Transphobia: An Action Pack (Pt. 6)
An authoritative collection of details on what transgender means, the current medical status, public perception and backlash.
Hey, you! Yes, you. Are you normal? You didn’t change gender, or anything? Then you might have heard a lot of barking about those transes!
Maybe you’re feeling just a bit intimidated by all? Well, I’m here to help, best beloved. I’d like to show you how people talk about me and those like me, what it means and where we are now.
Entries
Glossary entries
- Gender Identity
- GSM, transgender, trans man, trans woman, cisgender, anti-trans campaigner, biological essentialism, misgendering, deadnaming, dogwhistle
- Stochastic violence, conversion therapy, trans-away-the-gay, rapid onset gender dysphoria.
- Autogynephilia
The Arguments
- Arguments 1 (Part 5 overall)
“What about the minority who are dangerous?”
“Calm down and stop being hysterical!”
“I’m just asking questions…”
“I’m not transphobic I’m just against extremists!”
“We have concerns but the transes silenced us!”
Some variation on “men”… - Arguments 2 (Part 6 overall)
Linking together gay/drag/sex/kink/abuse/pædophilia
Falling back on accusations of perversion
Using Trans Rights Activists / Lobbyists as a derogatory term
Appealing to “the gut” or common sense
Likening trans people to a contagion - Arguments 3 (Part 7 overall)
An appeal to ‘bringing reality’ into the conversation
- Declaring that sex is ‘baked into every cell in your body’
- Declaring that ‘you cannot change sex’
- Declaring that ‘men will always out-compete women’ in sports
Appealing to protecting women and girls - Arguments 4 (Part 8 overall)
An appeal to “ineffable womanhood”
An appeal to being generally “silenced” or “cancelled”
Any line that starts with “Well why can’t I identify as…”
Appealing to a shared experience that trans women cannot have - More soon!
The Arguments
We’ve been through the glossary of terms, and the first set of anti-trans arguments that are commonly wheeled out. Let’s continue forwards and look at the next batch: we will detail them and we shall hold them to a good level of scrutiny. We must agree that a concept needs to hold up to investigation, after all. Then we’ll provide the evidence demonstrating that they are unfounded.
Hang tight. First in this batch of anti-trans arguments is….
To Link Together Gay/Drag/Sex/Kink/Abuse/Pædophilia
This is a rhetorical tactic that tries to join unrelated items together so that a behaviour the speaker dislikes (eg drag) is tarred with the same brush as something generally considered reprehensible, like pædophilia. It’s meant to create a subconscious connection in the mind.
This works on two levels. The first is just trying to make something true by saying it over and over.
You might think that we’re all too smart for that, but it works, baby. It’s called the Illusory Truth Effect and it works because the target becomes so accustomed to hearing the falsehood that its familiarity overpowers rationality.
That’s partly why politicians have talking points and stick to them, even though it drives us all up the wall. The politicians are trying to create an illusory truth.
But wait, there’s more! The second level this works at is to make an implicit appeal to persons of a mind disposed to wholesome, puritan, conservative or squeaky-clean thinking. It is common for such people to find anything to do with sex generating a sort of disgusted interest. Trans-ness and queerness then are bundled up in the mind as just a sex thing.
Or, to quote Kurzban; Dukes and Weeden (2010):
“A zoologically peculiar feature of humans is that people not only monitor conspecifics’ [members of the same species] activities across a wide array of domains, but also express a desire that costs be imposed on third parties for a wide variety of behaviours. Humans do this even in circumstances in which they typically do not consciously perceive — and indeed often expressly deny — that they themselves (or their relatives) are harmed by the behaviour in question.”
Such a mindset could see cross-dressing as a kink (ie autogynephilia), and homosexuality as sexual deviancy. This is because they both break gender norms. Cross-dressing and homosexuality can thus be lumped together (see Part 2, section “Gender and Sexual Minorities”). It’s then a straight-forward step to throw in the transes, too, as we’re another group breaking gender norms.
