Transphobes & The Things They Say
My mind turns to bereavement at the tragic loss of our trans* brothers and sisters to suicide and murder. There are many who do not share our experiences as trans* but who nonetheless empathize with us and share in our grief.
Yet there are those who use our deaths as a soap box for their selfish crusades to stamp us out. They presume they can talk about morality, “common sense,” and what else in front of their audience feigning pensiveness as they cry out in vain while standing on a pile of corpses. One would think the depreciating quality of their speeches ranging from the corybantic to the prevaricating would rob them of people willing to lend their ears. Alas, human nature is capricious. People who would otherwise be neutral on such matters sometimes follow those with more energy than sense.
It used to be considered a source of bad luck to speak ill of the dead. Now, it appears to be a favourite American pastime if the deceased shares traits in common with the LGBTQ community.
A little empathy and understanding can go a long way to helping others heal. There is no reason to keep it in abeyance when there is someone in pain before you. If you have to take the time to vilipend someone else’s suffering, then you are a broken human being and should be pitied. That is all there is to it.
Transphobia… Yes, it exists on Medium. They are a small minority, but they are loud. If the world already accepted trans* and gender-queer people in the same capacity as it has accepted people of different sexualities, then finding courtiers, people with no opinions of their own and are perfectly happy to substitute them to advance in career or social status, and flâneurs, known as idlers and dawdlers, with such user names as “QuickFactChecker” or handles describing them as the scion of some sort of truth with an ax to grind would almost seem endearing and even comical. Oh, wait a minute… it is comical, even pointless twaddle. It is fun to laugh at how completely clueless they are, but it still hurts. What people say in public and online still hurts, no matter how ridiculous or ham-fisted their assertions are.
We usually find it absurd to find the typical homophobic bromides still being used today. What were they again? Let us put them in a list and see.
- Homosexuals will go after your boys, your children. Keep them out of public sanitation and restroom facilities. Keep them out of your schools.
- Accepting homosexuals will lead to bestiality and adults marrying children.
- Homosexuality is unnatural.
- Homosexuality is a choice.
- Homosexuals are mentally-ill. That is why they cannot help themselves. We should lock them up until they are cured.
- Homosexuality is a disease.
- Homosexuality is an abomination in the eyes of God.
- Animals do not exhibit homosexual behaviours in nature (We know this is not true).
- Homosexuality makes men effeminate.
- The new one white nationalists sometimes go for is that homosexuality and transsexuals are some feminist plot to turn guys into girls. No joke. Some MGTOWs and MRAs online reach for this one, too. It is something you have to see to believe, and even then, you still will not believe it.
I could go on, but I am sure you are familiar with many more examples.
So, the question you must be asking yourself is why? Why bring up homophobia? What does that have to do with transphobia? Well, they are two sides of the same coin. All you have to do is replace the word “homosexuality” in the list with words related to trans* people to get the message.
You will also notice a single undercurrent in the invective parroted by homophobes and transphobes, even racists. They frame-flip their message to convey their antagonism as a form of dubious self-defense. I have noticed the same kinds of people who regularly make antagonistic remarks against gay and trans* people also bring up the topic of race, and they frequently frame-flip their bigotry into conspiratorial persecution.
Here is what Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent of The Atlantic, has to say about the more nuanced racism and bigotry which infects modern life. My own additions added in parentheses.
Racism tends to attract attention when it’s flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping — positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gay do not simply want to marry, they want to convert our children into sin. (Or as Pope Francis has said, trans* people do not simply want to be accepted, they want to erase sex differences and confuse our children.) The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace, they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible, bigotry, one that does not seek to name-call, preferring instead change the subject and strawman. Thus segregation wasn’t necessary to keep the niggers in line, it was necessary to protect the honor of white women. — http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/07/the-naacp-is-right/59793/
Just like when young men used to use the “gay panic” defense to avoid responsibility for murder, transphobes still see trans-women, specifically, as very feminine gay men, and it threatens them for some reason.
