sit and watch TV like anyone else.
You could argue that the aforementioned White Lotus characters are shitheads, and so this scene isn’t a degrading stab at our humanity. You could argue that it’s a statement about how only shitheads think this way. Accustomed to making excuses for my oppressors and abusers, I tried for two weeks to convince myself of this, even though the rationale immediately falls apart because the teenage son is not a shithead.
Also: Writer and director Mike White is a cis gay man who is obsessed with dehumanizing trans people.
Gabriel Mac
Also, in case you haven’t heard: It’s illegal for trans people to go to the bathroom. It’s legal to sue them for trying, and the feds are freezing and suspending our passport applications, and so you can’t, actually, argue that the scene highlights bigotry harmlessly. Or critically: The White Lotus Instagram account—and Patrick Schwarzenegger’s—posted this clip with the profoundly racist and transphobic caption, “Look out for life’s little surprises.”
Life’s little surprises. Like, you know, Thai trannies springing their small Asian dicks on you.
Just like American ones do in public bathrooms.
“I REALIZED I gotta stop,” Sam Rockwell says in The White Lotus’ Season 3: Episode 5, two weeks later. “The drugs, the girls, tryin’ to be a girl.”
Okay.
Mainstream publications have lauded this as the greatest television scene of the year, if not all time. Mainstream publications do not sustainably pay trans people to be staff entertainment writers, because very few out trans people are sustainably paid to do anything. Nor have they ever been. Were we in more meetings and boardrooms, less anti-trans content would get made.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
The other night, I turned on Bill Burr’s new Hulu special, in which he immediately makes a joke about how many trans people there are in Seattle (true), then exclaims about our being a “whole new race of people out there” (objectively untrue), furthering trans erasure from history, a false doctrine rooted in white supremacy. It’s the same ol’, “Jeez, they just invented trans people on us” propaganda of the Trump administration, aggressively de-legitimizing our existence, painting us—yet again—as sneaky schemers.
On The White Lotus, Rockwell’s surprise-celebrity-guest speech conflates a severe racist sex addiction with gender exploration. Yes, we humans do—especially we queer humans boldly do—sometimes collapse the barriers between who we are and who we want to be with our sex partners. Unrelatedly: Lots of straight foreign men go to Thailand to engage in sex tourism, for which the country is famous the world ’round.
There is so much you could say about this: the power imbalance that attracts wealthy males to disenfranchised sex workers from the poorest parts of poor countries; the warmongering history of dehumanizing Asians of all genders by fetishizing and consuming Asian women; sex tourists’ responsibility for the massive influx of Asian ethnic minorities trafficked into Thailand.
Instead, what The White Lotus’ Rockwell says, after being enlightened by sobriety and Buddhism, is: “Inside, could I be an Asian girl?”
“How he chooses to label his gender or sexuality is of minimal importance,” Time’s TV critic writes about this scene.
Wrong.
Conflating gender questioning with race cancelation/objectification—this character loves screwing “Asian girls,” he makes very clear—ridiculizes transness. We have existed for millennia, and have a notably rich history in the country where he sits. Nothing in those centuries of Thailand’s gender-expansive culture centers around transracialism. Nor is there any record of it being significant in the trans experience anywhere else, ever.
That is exactly how this beautifully delivered piece of anti-trans propaganda works. It blends so many complex concepts—desire and identity and addiction and sex and race and existentialism and dissociation—that it’s difficult to untangle them. It uses the trans human rights movement against itself, propping up everything else Rockwell says with weight and legitimacy—because as all good liberals know, we’re supposed to take gender questioning seriously—camouflaging the obvious Rachel Dolezal of it all, which becomes the same as transgenderism.
This is how the shittiest boyfriends win arguments: by stuffing so many unrelated assertions down your throat at once that you can’t even argue them. But it’s easy to pick out the anti-trans messaging in all this eloquent dressing if you look at the simplicity of its denouement.
“I realized I gotta stop: The drugs, the girls, tryin’ to be a girl.”
Equating “trying to be a girl” with drug addiction and sex addiction, destructive vices one’s “gotta stop,” fits the trans-extermination agenda. Rockwell is also the second person in three episodes to hurl “ladyboy,” perhaps/probably incorrectly confusing trans women, drag queens, and femme men.
But it doesn’t matter. Not on this show. Not to White. Not to Trump or TERFs or the wide world of other trans-exterminationists. If trans people aren’t people—if they are vessels of misguided, bottomless thirst for another gender like drugs, like using a “thousand” Asian “girls”—then it’s not wrong to keep making TV that fights our lives while we’re out here, fighting for our lives.
“BE A GIRL,” my dad yelled at me in our kitchen in 1998, my senior year of high school, when I cut my hair short.
Be a girl, I begged myself, over and over and over and over, consciously and subconsciously, from age four—when my father correctively raped me over it—right up to the very moment when, at age thirty-seven, my only choices were transition or death and I went to my first endocrinologist.
A year later, I stood on a train platform in Oakland, and a man walked up to me and said: “Not a real boy.”
“I’ve got a half-brother,” Jimmy Carr says one minute into his 2024 Netflix standup special. “Sorry—transgender.”
Gabriel Mac
WHEN MY DOCTOR’S appointment was over, I sat in the passenger seat of a friend’s car.
I balked, wide-eyed, at him. He is also trans; he’d also heard what my doctor said. Maybe he also felt like we weren’t going to be having this conversation so soon, living so far west that we’re pressed all the way against the ocean, over here paying our exorbitant liberal taxes. We clutched each other in a hug across the front seat of his Toyota. We breathed; we drove. The afternoon sun came through his car windows. I proposed we go out for cocktails.
In protest, and in survival. In celebration, of our existence and our stunning ability—hard. fucking. won.—to live in a present moment. We invited another trans fag to meet us, and the magnificent threesome of us disrupted the otherwise prosaic scene at a small-town, waterfront bar.
Every day, we disrupt the entire anti-trans fabric of the universe.
Gabriel Mac
The friend I’d come with and I left the bar. We drove back to Trans Island, which we’d planned to do. When we got there, we decided to fuck—which we had not planned.
“Are you ready to be worshipped?” I asked, when I got on top.
It was an earnest question. It’s not a bedroom-voice question. It’s a lot to take into our bodies—vilified the way they are, abused and assaulted the way they’ve been—when someone pours unadulterated love and respect through our skin. I slid my palms together, clearing the energy in my hands, calling in reverence.
He said he was. And he was—because, like me, he’s worked for years and years to break the cycles of violence we were born into and continue to break still. We’re friends. And, we translated our care into sex, because nothing breaks trans hurt like trans pleasure, in whatever form.
I was ready to let him in, too, this man who made me feel more special than I’ve ever been able to feel. Who made me feel as special as I am.
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