Of course, since we’re now talking about dirty sex stuff (and already mentioned kink), let’s add in some leather and whips… oh, my, now we’ve added SM to our list. And what if the kink isn’t consensual? That means we now better add abuse to our list of dirty sex things. And, of course, once abuse is involved, it’s just a skip down the garden path to pædophilia.
Cue that meme of Helen Lovejoy begging “someone to think of the children”.
After this little performance of mental gymnastics and convolutitudinality, to bundle all this together under the banner of sex stuff, the anti-trans campaigner can easily now describe trans women (and/or drag queens) as perverts looking to abuse children. Hurray.
It also dovetails neatly with beliefs about being able to “learn” “deviant” behaviours like homosexuality and transness — that’s part of the abuse, see? We’re trying to “groom” children by telling them it’s okay to be queer or trans so we can make them queer or trans. It’s obvious that’s what we’re doing because we can’t have our own kids! And no God-fearing straight family could ever have queer or trans kids!
Telling kids that some people to have two mums, or two dads, or one dad and one parent, or two dads (where one used to be their mum) can’t make them queer or trans. Furthermore, gay is not the same as trans is not the same as drag is not the same as sex is not the same as kink is definitely not the same as abuse or pædophilia.
Anyone who hasn’t donated their brain to medical science would probably arrive at this conclusion if they spent more than five minutes around trans or queer people.
Naturally, this doesn’t stop some incredibly bad actors in this discussion from doing any amount of mental gymnastics to label pretty much the entire LGBTQ project as a stalking horse for child molestation. Here is Some More News covering exactly this topic in their delightful tongue-in-cheek yet studiously researched style.
To Fall Back On Accusations of Perversion
Following on from our previous argument, and directly based on the need to monster trans people as disgusting to justify hating them, the event horizon for an anti-trans campaigner is just claiming that all trans (women) are perverts.
It’s closely tied to biological essentialism, linking gender identity to kink or abuse (above) and, well, everything else we’ve looked at.
How can you rail and campaign against someone if you see them as just another human living their life? It is important to turn them into a figure of disgust and deviance in order to mistreat them. That way they deserve it and the anti-trans campaigner has therefore done nothing wrong.
Remember, these people don’t think they’re transphobic or bigoted (The Arguments Part 1 (Part 5 Overall) “I’m Just Against the Extremists”).
Here’s the lovely Caelan Conrad again, showing you this disgust in-progress in real life on social media — in groups ostensibly about helping parents.
There is, unfortunately, a lot more of this to come in other arguments later-on. Stick a pin in it for now, we’ll be circling back here later.
Using Trans Rights Activists (or Lobbyists) as a Derogatory Term
Once again harking back to “I’m Just Against the Extremists”, this is an argument that tries to draw a law between Good Transes (ie the ones who agree they’re not really whichever gender, just cosplaying) and Bad Transes.
This is a dogwhistle, so anti-trans supporters in-the-know are aware we’re talking about The Bad Transes. It incidentally has some connective tissue to our earlier topic of trying to mentally join two topics together to tar one with the same brush as the other… the acronym TRA sounds familiar, in fact it sounds like:
- NRA (National Rifle Association, a bunch of mostly male gun fanatics)
- MRA (Men’s Rights Activists, a bunch of mostly male misogynists)
- IRA (Irish Republican Army, which carries strong connotations of terrorist violence to a British audience)
This dogwhistle is designed to carry three implications:
- That Bad Trans people are mostly male.
- That Bad Trans people are violent and, therefore, dangerous.
- That any arguments which the speaker dislikes are ‘extreme’ and come from a small, troublesome group within the larger trans community… coincidentally, thus, absolving the speaker from being transphobic… after all, they’re only talking about the BAD Transes! You’re not a Bad Trans, are you? Or a Bad Trans supporter…?! (See “I’m Just Against the Extremists”)
This particular ill-fated ocean liner hits an iceberg when we consider that the trans community is, in fact, a very broad church of identities who broadly all want the same “extreme” things.
According to this study by KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation, San Francisco)/Washington Post (based on a representative sample of over 500 trans people in the USA in 2022) trans women account for 26% of the trans population. The majority are non-binary. Between trans women and trans men, trans women are slightly in the majority at 54.6%.
