On June 23, the president of the United States stood in a Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Pa., to give a speech about American manufacturing. Somewhere in the middle of this speech, he purposely manufactured a person.
It went like this: A young woman — somebody’s daughter, an Olympic hopeful — approaches the bar to break a record. She trembles. She strains. She cannot lift it. She cries. Her father watches her heartbreak. And then, in the president’s telling, a “very poor, bottom of the line male weightlifter” transitions, enters the women’s division, and shatters the record without effort.
Eileen Monte
The room reacted as expected. The story is vivid, unfair, infuriating and it does exactly what it was built to do.
This was not a stray thought that wandered into a speech. It had nothing to do with trucks, manufacturing or anything else that brought Donald Trump to that podium. He carried it there on purpose, the way a man carries a tool he intends to use. The president of the United States, holding the most powerful office on earth, took time out of a speech about heavy machinery to invent a story mocking a community that amounts to a fraction of 1% of the country.
There is a word for what that is, and “presidential” is not it.
“Neither woman in the story exists. Neither event happened.”
Neither woman in the story exists. Neither event happened. It never has happened — not at the Olympics, not anywhere the record books reach.
One lie about one person
Notice what the story was about, and what the belief is about. The story was about one transgender woman — a fictional one. The belief every listener carried out of that factory was about all transgender women. Nobody in that room decided to make that leap. He handed them one story, and the audience did the rest — multiplied it and made it worse, the way human nature always does once it has been told something.
This is the narrative machine’s greatest efficiency and the sin of our forefathers I want to put under the light this time. The machine never needs a lie about millions to lie to millions. It needs one story about one person — and the generalization reflex, which every one of us carries, finishes the job for free. One person becomes “those people.” One incident becomes “what they do.” The machine supplies the specimen; we supply the species.
And here is the proof that it is reflex and not reason: Trump did not even need a real person. A fictional individual generalized just as well as an actual one. The reflex asks no questions of the sample. It only asks for a category.
I wrote in these pages about the three-headed monster — how a false narrative built by a few becomes the story that a majority believes. This essay is about the head that lives closest to home: the one in the audience. The one in us.
Unwelcome comparisons
I did not choose Caitlyn Jenner. Nobody asked me. But when she announced her transition to the world — magazine covers, television series and a level of wealth and fame I never will see — she became, overnight, the woman strangers compared me to. And not just strangers, but friends and colleagues as well.
“There is no seminar for the day your friends start interviewing you about someone else’s body.”
People who had known me for years suddenly felt licensed to ask questions no one has the right to ask, about the most private terrain of my life, each one framed the same way: Like Caitlyn? As though her journey were the map and my journey the imitation. I had no argument prepared. There is no seminar for the day your friends start interviewing you about someone else’s body.
So, I did what the questions were designed, intentionally or not, to make me do: I withdrew. From gatherings, from conversations and from society itself for a while. The comparison did not need my consent to be installed. It only needed her fame and my category.
Then came 2023, and a beer can. Bud Light put one transgender woman — Dylan Mulvaney, a young woman barely begun in her own transition — into one promotion, and celebrities lined up to announce, loudly and publicly, that she would now be the spokesperson for us all. Nobody asked her to be that either. The rude comments found me within days — to my face and behind it — over a marketing campaign I had nothing to do with, about a woman I never had met.
And here is the confession this essay requires of me: I resented her too. I caught myself thinking she made us look foolish — one woman, early in her journey, carrying 30 years of my journey on her shoulders because a beer company put her there. That is how strong the reflex is. It runs even in the people it wounds.
Being made into a comparison does not require enemies; it only requires a category. Once the category exists, anyone can be installed as your representative without your consent, and every stranger who accepts the substitution has quietly decided to be done looking at you at all.
Someone will honestly offer the objection: Don’t we learn from examples? Isn’t admiring someone a comparison, too? It is not, and the difference is worth being precise about, because the machine depends on blurring it.
“A comparison used as a weapon is done to you, meaning it erases the individual to indict the group.”
A comparison used as a weapon is done to you, meaning it erases the individual to indict the group. Aspiration is done by you, meaning you choose what you admire in someone and grow toward it, and both people remain fully themselves. One is done to you, while the other is done by you.
