There’s a strange dissonance inherent in being a living, breathing, three-dimensional trans person at a time when the concept of your existence is framed as an abstract topic for debate – one you’re forced to reluctantly show up for, despite never agreeing to.

As trans people become the moral panic de rigueur, as a narrative emerges so deliberately sensationalised, it remains obvious that those who would seek to erase trans people from public life have never spoken to a trans person in their lives.

To draw from an admittedly extreme example, not long ago the Vatican put out a statement in which they suggested trans people’s mission on this earth was to “annihilate nature”. Which is, of course, super-empowering. I was unaware I had such capabilities.

Last week, a national, conservative-leaning newspaper established a dedicated section on their website to collate articles which obsessively demonise trans people, primarily by targeting young people who express gender variance, and the medical professionals and parents who make the radical decision to listen and support young people in distress.

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Given that so much of the reactionary media’s focus is on the supposed idea that young people are being pressured into medical changes they will live to regret, it crosses one’s mind that the end goal here is about creating and maintaining a situation in which young people cannot imagine a future for themselves where they are comfortably trans, happy, supported.

It’s about marking gender variance as undesirable, as shameful – erasing the realities of trans experience and replacing it as a nightmarish scenario.

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I have no business assuaging fears by arguing that trans people are just like anyone else. Despite the fact that I really am just out here living my life, I don’t think explaining that serves a particularly useful purpose.

If my legitimacy, my right to exist in whichever way I damn please so long as I’m not hurting anyone, is based upon how readily I deny my difference, then I’m not interested. These arguments also necessarily do little for those whose bodies don’t fit within a white, able-bodied, middle-class image of queer normativity.

Because if you’re cis (i.e. not trans), the fact of the matter is I’m not just like you. And you’re not exactly like me. We have realities that are unique, struggles which are unique. And that’s fine, because expecting everyone to be the same as you, and getting irrationally upset when they aren’t, is something people generally grow out of pretty young.

What I do have business telling you is that I am filled with deep gratitude that I was given the support and resources to transition when I did, around six years ago. Because, for the most part it’s worked pretty spectacularly – and I reject the implication I should feel bad about that.

Navigating the world is an experience unique to every trans person, but many of the trans people I know share the feeling that transition has, essentially, saved their life. I feel this way too.

However, if I was a young gender non-conforming person right now, I would probably believe, like I believed in my youth, that to be a trans adult was to live a life of intense shame, of inescapable sadness.

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That’s because the assumption that underpins most of the moral panic around trans people, and especially young people, is that we all agree being trans is a bad thing, so we’d better make sure that we aren’t letting people access transition all willy-nilly.

But what if we removed that lynchpin from the arguments it props up? What if we took for granted that transition was, broadly speaking, a good thing?

Shame is a powerful disincentive for action that sits outside of dominant understandings.

Perhaps the most insidiously toxic part of reactionary media reporting on trans issues is the disingenuous notion that it comes from a place of concern. The first two headlines on that newspaper’s “gender” section I mentioned are “They’re castrating children” and “Fears grow for trans kids”.

There has been a concerted effort to present transition as an experience it is extremely common for people to later regret – despite having little credible evidence to back this assertion up. They find a particularly potent scapegoat in young people, who are positioned as incapable of making choices about their own bodies, and suffer irreversible consequences when provided with access to transition.

This leads to another mythology of reactionary media, that of medical intervention. Trans healthcare is often positioned as a walk-in walk-out situation, where radical change happens in seconds. Alarmist narratives of young children undergoing “sex change surgeries” and hormones given out like candy.

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As anyone who has tried to access transition-related healthcare in Australia will tell you, access is in fact a heavily restricted and gate-kept process. The amount of hoops one must jump through in order to even begin medical transition can be prohibitively difficult. It is a wildly different experience to the sensationalized version the media regularly portrays it as, but we persist because, ultimately, we know – far better than a stranger on the internet – about our bodies, and our needs.

None of what I’m saying erases the fact that trans people, by and large, suffer under oppression in this moment, and depression and suicidality are often the ways this manifests. But oppressive conditions don’t come from within. That is, poor mental health outcomes for trans people aren’t some innate condition that comes as part and parcel in identifying with a non-normative gender, as is often argued by critics.

It is the structural and systemic factors that we need to focus on when talking about mental health outcomes for trans people. Building positive outcomes for our community – and especially the most vulnerable in our communities and likely to be targeted by transphobic discrimination – starts with addressing those factors. Making accessing healthcare easier, and addressing gaps in housing and employment equality, for instance.

On an individual level, anti-trans narratives succeed when they convince people, and particularly young people, that their identity makes them less of a person. It is vital we refuse to let reactionary media frame young people as “victims” when they make active choices about who they are and receive support in transition.

The young trans people that I’ve worked with in the past are not victims, being trans is not a disease, and what trans people need – what all people need, really – is to have their autonomy recognised and their choices supported.

As far as our rights are concerned, it doesn’t even really matter that my wellbeing has vastly improved since I began transitioning. Nobody’s access to transition should be based on whether it makes them happy or not, and bodily freedom and autonomy should be a given right. Yes, even in the case of young people and adolescents.

But if the right is dead set on painting transition as an inevitably bleak scenario that “many” people regret, then there is value in saying that no matter the level of vitriol aimed at me, you cannot make me feel bad about being trans. You can’t make me believe that to exist outside of archaic understandings of binary gender is shameful.

Perhaps most importantly, you can’t stop support and affirmation of trans people from within (and often outside of) our community. For whatever aspects of existing in this cultural moment are isolating or painful, I have found joy and connection, largely through the trans and queer people in my life, the knowledge that I am demonstrably not alone.

We’re here, we’ve always been here, and we’re not going anywhere.