Therefore, it is inaccurate to identify ‘trans rights activists’ with movements associated with men. Furthermore, trans people are much more likely to be victims of crimes than perpetrators — see The Arguments Part 1 (Part 5 overall) “What About the Minority Who Are Dangerous?”.
As for the “extreme” demands of activists, here’s CBS News summarising the 2022 Trans Equality Survey showing that what most trans people want (and will move to get) is to be able to use the washroom they need, to play sports like other human beings, access to healthcare and freedom from discrimination.
Once more for the cheap seats at the back, most trans people want:
- To use the washroom that matches our gender
- To play sports in groups that match our gender
- To get healthcare appropriate to our needs as trans people
- To not get hit or yelled at or told “we don’t serve the likes of you here”.
Yanno. Really extreme stuff which the UK and US governments are under intense pressure to kill-off by: underfunding public healthcare with average wait times of 4½ years, removing healthcare for under 18s, undermining discrimination law (content warning: Daily Telegraph) and banning trans women from competing as women in athletics, cycling, rowing, golf, fishing, fun-runs and chess.
Golf. Fishing. And fucking chess. Rather betrays the lie that this is about protecting “real” women from “unfair” physical advantage, doesn’t it?
Incidentally, best beloved, you have no idea how hard it was to find any data on trans people’s views about ourselves, since all any news outlet wants to report on is what cisgender people think about trans people.
That leads me to a mini-reminder, in case I forget to say it later: as a group, we exist in our own right, separately, without needing to be thought of only in reference to stuff that affects cisgender people! A trans person won’t stop when a cisgender person leaves the room, and only start when they return!
Finally, a word on the term “lobbyist” that sometimes gets applied. I’ve been to many trans pride events and just about everything we do is grass roots. There’s no “big money” behind us, despite what repulsive nimrods would love to be true so they can link it back to George Soros, which is code for Cultural Marxism… which is code for Great Replacement… which is code for “Jews are going to kill us all!” Genuinely, I will never stop being stunned at finding anti-Semitism always at the root of these bonkers theories.
An Appeal to Listen To Your Gut, Common Sense, etc.
There’s a fascinating book by Robert Caldini called ‘Influence: Science and Practice’ in which the author researches and details the psychological tricks that sales people use to get us to do what they want, rather than what we want.
The tricks are all based, ultimately, on short-circuiting the mark’s reasoning by getting them to make a quick decision under pressure. No time for rational thinking — quick, just do the most likely thing based on our society’s mores and standards!
For example, if you were selling your car you would have a better outcome if you accidentally schedule two people to look at it at the same time! Oh, whoops… but now the buyers will feel like they have to purchase this car now or else lose out to the other guy!
Similarly, if a sales person shows up at your door with a free small gift, it is only polite to invite them into your home… right? And once in, they can commence with the sales pitch unimpeded by a closing door.
It’s relatively easy to get humans to make gut decisions and fall back onto deeply-ingrained, almost instinctive, social behaviours. One startling example, which I have tested a couple of times in real life and can confirm works, is jumping queues because you have a reason. If five people are queueing for the work photocopier, you can nearly always jump ahead if you say “I’m sorry, may I go ahead of you? I need to make some copies urgently because…”. You can follow “because” with whatever you like — my boss needs them, I have a meeting in five minutes, I’m running late, or even just leave it there. “Because” is the magical component that instigates this “whirr-click” response, as Caldini puts it.
Generally speaking human ‘instinct’ is a positive thing. We are conditioned to want to reciprocate kindness, to move quickly under threat, to want to be reasonable and not to be seen as indecisive. On the large scale, those things lead to better social cohesion and a more smoothly running society.
It makes sense that we would evolve in this way, as social creatures.
We touched on this already in The Arguments Pt 1 (Part 5 overall) when we looked at “I’m just asking questions”. We can be played because we want want to look reasonable in the eyes of others, and thus we will allow a bad-faith sealioning exchange to continue.
The problem is that these instinctive behaviours are based on assumptions, rather than rationale. The world is big and complicated, and we don’t have time to become experts in everything, so we use some common shortcuts. It allows us to move quickly and get on with what we’re doing.