Some just get dismissive and accuse them of “mental illness” (Based on their crackerjack degree, I’m sure) and use childish metaphors referring to fictional people thinking they’re turnips or some nonsense like that, which is no different than how people in online spaces sometimes characterize homosexuals as pedophiles.
In fact, most hostility towards trans* people exclusively targets trans-women, which is strange and also quite telling. It would not be surprising at all if the transphobia we are seeing is just another way for authoritarian conservatives to also get at homosexual men. We are familiar with the trope that the most ardent homophobe is secretly the most flaming gay. There is truth to that, and there are personal accounts where this is certainly true, but there has always been something about the feminine that our society rejects.
There is good chance a trans* girl coming out will immediately be shamed with remarks about her body, affirming in the eyes her tormentors the curse of manhood; however, a normal boy with no such inclinations can have his manhood consistently revoked by his peers if they so much as sense a moment of weakness or a flash of the feminine on him. Might he pretend to be a trans* girl in the face of such bullying just to retain a small shred of dignity as a boy? Yet cross-dressing for boys, despite not being the taboo that it was, is no guarantee the bullying will stop. If anything, the bullying will only be worse.
People sometimes shackle themselves to toxic ideas of manhood and womanhood. The fear of being dashed to bits for falling out of these roles is quite real. It does indeed have physical and psychological repercussions. Just ask anyone in the LGBTQ community? They will tell you so. I sometimes wonder what it will take to free us from such a risible and harmful culture.
Trans* people trounce on this idea of the immutability of gender as a function of sex, and trans-women are seen as threatening to this idea of the deterministic male. Man’s identity in society had to forcibly undergo some painful changes in the advent of women’s liberation and ever increasing gender equality. The pain is real, and it has left many people like chaff blowing in the wind wondering where they actually fit in this new society. Some take root in the bitter soils of resentment and seek to lash out as a physical manifestation as conflicts arise between what they think aught to be true and what is true.
People hostile towards the trans* community are in the same vein as those who can be described as homophobic. These people more than likely were raised in authoritarian households under rigid gender and social roles. They tend to be rather puritanical in their beliefs on sex and sexuality. They are more likely to express authoritarian and traditionally conservative attitudes. They could, though not always, have received a poor education. They have had no contact with anyone from the LGBTQ community. Their fear stems from the unknown, and the LGBTQ community embodies the unknown for a lot of people. They are likely to be older and/or religious. Then there are the cannibals or, as some have popularized, the Wetiko who, through either instinct or pleasure, live to consume other human-beings, figuratively speaking of course. Trans* people are just easy prey for such people.
The claims that are usually made by people who wish to categorize trans* people as somehow broken or defective are usually based on a high school level of understanding of human biology and just plain ignorance. They cling to claims about DNA. But what do they really know about DNA, except some watered down story about blueprints and building blocks? The biology argument is a popular verisimilitude that transphobic and homophobic people alike use when they have no other valid reasons for dismissing them. It is thinly disguised opprobrium passed off as rational concern. Nobody uses these excuses anywhere in normal daily human interactions. This half-baked reasoning is only reserved for a select group of people, the very definition of irrational discrimination.
Do we honestly separate society based on some crude genetic marker or do we separate people based on some “separate spheres” nonsense from the Victorian Era? I do believe it is the latter.
They also bring up the deterministic nature of gender, even though this is only half true, and yet immediately contradict themselves by saying trans* people’s genders can be changed to match their current sex with some sort of psychotherapy, even though such measures have proven unsuccessful. This “therapy” is sometimes called gender reparative therapy, and it is no different, if not exactly the same, as gay conversion therapy, which as you know is considered harmful and dangerous by leading medical and mental health associations. Even though the most invasive techniques used in reparative therapy such as shock and chemical therapy, even removing sex organs, has long since been relegated as quackery, psycho-analysis, pioneered by Sigmund and Anna Freud, is still used in psychotherapy to convert people. In the case of conversion therapy, some waffle over the legal technicalities concerning the legal definitions of what constitutes child abuse, but people can attest that it is indeed harmful as well as another form of quackery. It is in part due to it being based on the “a priori” assumption that homosexuality and transgenderism is somehow immoral.
