On April 16, I saw Wichita State University Turning Point USA student chapter promoting its screening for a new documentary, “Identity Crisis.”

Produced by The Daily Wire in collaboration with Turning Point USA, the film purports to scrutinize the “radical gender ideology movement.” Focusing on what its creators describe as the “mutilation of children,” it aims to end one of the “great human rights crimes of our era.”

As a transgender person, I did exactly what you might expect: I RSVP’d for the event — and took the free food they offered as an incentive for doing so.

That said, I don’t plan on attending. This film doesn’t simply present a different perspective from what it calls “mainstream culture.” It uses dehumanizing, inflammatory language to vilify transgender people.

Charlie Kirk, co-founder of Turning Point USA, refers to gender-affirming care as “the modern lobotomies of our time” and calls the mainstream acceptance of trans identities “one of the moral crimes of the century.”

By design, this rhetoric extends past being a mere exercise in free speech — it has tangible, detrimental effects on the lives of transgender people.

Through my experiences and those of my friends, I have gained firsthand knowledge of the discrimination people like us face. Sexual violence is committed against transgender people at harrowing rates, and is unfortunately something I know about far too well. 

I have witnessed blatant housing and employment discrimination, leaving friends evicted. I have seen rejection by family cull the dreams of higher education, physical abuse leading to hospitalization and the widespread acceptance of harassment in public. In this battle against endless hate, I have lost two friends who sought solace through suicide.

Since beginning my transition over a year ago, that weight — the cruelty, the fear, the isolation — has become my new normal. If being trans were truly a choice, I never would have inflicted this upon myself.

Which is why it’s so important to understand: for people like me, this is not a choice.

There are fundamental physiological and psychological differences between transgender and cisgender people. Where binary transgender people largely thrive under cross-sex hormones, cisgender people find only a crippling reduction in mental health outcomes.

The same principle applies to many other facets of transgender health care and underscores an immutable truth. These differences aren’t delusions or mistakes — they’re consistent, observable phenomena. Science has yet to fully grasp why, but the evidence is clear: internal gender identity matters, and expressing that identity isn’t indulgence — it’s necessary. The distress trans people face in the absence of gender-affirming care mirrors the psychological harm a cisgender person would experience if subjected to those very treatments.

That perspective is often foreign to cisgender people and greatly inhibits understanding. For many transgender people, embracing our inner identity is salvation — the breath of life given to our barely surviving lungs. When people tell us, “You’re being lied to” or “You’ve been tricked,” they fail to see the truth: that many of us only begin to feel real — to feel whole — when we are allowed to live as ourselves.

What films like “Identity Crisis” — and the organizations promoting them — do is frame that journey, the process of reclaiming our lives, as a horror story. They exploit the grief of detransitioners, who deserve compassion and care, not to advocate for better mental health care access or informed consent protocols, but to portray all trans people as broken and manipulated. 

And underneath their propaganda is the unspoken message: that we should never have existed in the first place. While they may not say so aloud, it is obvious to anyone who examines their messaging with a critical eye. Other medical practices with far higher risks and regret rates do not face their hostile scrutiny. The motivations behind targeting transgender health care specifically are painfully transparent.

Regardless of what they may desire, trans people exist. I was once a child, absurd as it may seem to them. A kid who didn’t have the words for what I was feeling, but who felt it all the same. Had I realized my identity sooner, the policies these groups wish to enact would have condemned me to needless suffering. To them, the misery of transgender kids is an acceptable casualty in the pursuit to “protect” the few who detransition.

Remaining silent through these attacks on trans rights is complicity with horrors yet to pass. Please remember that transgender people are not an ideology, nor a debate to be won. We are people.