Caitlyn Jenner Faced Transphobic Harassment at CPAC. She Deserves Dignity, But Not Power

Early in my gender transition, I found it easy to believe in the utopian possibilities of queerness. The line of thinking goes something like this: Because LGBTQ+ people are everywhere and because we come in every color and from every class, we are uniquely positioned to champion justice and progress across society.

It’s a beautiful idea! But also a naive one. Perhaps no one operating in U.S. politics today more fully exposes the naivete of this hopefulness than Caitlyn Jenner, the track-star-turned-trans-icon (to some) currently running as a Republican in California’s gubernatorial recall contest. No one with Jenner’s level of fame better represents reality's challenge to queer utopianism.  Jenner’s race, wealth, and right-wing politics are a reminder that the presence of LGBTQ+ people in every segment of our society isn’t actually a guarantee that those people will challenge the status quo for the better. In her eagerness to assimilate into modern conservative politics, Jenner is a reminder that rich white trans women are still rich white women.

If conservatives were to more completely embrace her (as some already have) and it somehow translates to electoral success, it would be a cautionary tale about the political power of transgender conservatism. And so while she may deserve dignity, she should not be granted more power.

Of course, as one might expect, Jenner’s assimilation into the reactionary Republican milieu isn’t exactly going smoothly. As Yahoo News reported this weekend, Jenner was subjected to transphobic abuse and harassment while she attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas. In a video posted to social media, someone repeatedly deadnames Jenner and refers to her with derogatory language. The incident is instantly recognizable to me as a trans woman. In my experience, a trans fem’s presence in any space can be, to some, interpreted as an invitation for this kind of abuse. There’s no excuse for this kind of language or behavior.

But Jenner is not just some trans girl getting accosted while waiting for a train. She’s a candidate for one of the most powerful political positions in the United States — governor of the union’s most populous state — and has an estimated net worth of $100 million. Her candidacy and wealth clearly don’t protect her from indefensible transphobic abuse, one of the many complications evidenced by her role as the public face of transgender conservatism.

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The people who have defended Jenner’s presence at CPAC are also speaking about her role in right-wing politics. Brad Parscale, former president Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, called the incident “disgusting” and wrote on Twitter: “Incidents like this create a dark cloud over the party.” Tomi Lahren, the controversial conservative pundit, also rose to Jenner’s defense on Twitter, writing that the news “made my blood boil.”

“There’s no room for your hate in the America First movement,” Lahren wrote, without any apparent trace of irony despite what “America First” has meant historically. “We believe in freedom and we believe in limited government. The way she chooses to live her personal life harms you in no way!” Jenner thanked her for her support.

Given Lahren’s defense of Jenner, you might think she would also be eager to speak out against the wave of anti-trans state legislation targeting students and athletes across the country, a dramatic overreach by the government into people’s personal lives. But just this past January, Lahren appeared to attack transgender participation in women’s sports — a lightning rod issue for conservative attacks on trans feminine people — though her apparent confusion about trans terminology made her message difficult to discern.

Throughout her career, Lahren hasn’t exactly been a trans ally. As GLAAD documented in a 2017 report, she supported Trump’s trans military ban and had deadnamed and misgendered Chelsea Manning. On Monday, Lahren clarified that her support for Jenner had nothing to do with the candidate’s trans identity.

“I don’t support @Caitlyn_Jenner BECAUSE she is trans,” she wrote. “I agree with most of her policy ideas & know she will fight for CA. She’s also a kind human & more conservative than half the people with ‘Rs’ in Congress. I don’t care how she identifies. She is more than that. Freedom first.”

It might be easy to accuse Lahren of hypocrisy, but her follow-up tweet actually displays an impressive amount of logical consistency if you consider that Lahren, like most U.S. conservatives, isn’t interested in coherent logic so much as the cynical pursuit and maintenance of power. Being transphobic has been beneficial to the conservative movement, giving them a primary target in the so-called culture war. But Jenner’s candidacy, if it were somehow to succeed, could create a sea change in the conservative movement’s relationship to transness. If a trans Republican could win power in a state considered a bastion of liberal coastal elites, I imagine we’ll see a lot more support for Jenner akin to Lahren’s.

And Jenner’s hardly the only rich, white, trans woman well-positioned to serve as an entry point for trans inclusion in the conservative movement. Consider Jennifer Pritzker, regarded as the world’s first and only known transgender billionaire. But Pritzker, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, very publicly disavowed her previous support for Trump after his military ban, blasting the then-president in a Chicago Sun-Times op-ed. According to a 2019 story from Vanity Fair, Pritzker’s historical support for Republicans made her an outlier in her liberal family until she broke with Trump and wrote a Washington Post op-ed threatening to stop making major donations to the GOP.

If Pritzker’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she’s cousins with J.B. Pritzker, the current billionaire Democratic governor of Illinois, where the Pritzker family is among the most legendarily wealthy. And despite her break with Republicans over their attacks on our community, it’s less clear whether her politics have evolved much beyond this reaction to attacks on her identity. In October 2020, the Sun-Times reported Jennifer dropped half a million dollars to a campaign to stop her cousin’s push for a graduated income tax, which was defeated at the ballot box in November. A graduated income tax, a.k.a. a progressive tax, make it so higher-income earners are taxed at higher rates than lower-income earners, as NBC Chicago explained.

Jenner’s conservative politics similarly seem at odds with her identity. According to her campaign website, she wants to cut regulations and prevent new or higher taxes. She’s made callous public remarks about California’s houseless population. And she even wants to stop trans girls from playing girls’ sports unless they’ve checked a bunch of boxes on their transition through official channels.

Both Jenner and Pritzker are living proof that trans people can come in any color or from any economic class — including from among the rich, white folks who are the beneficiaries of racial capitalism, scholar Cedric J. Robinson’s term for the ways racism and capitalism combined forces as Western industrialization established the present world order. In direct contradiction of the utopian notion that a diversity of queer identities represents a challenge to the status quo, rich, white trans people who want to further conservatize our present political and economic realities are more interested in assimilating into the existing systems of oppression than in liberating anyone from them.

Despite their shared identity, women like Jenner and Pritzker are antithetical to the values we honor when we celebrate people like Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera. It’s obvious from Johnson and Rivera’s organizing work following the Stonewall uprising that their fight focused on low-income trans people and LGBTQ+ youth who were so completely ostracized from their contemporary society that they might not have been considered working-class. As remembered by the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, a sex work advocacy group, the duo’s work following the Stonewall uprising prioritized housing for trans sex workers and LGBTQ+ street youth. They have more in common with a modern figure like Ceyenne Doroshow than they ever would have with someone like Jenner.

It’s all a reminder of a few simple if difficult-to-accept truths. First, being trans doesn’t make you a good person; being a good person makes you a good person. Second, there is not one singular, diverse trans community, but rather a plurality of diverse trans communities, either emerging or already established in nearly every segment of U.S. society.

While we should strive to unite trans people in the collective pursuit of liberation, we cannot pretend that rich trans conservatives aren’t positioning themselves as obstacles to this mission or that their identities can’t be co-opted by the right to further the conservative pursuit of power. And while I can sympathize with the experience of transphobic attacks, I can’t empathize with Jenner’s class or her politics. She deserves the basic dignity any human being should be granted, but that doesn’t mean she deserves the chance to worsen a status quo that’s killing people who could be just like her if only they were also famous millionaires.

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue