On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services was “considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth” for the purposes of claiming Title IX civil rights. If implemented across the executive branch, this directive would effectively erase civil rights protections for transgender people and require anyone wishing to change the assigned gender on their birth certificate to undergo genetic testing.

It seems inadequate to respond with a simple “We told you so.” Here, the cliché only works in the past continuous tense: We have been telling you so.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, trans activists and writers like myself warned that the Trump-Pence ticket was a lightning rod of evangelical cruelty eager to unleash its frustration on trans folk in particular. We warned that should they take power, they would undoubtedly come for our rights immediately — and we were told by cisgender people that we were overreacting, and that Trump was actually for trans rights. See the rainbow flag he’s holding? We were told we were overreacting again when Trump began attempting to force trans people out of the military, and that it wasn’t a big deal when his administration rescinded Obama-era guidelines on Title IX — after all, he wasn’t telling federal agencies that transgender identities were invalid, right? Not yet.

They are taking away our access to healthcare and telling insurers our needs are cosmetic. They are making it increasingly difficult to obtain passports to prevent us from leaving the country, and are letting us die in detention centers. They are attempting to force our youth into school facilities where they are routinely attacked by parents and other children raised on hate. They are attempting to impose genetic testing on a desperately marginalized community. They are coming for us.

They are coming for us, and cis people have been helping them do so for years.

I need to be perfectly clear that when I say “they,” I am not referring to the Republican Party or some Pepe the Frog-shaped mass of conservatism. My bitterness has equal time for the cisgender liberals and centrists who have helped sculpt the current “conversation” around transgender rights — those who have been all too happy to cast this as a debate, something for reasonable people to list the pros and cons of and pick apart with clever rhetoric. That’s what cis people are aiming for, right? When they tell me on social media that I’m “alienating potential allies”? That I’m “dividing the Democratic party” and “distracting from what’s really important”? Cis people want to make politics presentable again. And trans people...well. We’re not always who they consider to be photogenic.

Cisgender people have turned prejudice against us into a matter of opinion, and have dismissed the experiences of trans people entirely. When I wrote about trans people detransitioning to escape the heightened persecution they knew was coming after the election, I was accused of being part of a “detransitioning cover-up.” When I and others like me repeatedly objected, over the course of several years, to Jesse Singal’s irresponsible and inaccurate reporting, cisgender media darlings called our reactions “over the top” and “bizarre” in an elite listserv. When I posited that trans people can’t trust the political left to unify in defense of our individual and collective rights, I was dismissed for “sow[ing] distrust amongst class allies.”