Living in Texas as a transgender woman sometimes feels like walking through your own neighborhood with three heads. People stare. People whisper. People make decisions about who and what you are before you have said a single word — decisions informed not by anything you have done, but by what they have been told to think about people like you.
I have thought a great deal about that experience. Not with bitterness, but with genuine curiosity. The question that keeps returning to me is not why do they hate us — that framing gives away too much. The more honest question is: What exactly is it that they are afraid of? And why, in 2026, with more information available at our fingertips than any generation in human history, are so many people still choosing fear over facts?
Eileen Monte
Those are not rhetorical questions. They have answers. And the answers are not flattering — not for the political machine, not for certain corners of the church and not for those of us who allow others to do our thinking for us.
The psychology of a threat that isn’t there
Let us start with psychology, because it is more honest than politics. Thekla Morgenroth, a professor of psychology at Purdue University, has studied why people attach so readily to anti-transgender rhetoric, even when it has no factual basis. Her explanation is clarifying: “People are very attached to the way that they think about gender because it gives them a sense of certainty — a sense of who they are and who they’re not.”
When that certainty is disrupted — when someone exists who does not fit the categories they were handed — the discomfort is real, even if the threat is not.
“The fear is not really about transgender people at all. It is about the person doing the fearing.”
This is important to understand because it means the fear is not really about transgender people at all. It is about the person doing the fearing. It is about what happens inside someone when their mental map of the world — built over decades, reinforced by family and church and culture — encounters something that does not fit.
What happens, according to research, is people do not revise the map. They protect it. They reach for an explanation — any explanation — that makes the discomfort feel justified rather than personal. As Morgenroth puts it: “Here’s an explanation for why I should be scared. I’m going to endorse that and believe it, regardless of whether it makes logical sense or not.”
This is not a character flaw unique to any one group of people. It is a deeply human tendency — the drive to protect our existing framework of meaning rather than do the hard work of revising it. The problem arises when that tendency gets picked up, amplified and weaponized by people who understand exactly what they are doing.
Research consistently shows that people who score high on measures of right-wing authoritarianism — a psychological profile characterized by submission to authority figures, strict rule-following and fear of norm violations — are significantly more likely to hold anti-transgender views.
This does not happen because they are examining evidence, but because they are looking to authority figures to tell them what to think. And when those authority figures — politicians, pastors, cable news hosts — tell them transgender people are dangerous, the emotional machinery of fear and anger activates long before critical thinking has a chance to engage.
University of South Florida psychology professor Joseph Vandello puts it plainly: When influential figures amplify a threat, it triggers fear and anger that override analytical reasoning. The emotional response comes first. The justification for it comes second. And by the time someone is truly afraid, they no longer are evaluating evidence. They are defending a conclusion.
The machine that runs on fear
Now let us talk about who benefits from keeping that fear alive — because fear, as it turns out, is extraordinarily profitable.
“Moral panic … explains what happens when a society becomes convinced a particular group poses an existential threat to its values.”
Sociologists have a term for what is happening in Texas right now. They call it a moral panic. It is a concept developed by British sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972 to explain what happens when a society becomes convinced a particular group poses an existential threat to its values, when, in fact, the threat is vastly exaggerated or entirely fabricated.
Cohen described the process in terms that read like a description of today’s Texas Legislature: “A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people.”
The target of a moral panic is what Cohen called a “folk devil” — a group reduced to a simple, frightening image and made to stand in as the symbol of everything threatening about social change. Sociologists who study folk devils note they are almost always already marginalized — immigrants, racial minorities, LGBTQ people, the poor. They are groups with the least power to push back against the narrative being constructed about them.
In Texas in 2026, transgender people are the folk devil of the moment. Not because we have done anything. Not because the data supports it. But because we are useful. We are small enough — less than 1% of the population — that we cannot mount a significant political counteroffensive. We are visible enough to be pointed at. And we exist at the intersection of gender, religion and family — three categories that carry enormous emotional voltage for the voters these campaigns are designed to mobilize.
In a petition launched in September 2025, the Heritage Foundation and its spin-off, the Oversight Project, urged the FBI to create a new domestic terrorism category called Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism. Not because the data supported such a category. By one analysis of the last decade, roughly 0.1% of mass shootings were carried out by transgender people, who are far likelier to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
As of this writing, the FBI has not adopted the category. But the recommendation itself does political work, whether or not it is ever made official. It plants a word. It seeds an association. It gives the fear a name and an authority behind it.
This is not governance. This is engineering.
And it works precisely because it exploits the psychological vulnerability Morgenroth identified — the human tendency to accept an explanation for discomfort without examining whether the explanation is true.
The people running this machine are not confused about the facts. They know the facts. As Morgenroth said of those behind the rhetoric: “I think some people know that this is false, but push it anyway.”
“The people running this machine are not confused about the facts. They know the facts.”
That is the part that should make every person — regardless of how they feel about transgender people — genuinely angry. Not at transgender people. At the people who are lying to them.
The church and the clobber verses
I want to speak carefully here, because I am a person of faith and I have loved the church despite everything the church has cost me personally. But careful does not mean silent. And what is happening in certain religious communities deserves to be named clearly.
There is a practice in some religious circles known, informally, as “clobber verses” — the use of a small handful of scriptural passages as blunt instruments against LGBTQ people, deployed without context, without historical scholarship and without any apparent awareness of what the rest of the Bible says on adjacent topics.
These include Genesis 1:27, Deuteronomy 23:1 and others. A verse here, a verse there — cited with the confidence of people who have never sat with a concordance and asked what the surrounding chapters say, what the original language meant or what centuries of theological scholarship have concluded.
