Transphobia: What It Is and Why It's Dangerous

Transphobia is a favorite cudgel of the right-wing weirdo. It allows for the demonization of basically everyone because it is essentially the idea that if you do anything different with your gender and presentation than the exact thing your assigned (not necessarily actually had) genital configuration at birth said you should be, you are an existential threat to the very fabric of society. We have seen, over the last several years, talking heads waxing poetic about the dangers of “boys in girls’ bathrooms,” 141 anti-LGBTQ+ bills put forward in the Texas legislature in 2023 (76 of which passed, including a ban on gender-affirming care for trans children) on the back of “protecting children from the trans cult,” and the horrific treatment of women in the public eye as “secret men” for no other reason than being a public-facing woman of color or having a strong jawline. 

Through all this and more, we can conclude 3 things about transphobia: It is pervasive, it is dangerous, and it affects everyone, regardless of how one identifies.

That last point I do feel the need to emphasize: You do not have to be trans to experience transphobia, nor do you have to be a specific type of trans to experience that type of transphobia. Many cisgender (re: not trans) women reading this very article may indeed have faced some belligerent bigot shouting at them for not fitting their perfect definition of womanhood (on or offline) and therefore being “a man in a dress.” Many cis men I know have had their identities as men denied and shamed for simply being sad that a relative died. And enough people spout that inane “YWNBAW¹” acronym at me (someone who is in fact transmasculine² and was raised as a girl) that I could feed the people of r/AccidentalAlly for an entire fortnight. 

However, the way in which transphobia is expressed, and its very real impact, tends to be very different depending on the identity of the person that’s earned the ire of transphobic weirdos. 

Notice how they speak about trans women and transfeminine² people. They speak of disgust, monsters, predators coming for your children in the bathroom, “trying to extricate my hand from the hairy, beringed paw that clutched it” (Germaine Greer, “Why Sex Change Is A Lie”), and horrifying fantasies of extermination. They draw lines on women’s jaws, hips, or in my own personal amusement, their shoulders, looking for any excuse as to Why They’re A Man, Actually (again, regardless of their status as being trans or not). They speak of evil, creepy, horrible, caricatured men… but also seductive temptresses, made to entice men into “becoming gay” by having sex with someone with… pause for dramatic effect…

A penis.

Now, aside from the fact that I can personally confirm that anatomy has nothing to do with the queerness of either yourself or the partner you have sex with, I do ask you to please note that in places where anti-trans legislation is the law of the land, popularity of porn featuring women with penises (most of it using slurs in the tags and titles and involving content that is decidedly not trans-positive) has absolutely skyrocketed. Trans women and femmes have long since catalogued a paradox of their treatment as both trickster succubi and hideous monsters tainting the very concept of womanhood. Indeed, it is this very contradiction in action which spurs the “trans panic” defense, in which someone who murdered or assaulted a trans person was overcome with fear and desperation at the horror of being “manipulated” by one’s transness. This has killed many trans people, mostly trans women of color, whose killers are still at large today.

An excellent video by ex-philosopher and video essay pioneer Natalie “ContraPoints” Wynn (she/her) about this very topic that answers a great deal of questions people tend to have.

This type of transphobia is what we call “transmisogyny,” coined in the 2007 book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual³ Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by biologist and gender theorist Julia Serano. It’s exactly what it sounds like on the tin: The intersection of transphobia and misogyny, especially as it pertains to trans women/transfems. This is the transphobia the average cis person is most likely to have seen (or even experienced), and indeed in the mind of the average transphobe, when they see the words “I’m trans” online, they immediately conjure up an image of a “man” with a full beard, hair all over their arms, wearing a Barbie pink dress and long acrylic nails. 

Now, I ask you to notice how they speak about trans men and transmasculine people. 

They speak of “lost lesbian sisters,” and young girls “mutilating themselves” because they’ve been “indoctrinated into the gender cult.” They outright deny masculinity and manhood to these “girls,” acting as if their identity doesn’t even exist. So great is the erasure of transmasculinity, that any mention of historical figures we might consider today as such are absolutely denied their identity so as not to “erase women.” 

This has gotten especially popular after the turn of the decade, with the release of the literary vomit known as Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Schrier. Not one actual trans person was consulted in the writing of this book, and Schrier is not even related, let alone a parent, to any trans person she writes so hatefully about. The book discusses “the gender cult” and how The Wokes are trying to make “young girls mutilate their perfect bodies to destroy their fertility,” which is absolutely rich coming from Schrier, who since the book’s release has been working directly with The Daily Wire and Prager U, organizations that directly advocate for banning abortion, including in cases of rape, incest, and children. The book treats those it supposes as girls and women as fragile, easily swayed, and above all, stupid. Because obviously girls can never make such life-altering decisions for themselves so young! Even as they say the same things about Elliot Page, who is, and I cannot stress enough, a grown adult. 

