I am old enough to remember reading the memoir of Christine Jorgenson when it appeared on the stands in the 1960s. There were people who found her desire to transition perplexing, but no one considered her, or her acceptance as a woman, a menace. That's a yesterday invention.

I remember Renee Richards playing women's tennis. I don't remember an uproar over her performance on the courts as somehow "unfair;" there was an understanding that hormonally transitioning to a female body composition necessarily erases the strength advantage that most men have over most women.

I, a "cis het" woman, am a lifelong hobby athlete and weightlifter, and have been described by a gynecologist as showing "high androgen affect." I have trained men who sometimes boasted after a few months that they could now lift "as much as she does." I have a deep voice and am often addressed as "sir" because of broad shoulders and a long stride, even in my 70s. Will I eventually be expected to obtain a certificate in case I am challenged in a women's only restroom -- something that is already happening to women "assigned female at birth"?

I went to college with many out, queer people in the 1970s, and would have had no reservations about changing clothes backstage with the trans girl who dazzled us all with her work in the costume shop of the drama department. Trans women choose to transition because they identify as women. They are not doing it to gain some pervy stealth advantage. Ask yourself, assuming you are male, if you would undergo surgery and pharmaceutical body changes, or the spite and bias inflicted on chromosomal males who present as female without having yet medically transitioned, or would trade male privilege for the discrimination that women routinely experience in employment and everyday life -- all in order to peep at chromosomal women in a locker room.

I dated a person in high school who went on to a lifetime of quiet hell because of a secret conviction they eventually revealed to me that though physically male, they were actually female. This person, stuffing down their true nature out of shame, later endured a miserable marriage and years of abuse before seeking out a support group for trans women in their fifties. What a waste of a person's good time. What is the point of causing this suffering, except to cause suffering?

I participate in online hobby communities that attract many gender-nonconforming, queer and trans people, who are manifestly only trying to live.  I am sharply aware, from the conversations that occur in those spaces, of the relief and joy transgender people feel when medical intervention aligns their bodily experience with the identity they have felt, often since childhood as with my high school friend. I have seen photosets documenting transition -- showing chromosomal women becoming masculine and muscular, chromosomal men becoming less so, but always, in both cases, becoming radiant and proud as they saw their real selves in the mirror. I rejoiced with them.

Trans people have always existed; there is documentation of trans people across societies and throughout history, including people who lived as the opposite gender throughout their lives during recent centuries.  The current backlash against trans people, and trans women especially, is nothing more than a solution in search of a problem, a manufactured grievance against people who are "different." This has happened in every culture which fears freedom, a principle the United States is supposed to embody. Accusations of unfairness in athletics and "dangers" to "cis" women are unsupported and are merely excuses.  Will those who promote and enact anti-trans discrimination be proud to say at the end of the day that they devoted their energies and powers to making life harder for people who are only trying to get through life like the rest of us?