I know the difference because I have lived both sides of it. Nobody asked me before deciding to use Caitlyn Jenner as my comparison. Personally, I chose Brian Piccolo, the Chicago Bears running back who understood what the word “friend” actually meant, who roomed with Gale Sayers when America wasn’t ready for that friendship, and who stayed in the fight against an incurable illness through the bitter end.
He never knew I existed. He has been gone since 1970, and I am still growing toward him. That is aspiration: I did the choosing, and the choosing made me better. The comparison was done to me. The example was chosen by me.
Nobody should be made into a comparison. Anyone can choose an example. My friends’ comparisons were careless. What comes out of the White House is not.
Intentional misdirection
When the president of the United States stands at a truck factory and invents a transgender weightlifter — a woman who does not exist, breaking records that never were broken — he is triggering the same reflex that my friends felt, but purposely, at scale with a microphone. He isn’t confused about the difference between one person and a people; he’s counting on you not to notice it.
“He isn’t confused about the difference between one person and a people; he’s counting on you not to notice it.”
One fictional woman, installed as the representative of millions, and a room full of good people walked out believing they’d learned something. He and his cronies have industrialized what my colleagues did to me over coffee.
Scripture saw this coming, which shouldn’t surprise anyone since it’s usually ahead of us and we’re usually behind it. “You shall not spread a false report,” says Exodus 23. And the very next verse: “You shall not fall in with the many to do evil.” Two commands, back to back, like a lock and its key. The false report and the majority that carries it.
The manufactured story about the one, and the crowd that repeats it about the many. The Bible does not treat these as politics. It treats them as sin — the old, original kind, no legislative session required.
Here is the part that room in Pennsylvania never stopped to consider: The lie was not told to transgender people. It was told to them.
We were the subject. They were the target. When a false story about the few is manufactured, the people who are being deceived are the many it’s manufactured for — which means every person in that crowd, whatever they believe about people like me, walked out of a truck factory having been lied to on purpose. Whoever generalizes your neighbor to you is not doing you a favor; he is doing something to you.
The importance of story
I know something about stories, because I spent years wearing a badge and taking them down. Every statement I took, victim’s or perpetrator’s, had to be verified before it went anywhere, because I was the one who would raise my right hand and repeat it in court, and what I repeated could turn a verdict and change lives.
So, you listened with intent and you checked everything, because getting the story wrong meant somebody got hurt. Nobody in that truck plant was under oath, but every one of them walked out carrying a story they will repeat. And no one will ever ask them to verify a word of it.
This particular lie is a gift to anyone willing to spend five minutes checking, because it is completely, gloriously verifiable. No transgender woman ever has won an individual Olympic medal. Not one, not ever. The only out transgender woman to compete, weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, failed all three of her lifts in Tokyo and went home.
The International Olympic Committee already has barred transgender women from women’s events beginning with the 2028 Games, meaning the president told a story that never happened and now cannot happen. He didn’t stretch the truth; rather, he manufactured a human being.
“He didn’t stretch the truth; rather, he manufactured a human being.”
He also told that room that the country sides with him on this issue 99 to one. The actual record: The issue ranked dead last among voter concerns in 2024, and candidates who built campaigns on it spent the next year writing concession speeches. Even the popularity of the lie is a lie.
So, ask the question — not my question, yours now: If a man will invent a person to deceive you about something this easy to check, what is he telling you about the things you cannot check? The border. The economy. Your neighbor. I don’t need to answer that, and neither do you. Asked honestly, just once, that question never stops working.
So here is the challenge, and it costs nothing but a moment of honesty. The next time a story about one person is offered to you as proof about a people — from a podium, a cable panel or the fellowship hall — I challenge you to trace it. Three questions: Who told it? Did it happen? And even if it did, since when does one person prove a people? You would not accept that arithmetic about Baptists. Do not accept it about anyone.
This is not a new sin needing a new name. “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” made the top 10, ahead of quite a few things we preach about more often. A congregation that repeats a manufactured story about its neighbors is not staying informed; it is bearing false witness at a large scale.
The machine has no off switch you can reach, but there is one you can; it stops working, one person at a time, the moment someone refuses the substitution, looks past the story they were handed, and at the actual human being in front of them.
That’s the whole counter-machine. It looks a lot like the gospel, because it is.
Eileen Monte is a transgender woman writing from Fort Worth, Texas. She seeks to take 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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