These same people also bring genitalia into the mix, as if that makes any appreciable difference. I could just image these rubes putting this nonsense to practice. Imagine someone demanding a person of interest his or her entire biological history for admittance into a humble public space or just to engage in friendly banter. Imagine a person bowing to give salutations to people’s junk or breasts instead of meeting them in the eyes with a cordial smile and a civil wave. We do not do that. We are not our genitalia, though I can imagine some straining the credulity of that statement.
Genetics is irrelevant when we deal with other people in civil society. The educated among us know of the folly which comes from segregating people based on very insignificant biological differences, perceived or otherwise. It does not work, and it makes for very bad policy, period.
“But I was taught that if you have a Y chromosome you are a man.”
There are people out there who do not fit that very narrow and clumsy definition of what a man is. The are people with rare conditions called Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome and the lesser known Swyer Syndrome. These are people born female but have a single X and a single Y chromosome. Sex chromosomes based on their configuration typically yield what is expected to be male or female, but this does not always happen. The chromosome of interest here is the Y chromosome or more specifically as single gene known as the SRY gene. Destructive mutation of this gene will render an embryo with the XY karyotype female without exception. Translocation of the SRY gene onto the an X chromosome will cause an embryo with an XX karyotype to develop testicular tissue and even become male. Ironically enough, the X chromosome has very few genes which might have something to do directly with sex, and a woman will only have one active X chromosome. So, both men and women have only one active X chromosome. When you get down to it, men and women are virtually the same genetically separated by just one gene. Just what is all the fuss about then?
I am just going to come right out and say it. Building a moral argument, let alone an ethical one, on denying trans* people the right to exist based on arbitrary genetic chemistry is completely asinine. Do at your peril, but you will most likely be considered a laughing stock among those who know better for talking about biology in such a crude and childish way. There is no moral argument to be found in genes coding for proteins. The only reason to bring up genetics in civil discourse is either as a curiosity, for educational purposes, discussion of genetic diseases, and/or possible genetic therapies.
Also, when trans* people decide to transition, the body responds to sex hormones in much the same way as they would have had that person been born as the opposite sex. Some trans* people, like myself, already had sex characteristics of the opposite sex before transitioning. In my case, I already had a feminine body with small breasts. The human body is quite flexible and malleable. It is not wholly deterministic.
There are about 1 out of every 100 people born with some sort of physical sex anomaly. One percent may seem like a small number, but multiply it over 330 million or 7.4 billion and you begin to see these conditions are not at all that rare. A 37 year-old business man from Lancashire, UK went in for bladder cancer and was surprised to find out he had a full set of female reproductive organs instead.
There is also the possibility that two zygotes with different “sex chromosomes” can merge into one person known as a Chimera. As Shaggy would say, “Zoinks!” What about all those self-righteous moms out there wagging their fingers against trans* and gay acceptance making similar claims about DNA and biology? Well, any mother who has birthed a baby-boy may have his tissues living somewhere inside her. There was an instance where a mother had cells from her male child living inside her brain. You see how this argument against the existence of trans* people based on biology and genetics grows increasingly untenable even approaching the absurd, especially as new evidence comes out showing epigenetic evidence validating trans* identities. It is well accepted among the medical community that what causes people to become trans* is biological, not psychosomatic. The APA and the DSM also no longer consider being trans* a disorder.
Obviously, human biology is not so black and white.
Potboiler arguments about “biology” passing reactionary discrimination as “public concern” can be distilled effortlessly as good ‘ole fashioned sexism and gender discrimination couched in sciencey talk, which includes a pedestrian level of understanding of human biology and the human condition. The Victorians were well known for doing this, and most people hardly ever refer to their outdated ideas about the sexes and sexuality, except possibly from some holdovers in the deep south. Such rhetoric accomplishes two things. One, it hides bigoted statements behind sciencey and so-called “expert opinions” (This includes misusing studies) to elevate their bigotry to the same level as a scientific fact. Two, those statements are specifically designed as red herrings to focus your attention on the supposed “facts,” not on the bigoted statement they just made. Disagree with their bigotry, and they will most likely assume you disagree with the “facts” they misused to erase trans* people.