Practically, we’re unlikely to need to make super-fast decisions unless we work in a stock exchange or as a fighter pilot. Rationally, we can afford to pass over a car — it’s not like it’s the last car in the world! We don’t need to reciprocate to a gift given freely, other than with a polite “thank you”.
Like many sales people, anti-trans campaigners play to these instincts to get others to make quick decisions, on the spot, without all the information. It’s even easier since trans people are less common, which makes it very easy to other us — to make us seem like weird outliers, deviations from the normal, even though trans people have existed for thousands of years across multiple continents.
As long as there have been humans, there have been us. We were there when we first learnt to till the soil and raise animals, and we’ll be there when the last rock is thrown.
You see then, best beloved, that the poor everyday-person is thus very easy to convince with arguments to instinct. Anti-trans campaigners appeal to the gut (or common sense, which is defined as whatever the person saying it says it is) against an immediate and weird danger. They’re working to get that whirr-click response.
Maybe some of these talking points sound familiar, from news and opinion pieces:
- There are just so many trans people now — something must be causing it!
- Schools are teaching kids how to be trans and inviting drag queens to read to them!
- We simply must protect children.
- The TRA lobby is sterilising children!
- Experts agree it’s all a fad! This will shortly be looked back on as one of the biggest medical malpractices in history!
These statements all demand quick response — especially when put to politicians in the context of 24-hour news. They also make use of children as a point of concern to provoke a short-cut reaction that cuts through critical thinking.
Let’s go through some actual research, data and expertise in relevant subject fields. In actuality:
- Yes, there are more out trans people now. Especially in younger generations who don’t see it as such a big deal. One explanation is that it is marginally more socially acceptable to come out (particularly in online spaces). Note, also, the implication that more trans people is bad… why is more of us a bad thing? What do we do to anybody?!
- Children will encounter gender-and-sexual-minority people in the Real World. It’s just a fact of life, at least until the Right finally establish Gilead (fun fact, did you know Margaret Atwood has been dubbed a handmaid because she supports trans people? Learning is fun!). So why can’t they be told in a safe environment that we exist? That isn’t ‘teaching them to be trans’, it’s just saying that some kids have a mum and a dad; some have two mums; some dads started as girls etc. It’s a very gentle explanation of the world we actually live in, so these things won’t be a shock later. It’s colourful books about penguins; nobody is mentioning sexual positions or the ins-and-outs of graphic surgery, and what kind of mindset jumps to that straight away, anyway?
- Of course all right-minded people want to protect children. Duh. This is part of a broader strategy of motte-and-bailey arguing: start with an argument that’s easy to defend (children need protecting) and extend that to an argument that’s harder to defend (and trans people are dangerous!) then, when pressed, just retreat back to the easily defensible argument.
- Nobody is sterilising anyone — least, not in the way implied here: sterilisation without consent is still a practice used against Black and minority persons in the USA. Puberty blockers do not cause sterilisation, and that is the only medical treatment any under 18 is going to get — that’s from the Mayo Clinic, but you can find the exact same answer from the AMA, the Endocrine Society, WPATH and and fucking and. But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a good argument?
- Oh experts all agree it’s a social fad, do they? Which experts? Kathleen Stock is a professor of the philosophy of English. Helen Joyce is an economist. Graham Linehan is a comedy writer. James Caspian has an undergrad degree in Mandarin Chinese. That David Bell guy at the Tavistock Clinic in London didn’t work with, or have anything to do with, treating young people. Most of these experts who get cited are nothing to do with sociology, sexuality or gender so why should their opinion carry any more weight than my next door neighbour? I don’t see the press beating a path to Gary’s door, looking for his expertise, so who gives a flying toss what Maya “I For Some Reason Have My Own Wikipedia Page” Forstater thinks? Of the few who actually are qualified, they are outnumbered by an enormous number of experts who believe trans healthcare and social recognition of gender transition is valid and correct.
