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A few years ago, at a café for brunch, I walked up to the restrooms behind a skinny man with a great tuft of gray hair, so tall, he was going to have to crouch down to enter one of two doors, both bearing the sign, “This bathroom is for everyone.” He turned to me, and said, “Wow, I’ve never seen that before. Everybody can go in there!” He said it with a kind of gleeful surprise, as if he had never even heard of a gender neutral bathroom before. The same thing happened a few weeks later, when I was chatting with two older women in line for the bathroom at a restaurant with bathrooms for everyone, earnestly observing they had never seen such a sign. And then that was that, and they all went, and took a piss, and, we can only hope they all washed their hands.

According to the popular queer zine known as the US Census Bureau, about 1.14 % of the population is trans, or about 3 million people. The fact is that there are many people who do not know a trans person, and not because they wouldn’t like to meet one. Over the past several years, I have had multiple open-minded friends tell me, often with slight guilt, that they do not really know any trans people, and then I ask them how many red heads they know, given there are at least 6 million and, indeed, may be as many as 18 million redheads, along with a handful of colorists who will never tell.

This new logo was created by my talented friend Nick Zeig-Owens in collaboration with undying nostalgia for old school Nickelodeon.

The insanity around the conversation about transness is based on the idea that people being trans is actually affecting the public at large. The weight of political correctness bears so heavily on our shoulders, I even have queer-friendly, progressive, trauma-informed yoga teachers for friends who have told me they are afraid of saying the wrong thing. It seems like much of the violence against the trans community is weapons-grade artillery built in defense of ignorant embarrassment, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of people do not even know a non-binary person to misgender in the first place. Of course, it may be harder to ignore the utter ubiquity of our country’s historically passionate commitment to women’s sports.

To accept the notion of transness, is to consider the possibility that your own life might have been different were it not for your implied category, to see that there are so many options beyond the scripts we are fed, which means also reckoning with the tragedy of having been forced to follow those scripts, all of which compels me to ask, does the suppression of queer fluidity have anything to do with the fact that literally all straight women want to fuck vampires? I’m just kidding, only 69% of straight women are deeply longing to develop an erotic love affair with a vampire, and the other 31% would prefer it to be a werewolf or other monster. Look no further than the rapidly rising trend of romance and fantasy known as romantasy (a portmanteu that begs for the subgenre of portmantasy, dedicated to stories of words that can’t stop fucking each other). Over the past several years, the genre of romantasy has exploded with sales doubling between 2020 and 2023, and in 2024, two of the biggest authors sold over 4 million copies combined, which is to say, approximately four times as many books as there are trans people. I’m not very good at math, but there are at least 2.28 million women reading romantasy who have not yet gotten to the chapter where they find out they’re gay.

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By virtue of the fact that there are over 330 million people in this country and about 3 million trans people, there is absolutely no reason why the entire country should be talking about being trans. The propaganda machine that has attacked trans people follows the same script that is being used to direct racism at immigrants, cherry-picking perverse panic to create cultural psychosis, like the time Fox devoted the national news to the fact that Muslim girls got to take swim classes at the YMCA. The biggest reason that trans violence is so insane is the fact that the average person has never even met a trans person, in fact, getting to be friends with a trans person is so rare in this country, the American population is statistically more likely to have a crush on a vampire.

The fair and rightful ruler of the Gulf of America has begun his second term signing a flurry of executive orders intended to tie courts and organizations into knots, including rolling back protections for trans people. “Well, I guess trans people don’t exist anymore,” my non-binary partner told me, reading the news over coffee. In retrospect, I missed the opportunity to gasp, and say, “Holy shit… where did you go?” The executive order says those words exactly, trans and non-binary people are “defined” as “out of existence.” The government now recognizes only male and female, and thus, by enforcing the gender binary as a legal cultural mandate, claims to be protecting women from “gender extremism.”

The violent anti-trans propaganda machine insists that public bathrooms are a place to fear, which may very well be true, if you ever take a piss in Vatican City. There are at least 330,000 survivors of sexual assault by drag queens, and that’s just counting the Roman Catholic priests from France. As a woman who identifies as a woman, it seems to me the more pressing “gender extremism” than the government’s trans insanity is the fact that three women are murdered every day by a domestic partner, but let’s just make sure we get their pronouns right. [Note: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that one in three women are murdered a day, but then I would probably not exist to write this.]

To be fair, it may very well be the case that many people believe trans people shouldn’t exist, for the same reason that many people believe vampires do not exist, on account of the cold, hard fact that they have not been able to find enough empirical evidence. I am biased here. I must admit that I believe trans people exist, because I am in love with one of them. The bathrooms in our apartment are radically gender neutral, much like literally every bathroom that has ever been inside of a home. In fact, just the other day, I saw a trans person doing the Sunday crossword, foam-rolling their sore muscles, and even folding the laundry for once, instead of just dumping it on the bed, and, you’re never going to believe this, but, they’re also a red head.

There will be a new Pancake Brain in your inbox every weekend, because that’s how long it takes to cook them. Between Fridays and Sundays, you can expect a fresh piece of pop culture commentary, reported comedic essays as well as reportedly comedic essays. If you haven’t already, please subscribe. Share this post wherever you doomscroll, if you like my vibe. <3

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