Here is what careful, honest engagement with Scripture actually reveals:
“Jesus Christ said nothing about transgender identity. Not one word.”
Jesus Christ — whose words are, for Christians, the authoritative center of Scripture — said nothing about transgender identity. Not one word. He spoke extensively about hypocrisy. He spoke about the danger of using religion to exclude the vulnerable. He named people who existed outside conventional gender categories — eunuchs, born and made and chosen — as participants in the kingdom of heaven.
Isaiah 56 promised those same people a name better than sons and daughters. Acts 8 records the first Gentile baptized in the New Testament was a gender-nonconforming man of color, baptized immediately and completely, without conditions.
And in Galatians 3:28, the Apostle Paul declared that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor male and female.”
Three hierarchical divisions, all abolished. That was not an accident. Paul chose those three examples deliberately.
None of this is obscure. None of this requires a seminary degree. It requires only a Bible and the willingness to read past the verses someone else has chosen for you.
The deeper question is why so many churchgoing folks — people of genuine faith and genuine intelligence — are willing to rest their theological position on three or four decontextualized verses while setting aside the greatest commandment, the arc of inclusion running from Isaiah through Acts, and the explicit words of Jesus himself. The answer, I think, goes back to what the psychologists found: It is easier to accept an authority’s conclusion than to do the reading yourself.
An inconvenient record: What the same search would show
If you are told a group is a threat, it is worth asking what that same group has actually done. The record is not hard to find. It is sitting in the very devices and medicines and films that the people most afraid of us use every single day.
“If you are told a group is a threat, it is worth asking what that same group has actually done.”
The phone in your pocket almost certainly runs on a processor architecture co-designed by Sophie Wilson, a transgender woman. The microchip revolution that made small, powerful computers possible rests on the foundational work of Lynn Conway, a transgender engineer IBM fired in 1968 for transitioning and who went on to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering anyway. Ben Barres, a transgender neurobiologist and the first openly transgender scientist elected to the National Academy of Sciences, reshaped modern brain science. The electronic music that runs under so many of the films you love traces back to Wendy Carlos. The Wachowskis made The Matrix.
And nearly a century ago, a transgender physician named Alan L. Hart pioneered the use of chest X-rays to catch tuberculosis before it spread — a screening method that, by the time antibiotics arrived, had helped cut the TB death toll to a fraction of what it had been. He did this while being forced to move from state to state every time he was outed. He saved an untold number of lives, quietly, under exactly the kind of suspicion Texas is working to revive.
This is the inconvenient part of the record: The people being cast as a danger to society have, generation after generation, been busy building it. Not asking for credit. Just contributing — often invisibly, often while afraid — to the same country now debating whether they should be allowed to exist in public.
The harder question
We live in an era of extraordinary access to information. Any person with a smartphone can read the peer-reviewed research on bathroom safety in under 10 minutes. Any person with a Bible app can read Matthew 19, Isaiah 56 and Acts 8 in under five. The data on transgender employment discrimination, violent victimization and healthcare access is publicly available, rigorously documented and written in plain English.
So, the question I keep returning to — the one that sits underneath all the politics and the psychology and the theology — is this: Why, when the truth is this accessible, do so many people choose not to find it?
I do not think the answer is stupidity. I have met too many intelligent people who hold views the evidence does not support. I think the answer is something more uncomfortable: Finding out you have been wrong — about a group of people, about what your church has taught you, about what you have forwarded on Facebook and believed for years — requires a kind of courage that is genuinely hard. It means sitting with the discomfort of revision rather than the comfort of certainty. It means being willing to say, out loud or just to yourself: I accepted something I should have questioned.
“I have met too many intelligent people who hold views the evidence does not support.”
That is not a small thing to ask of people. I know, because I have had to do it myself — about things I believed, people I trusted, institutions I gave my faith to and got harm in return. Revision is hard. It costs something.
But here is what the refusal to revise costs — 161,000 Texans their documentation, their healthcare, their employment, their access to public spaces and increasingly their safety. It costs them the experience of moving through the state they were born in — or chose — as full human beings rather than political symbols. It costs transgender children the right to grow up without a legislature debating their existence.
And it costs everyone else something, too, something less visible but real — the integrity of living in a state that claims to value truth, fairness and faith, but has allowed all three to be hijacked by a political machine that profits from keeping people afraid of their neighbors.
A final word
I walk through Texas with my head on a swivel. Not because I am dangerous. Because I never know when someone else’s fear — manufactured by people who will never meet me, sold through channels designed to bypass critical thinking, laundered through Scripture passages stripped of their context — is going to land on me.
I am not asking for pity. I am asking for something harder and more valuable — the willingness to think.
Not to think what I think. Not to arrive at the conclusions I have arrived at. Just to actually engage — with the data, with the full text of Scripture, with the research that is sitting right there waiting to be read — rather than outsourcing that engagement to a PAC, a cable news host or a pastor who has never read past Deuteronomy 23:1.
The three-headed monster you have been told to fear is a woman who has lived in Texas her entire adult life, built careers here, paid taxes here, prayed here and is still here. The only thing monstrous about any of this is what we are willing to do to our neighbors when we stop asking whether what we have been told is true.
Eileen Monte is a transgender woman writing from Fort Worth, Texas, one of the hardest places in America to be one. Her series, “The Sins of Our Forefathers,” takes on the political machine working to legislate trans people out of public life and the inherited fear it runs on. She is not a historian or a member of the clergy. Just a person of deep thoughts, stubborn convictions, and five kids who keep her honest.
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