In fact, on that last point, here’s a random handful from the party-size bucket. This represents just some of the organisations who do think trans healthcare, including puberty blockers, are effective and not dangerous:
- World Health Organization
- American Medical Association
- American Psychiatric Association
- Endocrine Society
- World Professional Association for Transgender Health
- American Academy of Pediatrics
- American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
- United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
- CDC
- European Association of Urology
- Pan American Health Organisation
- Royal College of Psychiatrists
But, hey, why listen to them when you can listen to Posie Parker, and have all your “gut instincts” validated? I mentioned in Part 5, under “We have concerns” that the concerns now drown out actual research and medical authority in the matter and I would take this moment to redraw your attention to that statement, best beloved. We’ve drowned out all of those actual subject-matter experts, purely because dipshits with an axe to grind got active on Twitter.
Excuse me a moment, I need to take a breath.
One last point of note: because humans like to appear consistent in the eyes of others, once a person has been flipped to a ‘gender critical’ position, they are unlikely to want to change. We don’t like people thinking we’re not able to decide something, do we? So once the decision to subscribe to some anti-trans viewpoint(s) is made, it then requires a level of intellectual honesty and humility to later decide “no, I got that wrong” in the face of evidence. Such an admission would come at the cost of face and the loss of their chosen community — or, in the case of Rowling, legions of worshippers who think she is their God-Queen.
Most of the anti-trans crowd simply don’t have those qualities and are fundamentally incapable of accepting that they could be upside-down on this issue. They lack the ability to question themselves or think they could ever be wrong.
Likening Trans Identities To A Contagion
Firstly, we need to note another dogwhistle: contagion; identifying being transgender with being a communicable disease. It’s meant to prime you to think “disease requires isolation and treatment, not indulgence!” That choice of verbiage comes from the UK Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch.
Words matter, because they shape how we approach discussions… and these are some sneaky-ass words, best beloved. We should play a drinking game with all these dogwhistles!
Anyways, this correlates to what we saw earlier: panicking that “oh my God there are so many transes now and there were so few before!” It must, therefore, be a contagion. Or an infection. Or disease. Blight. PLAGUE, even?
You and I shall flip this around, and start from the assumption that few or nobody was trans before now.
Some otherwise very intelligent people will argue this. In a nutshell, you’ll hear people say that because we didn’t have the word transgender before the 1930s, nobody could have been transgender before then. Here’s Helen Joyce, one of the editors of the Economist, making precisely this argument. This is largely the same reasoning that moon-howlers like Rowling now claim that trans people were not victimised by the Nazis: how could we be? We didn’t exist back then! Here’s the lovely Caelan Conrad deconstructing that twaddle.
This is much like saying the planet Saturn didn’t exist before we observed and named it. Simultaneously, it is both almost adorably self-centred and completely harebrained.
Trans people go back a very long way and there are instances of us across the globe. Various groups on the continent of Africa recognised non-binary gender, as did aboriginal peoples in the Americas and Australasia/Pacific. There’s a whole Wikipedia page breaking down trans history by continent, country and epoch.
Why do anti-trans campaigners make such blatantly wrong statements? Well, two reasons: in the first instance, they probably won’t get caught. Many people don’t even know a trans person; let alone being clued up on our history! In the second instance, it is a needful component of their “threat” narrative: an enemy that has, only just now, lumbered over the horizon and must be defeated.
What’s that coming over the hill, is it a trans? Is it a trans?!
Lots of people have been trans throughout history. There’d have been a heck of a lot more if European, Christian colonisers hadn’t wiped out indigenous beliefs about gender and sexuality. That’s actually a whole tin of worms unto itself, and much smarter people than me have looked into it.
I think you’ve had quite enough for now — you’ve done really well, and if your head’s not spinning, you’re made of sterner stuff than I am!
That’s it for Part II of “The Arguments” that anti-trans campaigners use. There will probably be at least another two sections to this volume, before I move on to citing the research and facts behind trans people and why maybe yanno we’re okay, actually, so don’t worry so much?
Thank you for sticking with this. I appreciate it. Even if we disagree, we are moving closer to understanding each other. Peace and long-life to you.
This is part of a multi-part series. New additions will appear when they are ready. All images used were created using DALL-E 3 via OpenAI. Use them if you like, AI sucks and should go in the bin.