Trans YouTuber and now published author Jamie “Jammidodger” Raines (he/him) and his now-wife Shaaba (she/her) break down JK Rowling’s infamous TERF Wars essay from a few years ago. Given TERF Wars was primarily about transmasculinity, I believe this video illustrative of the issue

This is what is known as transandrophobia, or the intersection of transphobia and misandry, specifically as it pertains to trans men and transmasculine people. This type does not get discussed as often, mostly as its primary function is erasure: While transmisogyny is largely about eradicating aberrant femininity, transandrophobia is largely about denying the fact that aberrant masculinity even exists. While at first glance this might not SEEM very dangerous, let’s think about what that means: If it doesn’t exist, can’t exist, then those who believe they are transmasc need to be fixed. 

Corrective rape and forced impregnation are often employed against trans men and mascs, as well as standard conversion therapy and social isolation. It’s often confused with being lesbian (although he/him lesbians do in fact exist, but that’s another article for another day), and so treated as such by unaccepting families. And our numbers are underreported in every single statistic about trans people because the people doing the polls don’t know we’re trans. 

And again, this is not to say that trans women and femmes don’t experience transandrophobia, and that trans men and mascs don’t experience transmisogyny. This is also not to say that people don’t think of trans men as monsters (they very much do), or trans women as non-existent half-entities (again, they very much do), or that violent murders, corrective rape, or any of these hateful atrocities only affect one group. These are simply the terms the community has come up with to talk about the differences between these equally dangerous modes of transphobia, and who is most often the target of them.

With this in mind, do note that a great deal of transmisogynistic rhetoric is based on misandry and that the same is true of transandrophobia and misogyny. This is largely due to the fact that, frankly, the people spouting it don’t believe that trans people exist. Only confused children or evil predators.

At least, that’s how it’s billed at first. 

For some, that is in fact as deep as it goes. The inherent disgust and deliberate ignorance of “aberrant” gender presentation. However, on some level, most of them know that trans people exist, and cannot just stop being trans. They would be writing different laws otherwise. No, for many, this is the first layer of a journey into very real, very open, and very scary… fascism. 

And I do use the term “fascism” deliberately, not as hyperbole or as a rhetorical device against the average person engaged in transphobia. No, I mean it as palingenetic ultranationalism; the idea that the strong must rule over the weak, that “we” are the strong, “they” are weak yet have taken over “our” world, and that in order for the world to be fixed and right again, “they” must be eradicated, and “we” must rule again. It is, in essence, hatred of people as a weapon with which to gain power. 

Who the “we” and “they” are depends on the exact fascist movement you’re talking about. For the Nazis, “we” was “The German People” and the “Aryans,” and “they” was Jewish people, the Romani people, people of color, disabled people, gay people, trans people, the list goes on. For Mussolini’s Italy, “we” was Italy, and “they” was socialists, Slavic people, and the African people they conquered. 

The public burning of “un-German” books by members of the SA and university students on the Opernplatz in Berlin, May 10, 1933. About 20,000 books were burned. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.

The hatred of these groups and more was deliberate. Fascist leaders preyed on the huge ramifications of World War I on the people of these countries, on the deeply impoverishing economic hardship of the Great Depression, and gave the people something to blame. Not the fallibility of human nature, or something as complex as capitalism (although they were perfectly content to appropriate the language and pageantry of socialism while it was politically convenient, only to privatize large swaths of the economy once their power was secured) and how it requires war to sustain itself, but something simple, tangible, and seemingly with a solution: A type of person they already didn’t like or understand. 

And it’s easy to see why one might fall into that kind of thinking. It is easier to hate something you don’t understand than to try and understand it, and it’s much more comforting to think all will be well if This One Thing disappears. To ignore the complex truth that the world and its problems are complicated and tangled up and cannot be put down to A Type Of Person making them that way. 

(A reminder for the audience that you are not immune to propaganda and that you may catch yourself thinking this way about some people. You need to examine why you think this about these people, and what the truth of the situation is.) 

However, this model is, as these examples show, not sustainable. 

And just like the Nazis of last century, “they” absolutely includes trans people. One of their first book burnings was the Institute of Sexology, where some of the first research of gender, gender transition, and sex reassignment was done. They considered queer people “degenerate” and “inherently inferior” to them. Note the kind of people online who talk about degeneracy now. And also note that one of the big surges in transphobic rhetoric in the last couple of years came after self-proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh’s film What Is A Woman, a movie that actively engages in disinformation about trans people’s lives, and had to lie flagrantly about its purpose to the trans people and allies it featured to do so. And then there are people in CPAC like Micheal Knowles (notably a talking head on the same Daily Wire network as Walsh) who call for our “eradica[tion] from public life entirely” to thunderous applause. 

