But trans is going too far
Translated from the German original, «Aber trans geht zu weit».
At Christmas dinner we had beef fillet, the way we always do. I wore a black skirt and a black long-sleeved top. Nobody said anything.
A few weeks later, a relative told my mother he had been surprised. How feminine I come across. Like a normal woman.
He didn’t say it to me. He said it to her, when they met up later. I wasn’t there.
One of my grandmothers had told me six months earlier that she wouldn’t have a problem if I were gay. But trans, that was going too far.
The other one had assumed I would now be walking around town dressed like a drag queen.
I let both remarks pass at the time, the way you do when it’s your own family. These days I think they explain fairly precisely why the debate about us runs the way it does.
Both remarks came from people who have known me my whole life. Both had a picture of me beforehand that had nothing to do with me. One didn’t know where to put me. The other knew exactly, and was wrong.
My grandmother was born in 1940. When she was young, the Zurich city police kept a register of homosexual men. Same-sex relationships between adults hadn’t been a criminal offence since 1942. The register existed anyway, until the late seventies. In 1979 it was ended and destroyed.
So when that same woman says today that she has no problem with gay people, it isn’t indifference. Something shifted over the course of her life.
It shifted because people eventually knew someone. The neighbour. A colleague’s son. Somebody from the gymnastics club. There is a name for this, the contact hypothesis, set out by Gordon Allport in 1954. Prejudice against a group declines when you know members of that group personally.
For homosexuality the evidence is solid. A national survey in the United States found in 1993 that personal contact predicted attitudes toward gay men better than anything else. Better than age, education, where someone lived, religion or political leaning.
At some point the numbers were large enough. Almost everyone had someone in the family, in a club, at work. After that, marriage equality became politically possible. That doesn’t mean the matter is settled. The LGBTIQ Helpline recorded 281 reports of anti-queer violence and discrimination for 2025, and a Geneva study found that over 80 per cent of LGBTIQ people have experienced something of the kind in public.
For us, that point hasn’t come.
There is no reliable official figure. What can be counted are changes to the legal gender marker: around 600 in 2025. How many trans people live here altogether, nobody knows. TGNS notes that it depends on who you count, and cites estimates starting at 0.3 per cent of the population. For Switzerland that would be at least around 26,000.
Sounds like a lot. It isn’t, when almost none of them are recognisable as such.
There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t a sad one.
Once you’re through, you’re simply a woman. There’s no occasion to mention the rest, any more than you’d mention which village you went to school in. The community has a word for it: stealth. It sounds like hiding. To me it doesn’t feel that way, more like the end of a process.
That’s the difference from gay men and lesbians. There, coming out is the decisive step, and afterwards you’re out and stay out, broadly speaking, even if you have to do it again with every new job and every new neighbour. For us it’s a phase, and whoever has it behind her disappears from the count of the visible. Nobody can be blamed for that. It’s the point the whole thing was heading towards.
It does mean, though, that this correction often never happens at all. They live somewhere, work, do their shopping, sit at Christmas dinners. My grandmother has probably met a few in her life. She never found out.
I could go stealth too. In daily life I am. On the bus, in the shop, at the office, nobody sees anything, and that matters to me. Simply being a woman, not a trans woman. That was the point, after all.
And yet my name is on this.
Not because I’m braver than anyone else. Because somebody has to be publicly visible, particularly in politics. Decisions about us are made in motions, in editorials, in regulations, and in those debates there is rarely anyone present whom people know. When nobody is there, the picture decides.
If personal contact corrects pictures, the other question remains: where does the picture come from that needs correcting?
Some time ago I saw a report on Natalie Rickli and her proposal concerning medical treatment for trans adolescents. The subject was minors and medical procedures. It was illustrated with a photo of a drag queen. I no longer have the article to hand, but the image stayed with me.
There is no shortage of this. Rainbow flags, parades, wigs, glitter. Editors aren’t choosing maliciously; they’re choosing what’s available and what stands out. A woman from Winterthur on her way to work is not a picture. A drag queen is.
None of this is a reproach to drag queens. Drag is an art form and has contributed a great deal to queer visibility. But drag is a stage role. Being trans is not. There is nothing to take off.
Confusing the two turns a life into a question of costume.
For media there’s a related concept: parasocial contact. The idea is that repeated exposure to people through media can also shape how you see a group.
So my grandmother did have contact. Not with me, but with an image that was there years before I was. She thought I’d be walking around like that, because she had seen the stage figure and taken it for the thing itself.
The picture came first. The person afterwards.
And the picture costs more than agreement.
If drag queens are all you picture when you hear the word trans, you won’t find yourself in it. Some people need years to realise the picture wasn’t the thing.
And parents hear a statement where there isn’t one. They imagine something loud, a decision against them, against how things are done. What actually arrives is usually someone who just wants to be left alone.
So the wrong picture doesn’t only cost opinions. It costs time, sometimes a lot of it.
That leaves my relative’s remark. He was surprised at how normal I come across. Which means the picture corrected itself in his mind. He watched me sit at the table, and what he had expected no longer held.
Except that he said it to my mother and not to me. The correction happened and stayed inside the family. What he says when the subject comes up elsewhere, I don’t know.
I also know why he was surprised. I don’t stand out. But that isn’t something that fell into my lap. It’s work. An hour in the chair every two weeks, hair by hair, out of my own pocket. A waiting list in France. A small flat and no holidays, because the money goes elsewhere.
Put that way, I bought the remark in the kitchen.
And part of it I simply inherited. How the bones sit, how the voice sounds, how the body responds to hormones. No amount of money changes that, and willpower certainly doesn’t. I got lucky. Others didn’t.
And that’s the part that bothers me. That the correction hangs on something like that at all. On money and on genetics. A trans woman who can’t afford that effort, or whose body is built differently, convinces nobody at a Christmas dinner. Not because she is any less a woman, but because she doesn’t fit the picture the others brought with them.
Contact works. But it only works where it takes place, and it can’t be multiplied. For every person who corrects her picture, one of us has to sit at a table and spend the evening being looked at.
At 26,000 out of nine million, that isn’t a strategy. It’s a burden placed on whoever happens to be in the room.
I’ll go again anyway. There’ll be beef fillet again, and I’ll wear something inconspicuous again, and probably nobody will say anything again.
That, as far as I can see, is the entire plan.