The death of the Trans Tipping Point (and what comes next)

When we lost our fight for the previous big idea, integration into society as-is, we lost our hope of a better future. Now, we can reforge such a hope, but only through a new set of big ideas.

By Jane Migliara Brigham

For years, it has felt as if trans people have lost our hope for a better future. When we think about what the future might look like, most of us can imagine no more than an end to our current suffering. Many more can’t even imagine that.

It didn't used to be like this. Only a few short years ago, trans people were by and large broadly hopeful about a better future.  

This was the age of the Transgender Tipping Point.  Back then in 2014, gay rights had won an overwhelming cultural victory in much of the developed world. In the US, gay marriage was on the cusp of being legal in all 50 states. Hardly anyone believed that this momentum could change.

Enter the trans rights movement. For decades, we were the red-headed stepchild of the gay rights movement, yet then genuinely felt that this moment was our chance. With the seemingly inevitable victory of gay rights, trans people felt that we too could now break free of our oppression.  

The Tipping Point article came out a few weeks after I came out of the closet. Its message was simple: we trans people will gain equality by integrating into the wider society, just as the gay rights movement had done before us. For years afterwards, it was the guiding star for me and millions of others.

Fast forward to 2026, and this dream feels further away than ever. Trans dignity is constantly being put into question, and our rights are at the worst point that they have been in centuries.  Our social lives are more and more focused on our online spaces, as cis people in physical space grow ever more wary of us.  

In terms of integrating into the wider society, our status, and by extension, ourselves, have been actively regressing for years. Few people expect this trend to stop or reverse any time soon, and the few who say otherwise appear less and less confident in this belief as time goes on.

Ever since the Trans Tipping Point tipped back the other way, we have lacked a unifying big idea to guide our hearts and plan our future.

This thought came to me while watching Mia Mulder’s recent video on the death of big ideas and what this means for the public imagination. 

Mulder’s video covers how this has affected leftist and liberal spaces, how their imaginations have shrunk as a result, and how right wing ideas grew in the spaces left behind.  

Watching this video, I couldn't help but think how trans people have the exact same problem.  We no longer have a clear idea of what a better future would look like. Any idea we did have was based on a consensus that can’t exist and assumptions that have since been proven false. The liberal order of the 21st century won’t let us integrate, no matter how much we make ourselves appealing to it. The fascist order which looks ready to replace it seeks to eradicate us altogether. 

Neither system can improve our lives.

This has been devastating to our collective psyches because integration was the big idea that trans activists had been working towards for a decade. 

Since the vast majority of out trans people today did not live as trans before this optimistic time, most of us have no idea what a better future could look like, except by looking back nostalgically to that more tolerant past.

Nostalgia-based politics are a mistake that leads to reactionary ideals. Look at either variant of the MAGA phenomenon, red or blue, and you can get a glimpse of this.

We trans people spent a decade working towards the goal of integration, and that goal has crumbled before our eyes. This failure was not our fault, but how we react to it is our responsibility.

We have tended to treat this current state as a total failure, not because it is impossible that things might get better in a distant future, but because we no longer have an idea of what a better future would look like, or how to get there.  

The problem is that we need to move forward, but we have little to no basis to start from.

Some of us believe that socialism could fix our woes, others tell us to flee to more tolerant countries, others tell us to wait for another chance to integrate into wider society, and a small but growing number believe that trans separatism is our path to dignity. 

Still, the largest group appears to be those clinging to nostalgia from the comparatively tolerant 2010s. 

The one thing these varied subgroups can all agree on is this: the present sucks and we want it to end. Beyond that, we agree on precious little.

This situation means that our main way to unify is against the current regime and against transphobia in general. We unite against a common enemy, not just because it harms all of us, but also because we cannot unite in favor of any particular agenda.  

In a sense, there is a silver lining that Trump and his followers give us such a clear unifying target to fight against. In the absence of a common enemy, we would spend even more time at each other’s throats over the minutia of what trans liberation looks like and how to get there.

Someday, this fascist wave will end. When it does, two things will happen.  First, we will have an opportunity to shape the world to improve our place within it. Second, we will lose the specter of fascism as a unifying force to fight against. 

When we lose that unity that comes from a shared enemy, we will need a vision of what to achieve and a plan on how to do it. If we fail at this, we will be at the margins of society without a plan to fix that.

This is why it is important to lay out a vision of a better future and how to get there, ideally while we are still fighting a common enemy. 

This period of unified enemies, a single obvious place to punch against, could be used to plan out our next moves, build institutions for ourselves, and work towards the future we want to see. This should be done alongside fighting the regime and the bigotry that fuels it, since these aims go hand in hand. 

I have my own opinion on what path forward is the right one, but I'll save that for another time. The point remains; our fight to oppose bigotry will not get anywhere without a vision of a better world.

I invite you to create such a vision. When you imagine what the lives of trans people will be like when this is all over, what does that look like? My invitation extends to giving you space to take a moment and think, really think, about the future.

To what extent is the cis population around us a reliable partner in the preservation of our dignity? Can the governments they run be trusted to preserve our rights? What institutions should we build to improve our conditions? What would that look like? I want you to ask yourselves these and other questions.

When we lost our fight for the previous big idea, integration into society as-is, we lost our hope of a better future. Now, we can reforge such a hope, but only through a new set of big ideas.