(on why trans existence is always treated as political)

In a previous post, I argued that eunuchs were not symbols but solutions – a form of human infrastructure designed to stabilise power without reforming it. Eunuchs were built where trust was scarce, inheritance was sacred, and patriarchy was non-negotiable.

They were not the problem – they were the workaround.

That same logic has not disappeared. It has simply found new bodies.

The real fear is not difference

Political systems do not panic because of difference: they panic because of unpredictability.

A stable state depends on bodies being legible. It needs to know, quickly and cheaply:

• who is male or female,
• who will reproduce,
• who will inherit,
• who is dangerous,
• who is disposable.

Gender is not just cultural, it is administrative.

This is why trans people are treated as a systemic problem simply by existing. Not because they are disruptive in intent, but because they disrupt the sorting mechanisms the state relies on.

A trans body asks a question the system does not want to answer:

Where do you put someone who does not reproduce your expectations?

Gender as political infrastructure

Like eunuchs, trans people reveal something uncomfortable:

Gender is doing work.

It organises:

• reproduction,
• inheritance,
• labour,
• violence,
• citizenship.

When someone steps outside it, they are not merely expressing identity – they are exposing the machinery underneath.

That exposure is what gets framed as “political”.

Not activism.
Not protest.
Not ideology.

Visibility.

From bodily neutralisation to bureaucratic neutralisation

When systems cannot absorb unpredictability, they don’t always attack it directly. They slow it down.

Ancient societies neutralised males and created eunuchs through irreversible bodily alteration. Modern societies prefer to believe they are more humane.

Instead, they neutralise trans people through process.

• waiting lists,
• assessments,
• proof requirements,
• psychiatric scrutiny,
• medical gatekeeping,
• legal limbo.

This is not primarily about safety or care.
It is about containment.

A person who is:

• waiting,
• justifying,
• proving,
• explaining,

is a person who is not reorganising the system around them.

Neutralisation has become procedural.

Why the myths return

When systems cannot categorise, they mythologise.

Eunuchs were accused of:

• secret power,
• corruption,
• unnatural desires,
• courtly manipulation.

Trans people are accused of:

• social contagion,
• predation,
• ideological subversion,
• civilisational collapse.

These stories perform the same function: they shift attention away from institutional fragility and onto allegedly dangerous bodies.

It is easier to invent monsters than to admit that your framework cannot cope.

“Just existing” is never neutral

This is why trans people are told – endlessly – that their existence is political.

Not because it truly is, but because the system has no neutral place to put them.

Neutrality requires:

• stable categories,
• predictable futures,
• compliant bodies.

Trans people, like eunuchs before them, interrupt that flow.

And interruption reads as threat.

The quiet continuity

Eunuchs no longer walk palace corridors, but the logic that produced them is alive and well.

Any body that:

• does not reproduce the state’s assumptions,
• does not stabilise its hierarchies,
• does not quietly serve its future,

will be managed, delayed, constrained, or erased.

Not out of cruelty, but out of fear.

A closing thought

If a society experiences certain bodies as inherently political, the problem is not the bodies.

It is the system that requires such narrow forms of humanity in order to function.

That was true of eunuchs.

It is true of trans people now.

And until power learns to tolerate unpredictability, it will keep mistaking existence for rebellion.