This is not just how it starts; this is how it works. “They” is a kind of person, but that kind of person is as vaguely defined as the people using that concept of “they” need it to be. See, the whole point is to use hatred as a means to gain power. Because if you’re angry, you’re reacting to what you perceive as the immediate threat. If you believe that the thing you’re angry at is an immediate, pressing danger that requires immediate action to protect yourself (and others!) from it, you either don’t notice or don’t care about the people who told you of the danger using your hate and fear as a weapon.

Right now, “they” are, among many things, trans people. But your proximity to “they” can make you “they” regardless, in a fascist's eyes. People who hid and protected Jewish folks during the Holocaust often got the same treatment as those Jewish folks. People who marry interracially are derided as “race traitors” and, in neo-Nazi pipedream and guidebook The Turner Diaries (a book that has been directly connected to multiple terrorist attacks and hate crimes that we know of, including the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995), are executed along with people of color. So too, those who appear in proximity to transness are thought of in the same way, and with the same level of scorn. 

A great insight into Nazi and fascist strategy, ideology, and cynisism, genderfluid anarchist Mildred Thought Slime (any pronouns) reads this vile text so that we spare ourselves both boredom and pain.

Transphobia is dangerous not just because of what it does to trans people, but what it does to everyone. 

If this all sounds similar to antisemitic conspiracies, that’s because it’s coming from the same place. Antisemitism and transphobia have long been fast friends, and once you’ve swallowed either bigotry, either seems like a narrow leap in logic. However, people tend to know to be disgusted with outright antisemitism (I say “tend to,” although in light of recent events, it seems many more people are ok with outright antisemitism these days than we thought). Transphobia is… easier. More permissible. Hell, most people grew up with Man In Dress as both setup and punchline. Most people don’t see the danger, and thus, don’t see a need to worry.

“Gee, Quincy!” I hear you say from the other side of the screen. “That’s all really scary, what do we do about it?”

Well, like I said, this is all a very complex issue that cannot be swept away overnight. And if we go with “get rid of all the transphobes,” well I just spent the last page talking about where that goes. But, thankfully, there’s hope, and a lot of things you can do. 

First of all, you’re reading this; trying to understand the issue rather than dismissing it as not affecting you. That’s good! But this is the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it. For further discussion, I recommend the videos of Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints) and Jamie Raines (Jammidodger), who do much better breakdowns of transphobia in the media and its greater social impact. I also invite you to check out the literary works of Judith Butler, a somewhat controversial but greatly influential author and philosopher that has shaped a great deal of my own understanding of gender and its place in society. Their most recent work, Who’s Afraid of Gender, is a great breakdown of transphobia AND anti-feminism at large, and discusses ideas far more complex than an introductory article such as this ever could. And of course, merely talking to trans people about their experiences (when they want to, of course, this is obviously really hard to talk about sometimes) and listening to a variety of trans people on what we ought to do is healthy for anybody! 

Another wonderful trans creator, Abigail Thorn uses this video to discuss Judith Butler’s philosophy, theories on gender, and specifically Who’s Afraid of Gender?, as part of her mission to give away a philosophy degree for free.

Further than that, there’s the usual stuff. Listen to trans people about what we need from allies, contact your representatives, testify, and protest when trans rights are on the line, let your friends and relatives know that the transphobia they spout isn’t ok, and show up for us when we need you to. But most of all, I personally want you to recognize and understand transphobia for what it is: Not just mean, but a danger to all of us. And, to recognize these simple truths: 

There can be no true feminism without trans feminism. There can be no equality among genders until trans people are treated equally. 

There can be no anti-fascism without anti-transphobia. 

¹ YWNBAW is an acronym coined on right-wing and TERF (Trans Exclusionary/Exclusive Radical Feminist) message boards, standing for “You Will Never Be A Woman”

² I use the terms “transfeminine/femme” and “transmasculine/masc” to refer to non-binary people who transition to a presentation that is more outwardly feminine/masculine, and thus face a great deal of the same treatment, along with the erasure, denial of both validity and care, and rejection that comes with enbyphobia (a concept I cut from this article for time, but will revisit at a later date). This is no indication of their assigned gender at birth, and there are many non-binary people who reject these labels entirely. Also, many who do not consider themselves to be trans at all.

³ “Transsexual” was coined in the 1920s by Magnus Hirschfeld to refer to who we now generally refer to as “transgender,” and is the term a great deal of people, especially before and during the AIDS Crisis, grew up using. As it is used today, it tends to refer to people who want to medically transition, be that with hormones, surgery, voice training, ect, where “transgender” may also refer to someone who is only socially transitioned/transitioning. Generally, it is inappropriate for cis people to call someone “transsexual” without knowing that person is okay with being called that first, as it does indeed carry a lot of trauma with it. There are, however, people who do prefer to be called such rather than “transgender,” so if that is their wish, let them have it.