Imagine the chaos created by bigoted policies using “tests” to exclude trans* people from public places. They could have unintended consequences for people they did not account for.
I reiterate. What genitalia trans* people are born with is irrelevant. We go by a person’s gender presentation, not their genitalia. We do not demand a show-and-tell of people’s genitalia for access to public spaces, and such policies would clearly be a form of sexual harassment.
“But what about public bathrooms?”
The whole bathroom hysteria has already started claiming victims. So, we can cut through the bovine scatology right now and see these policies do not protect anyone.
Trans* people wish to avoid being body shamed as much as possible. They will want to use a private stall or ensure a restroom is empty before using. They will not flash men or women with their ambiguous bodies, undoubtedly causing both men and women to suffer from “the vapours” I’m sure. This isn’t rocket science, you know. Trans* people are not anything like the negative stereotypes you may be familiar with. They do not want to risk increasing their own discomfort by causing others the same. There are trans* children who change schools or drop-out all together due to these very reasons.
The main reason behind the whole bathroom kerfuffle has no basis in fact but in the pseudoscience of the “separate spheres” ideology. You know… the same ideology which forbade women from rigorous sports because their uterus might fall out. The idea behind having co-ed restrooms and shower rooms is nothing at all new or exciting. Some European countries have effectively solved the whole gendered bathroom debate with mixed-gender bathrooms and saunas long before the idea of “transgender bathrooms” ever entered the political discourse in the States. They have even been implemented in the US in a limited capacity without any adverse affects.
We respectfully take people at their word for who they wish to present the selves as with no presumption of fowl-play or ulterior designs, and it works. There is no reason to suspend this custom on account of those within the LGBTQ community. Nothing is lost from treating these people with dignity and respect. If you cannot give certain people the benefit of a doubt and treat them with dignity without falling on your sword, might I suggest a swift retreat from the space feeding your indignation and paranoia? Go outside, meet new people, and hang out with those in the LGBTQ community. Life is not nearly as scary or as monochromatic as you make it.
It should also be noted that the trans* discrimination also hurts the cisgender, hetero-normative crowd, as well. Let us think about the rhetoric surrounding bathrooms, again. What is the main scare tactic people use against legally protecting a transgender person’s right to use the restroom? They typically wail that such legislation will put “women and children at risk” by allowing “male sex predators” in the women’s room. Despite the glaring lack of evidence that any of this is true, this tactic has worked quite well. However, it makes some pretty bad, not to mention sexist, generalized assumptions about women and men. Whether explicitly stated or not, it is important to realize these generalizations are often implied. These ideas are deeply ingrained by generations of reinforcement. First, the phrase “women and children at risk” typically refers to those who are white, cisgender, and hetero-normative. Second, it lumps women in with children which hearkens all the way back to traditional, sexist attitudes towards white women being pure and innocent to the point of naivete and childlike. Third, it assumes the helplessness of women, which is sometimes used as a tool to enable male violence. The second part of the statement assumes the popular negative stereotype that men constantly lust after young, feminine bodies; they are opportunistic monsters ready to take any advantage society affords them. The risks are obviously overblown, and all these risible arguments do is perpetuate harmful stereotypes, which not only set trans* rights back but sets back gender equity in the aggregate. Yet people, including women, unconsciously follow along oblivious to their tacit agreement with these generalizations they would normally, consciously rebuke.
As someone wrote in Caecilius Iucundus’ house right before the destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD, “He who loves should live. He who does not love should die, and he who obstructs love should die twice.” For those religious among you, even the Bible says as much. The ancient world knew how important solidarity and community was to societal cohesion, basic survival and well-being. Through learning to accept people within the LGBTQ community, we are learning those same old lessons all over again. Maybe someday we will get it right. Though dismayed, I am hopeful.
There are many resources out there to education people on matters relating to the trans* community. Here are some recommended sources.
There is a really good Ted Talk which talks about how language is used in a gendered way to hide sexism and privilege, which allows these ideas to go unchallenged.
