Why Are So Many Trans People Into Urban Planning?

If you’ve spent any time online with a bunch of trans women, you may have come across the “trans on trains” meme. The bit goes like this: be a trans woman, snap a selfie during your train ride, and then post it online. The similarity between the word “trans” and the words “trains” or “transit” has become fertile comedy ground for trans people online for a generation.

Pictures of cargo trailers with a company name ending in “trans” are easy fodder to get likes on trans social media.

But alongside the memes and jokes, wherever I go online, I see trans people pairing their transit puns with hardcore transit and urbanist advocacy. While not ubiquitous amongst trans people, it feels like trans people have a predisposition for transit advocacy. Others have noticed as well. The popular urbanist YouTuber Ray Delahanty, perhaps better known by his YouTube handle “CityNerd,” noted the high number of trans people into transit systems and housing planning a few months ago on BlueSky.

It was this interaction with Delahanty that got me thinking about why so many trans people are trans…it nerds (like me). So I took to BlueSky to ask my fellow trans urbanists why we think we’re like this.

The answers varied widely but the most common refrain I heard was that trans people are more likely to seek to move to the relative safety of a large city, while also being economically challenged enough to be forced to use public transportation systems.

“Much of our existence is defined by the spatial operator of, ‘does this place allow me to exist?’” said Ada, a trans woman and urban planning student. “Cities are a great equalizer in a way. By a city’s nature, you’re exposed to so many people so frequently that the novel becomes mundane. If social exposure maps to progressiveness, then it’s easy to see that locations with a density of places and transportation would be the safest place to be transgender.”

But in most cases, cities are more expensive places to live within than rural areas, especially with the housing market conditions that have been in place for the last couple decades. Property value keeps rising, and so do rents. A recent study of urban rent increases showed that Washington, DC, of which an estimated 2.7% of its population is trans, triple the percentage of the number of trans people in the general population, had a nation-leading 12% increase between 2023 and 2024 in rental prices. DC was among the first cities in the country to offer trans specific protections against discrimination, and leads the nation in trans people as a percentage of the general population (in part due to the urban nature of the District of Columbia).

Trans people are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed compared to similarly educated cis people in the general population, and because of this, trans people are more likely to live in poverty. The stark reality is that anti-trans discrimination runs rampant amongst US employers. According to data from the Williams Institute at UCLA, about 70% of trans people have experienced at least one form of discrimination in the workplace and multiple studies have shown that a job applicant is significantly less likely to get an offer if there are obvious signs that an applicant is trans.

For economically disadvantaged trans people, cities are a double-edged sword. They’re the places we find our greatest safety, while being less financially equipped than cis people to live there. Since public transit systems can be a literal financial lifeline, it makes sense that these circumstances would radicalize people and breed transit advocates and activists.

Trans people are “socially located in a place that puts us right in the middle of [a] storm,” trans woman Dani Kasper told me in a DM. “Dense cities are the places that are safest for us, but they’re very expensive because of the exclusionary policies and we’re one of the most financially precarious groups–that’s a setup that’ll naturally make you passionate about reform.”

Transisters and Systems Nerds

But social and economic conditions alone are only part of the story. Along with the transit enthusiast thing, another stereotype common for trans people (especially trans women) is that we’re gamers.

For decades, trans people who face social stigma in public have found friendship in gaming and online communities. Going online has helped us find other trans folks and learn about the basics of transitioning, and has offered a safer, more controllable environment to exist within as a trans person. Gaming is an extension of that. Computer gaming offers that same safety and the ability to pass the time away from a society that ranges from barely tolerant to actively dangerous for us.

Of course, there’s a game for transit nerds.

Many folks I spoke with mentioned playing the game Cities Skylines, a city building simulator akin to the old SimCity games. The game requires you to build out an entire transit infrastructure in order to serve an ever-growing virtual city. It’s a sandbox and you can create just about anything you want.

“I love that game,” said Mila, a trans woman from Philadelphia who has also lived in the Tokyo area and Washington, DC. “I love taking inspiration from cities where I've lived and sticking a big huge middle finger in Robert Moses' face and eschewing the whole concept of suburban planning.” (Moses was a powerful urban planner in early 20th-century New York and his philosophy shaped the US system of transit and car-oriented development across the following century.)

For Mila, who has made her living as a bike messenger now in multiple big cities, she has an inherent interest in systems and how they work. “I can't speak for trans people as a monolith, but personally speaking, I take great interest in systems—anything with nodes and paths makes my planning autism happy, and I love love love seeing how those nodes fit together, and making those networks pretty and efficient,” she said.

There’s been some analysis of the way being trans and being autistic often go together. Both trans people and autistic people have somewhat of a reputation of being into trains. Some of my autistic friends who are into transit have told me that the predictability of transit, with its routes and schedules, offers a measure of comfort in a world that has so much disruption.

That’s not to say that all trans people who are super into transit and urban planning are autistic, however—and transphobes often try to invalidate the transness of autistic trans people. I myself am a non-autistic trans person who is obsessed with transit. But there’s enough of a crossover between the two populations that this piece would not be complete without mentioning it.

Transitioning–and Urban Planning–Are Collective Actions

It makes sense that exposure to systems like public transportation and housing, especially with the poor state of both in the US specifically, would create critics and reform enthusiasts. But one trans person I spoke with felt that the critical analysis needed to realize and accept a transgender identity also lends itself to seeing the problems that exist in current city and transit planning practices.

“I almost feel like there's a higher order connection in that transness necessitates taking a bird's eye view of society from a gender standpoint,” said the BlueSky poster known as Katie Tightpussy. “I know what womanhood means to me, but given that gender is as equally personal as it is social, I am obliged to know what womanhood means to society. I think trans people tend to have a lot more conscious thought about this kind of grander societal thinking as a result of our experiences, which is also the exact way of thinking that you need to do with transit and urban planning.”

Katie explained the old trans joke that transitioning genders brings with it a de facto interdisciplinary degree in gender studies. So too does urbanism. “There are SO many angles to [urban planning] with countless factors that all need to be considered,” she said. “It's almost like a fractal with how much you have to understand depending on the scope and scale. All of that needs to be synthesized by someone who can see the vision.”

In much the same way as an urban planner figuring out how a possible change to a transit system might change the housing pattern of a given neighborhood, trans people engage in similar analysis for how hormones or a given medical procedure might change how they or others perceive their bodies. Our healthcare is also not very well documented, and a lot of doctors are simply unfamiliar with trans healthcare, which means that trans communities are frequently creating cycles of information where more experienced trans people pass on important experience about our healthcare options with those who come up behind us. Getting healthcare becomes a kind of collective action, much in the same way transit and housing problems call for collective action.

Stepping back from all of this, whatever it is that motivates trans people to get into transit and urban planning, there can be no doubt that a ton of trans people have this interest. As a journalist, I’ve done hundreds of social media callouts for sources willing to speak about various topics, from trans people accessing healthcare to a round up of the best trans jokes, and I’ve never before received the volume of responses to a call for comments as I did for this story. One person on BlueSky joked that my callout looking for trans urbanism enthusiasts was “like looking for feline catnip enthusiasts.”

Honestly I love this for us. I look forward to seeing even more “trans on trains” selfies.

This piece was edited by s.e. smith and copyedited by Chrissy Stroop.