Transphobia
Transphobia consists of negative attitudes, feelings, or actions towards transgender people or transness in general. Transphobia can include fear, aversion, hatred, violence or anger towards people who do not conform to social gender roles.[1][2] Transphobia is a type of prejudice and discrimination, similar to racism, sexism, or ableism,[3] and it is closely associated with homophobia.[4][5] Transgender people of color can experience many different forms of discrimination simultaneously.[6]
Transgender youth often experience a combination of abuse from family members, sexual harassment, and bullying or school violence.[7] They are also disproportionately placed in foster care and welfare programs compared to their peers.[8] Adult transgender people regularly encounter sexual violence, police violence, public ridicule, misgendering, or other forms of violence and harassment in their daily lives.[9] These issues cause many trans people to feel unsafe in public. Other issues include healthcare discrimination, workplace discrimination or feeling under siege by conservative political or religious groups who oppose LGBT-rights laws.[10] Discrimination and violence sometimes originates from people within the LGBT community[11] or feminist movements.
As well as increased risk of violence and other threats, the stress created by transphobia causes negative mental health outcomes and lead to drug use disorders, running away from home (in minors), and suicide.
In much of the Western world, there has been a gradual establishment of policies combatting discrimination and supporting equal opportunity in all aspects of life since the 1990s. The trend is also taking shape in some developing nations. In addition, campaigns regarding the LGBT community are being spread around the world to improve social acceptance of nontraditional gender identities. The "Stop the Stigma" campaign by the UN is one such example.[12] However, transphobic violence has been on the rise since 2021,[13] accompanied with an increase in anti-trans discriminatory laws being enacted in many parts of the US and other countries.[14][15]
Etymology and use
The word transphobia is a classical compound patterned on the term homophobia. The first component is the neo-classical prefix trans- (originally meaning "across, on the far side, beyond") from transgender, and the second component -phobia comes from the Ancient Greek φόβος (phóbos, "fear"). Along with lesbophobia, biphobia and homophobia, transphobia is a member of the family of terms used when intolerance and discrimination is directed toward LGBT people.
Transphobia is not a phobia as defined in clinical psychology (i.e., an anxiety disorder). Its meaning and usage parallels xenophobia.[16] The noun transphobe denotes someone who harbors transphobia. The adjectival form transphobic may be used to describe a transphobe or their actions. The words transphobia and transphobic were added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013.[17]
It has been argued that transmisia, with the suffix -misia meaning "hatred", would be a more accurate term, because transphobia is more about hatred of than about fear of transgender people.[18]
Origins
Transfeminist theorist and author Julia Serano argues that the root of transphobia is "oppositional sexism", i.e. the belief that male and female are "rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires". She contrasts this against the belief that males and masculinity are superior to females and femininity along with people's insecurities about gender and gender norms, which she calls "traditional sexism".[19]
Other transgender rights authors argue that a significant part of the oppositional sexist origin of transphobia and violence towards transsexual people is linked to psychological claims of difference between male sexuality and female sexuality in the brain's protection mechanisms from committing sex crimes. These authors argue that the paradigm of acceptable sexual behavior that assumes men's sexual arousal is category-specific and women's sex drive is lower and more inhibited causes allegations that transsexual people have neither safety system in the brain and are therefore sex criminals. They argue that studies that claim to show such sex differences have flaws, such as the possibility that more men are deterred from participating in sexual arousal studies than women due to fear of being alleged to be inappropriately sexually aroused.[20][21]
Others have argued that hostility towards transgender identity is in part due to the challenge it poses to the idea that gender is based on observable physical and behavioral characteristics determined at birth.[22] Rad and colleagues surveyed a sample of 1323 American adults, asking them to identify the gender of transgender people who medically transitioned, finding that the type of transition procedure mattered but its direction did not. Specifically, biological changes resulted in the target being more identified with their self-identified gender than their birth-assigned gender, but there were no significant differences between male-to-female and female-to-male transitions. Moreover, compared to male test subjects, female test subjects were more likely to identify the targets as their self-identified gender. This gender difference was larger in younger, more liberal, and less religious non-Midwestern respondents. The authors further showed that gender category beliefs (ratings of the transgender person's post-transition gender identity) were strongly associated with attitudes and feelings of warmth towards transgender people. However, gender category beliefs performed better in predicting bathroom policy preferences compared to feelings in unseen data, indicating that beliefs about what gender is and how it is determined are significantly linked to transphobia and support for anti-transgender policies. The authors argue that this pattern is consistent with theories that transphobia is rooted in a hierarchical social classification system where low-status groups (e.g., females) view the hierarchy in less essentialist ways than high-status groups (e.g., males).[22]
Transgender author and critic Jody Norton believes that transphobia is an extension of homophobia and misogyny. She argues that transgender people, like gays and lesbians, are hated and feared for challenging and undermining gender norms and the gender binary, and the "male-to-female transgender incites transphobia through her implicit challenge to the binary division of gender upon which male cultural and political hegemony depends".[23]
Drawing on theory of radicalization, Craig McLean argues that discourse on transgender-related issues in the UK has been radicalized in response to the activities of what he terms the "anti-transgender movement," claiming that the movement pushes "a radical agenda to deny the basic rights of trans people (...) under the cover of 'free speech.'"[24]
Some authors have linked transphobia's origins to colonialism, arguing that gendercide against third gender people carried out during the European colonization of the Americas reflect the historical roots of transphobia.[25]
Related concepts
Cissexism (also termed cisgenderism, and related to but distinct from cisnormativity or cissexual assumption) is the appeal to norms that enforce the gender binary and gender essentialism, resulting in the oppression of gender variant, non-binary, and transgender identities.[26] Cissexism refers to the assumption that, due to human sexual differentiation, one's gender is determined solely by a biological sex of male or female (or, in the case of cisgenderism, a bivalent male or female expression), and that trans people are inferior to cisgender people.[27] Cisgender privilege is the set of "unearned rights afforded to nontransgender people by virtue of the fact that they are not transgender", such as access to gender-segregated spaces and teams, lower exposure to gender-based violence, and easier access to gender-specific healthcare.[28]
Harassment and violence directed against transgender people is often called trans bashing, and can be physical, sexual or verbal. Whereas gay bashing is directed against a target's real or perceived sexual orientation, trans bashing is directed against the target's real or perceived expressed gender identity. The term has also been applied to hate speech directed at transgender people[29] and to depictions of transgender people in the media that reinforce negative stereotypes about them.[30]
Transprejudice is a term similar to transphobia, and refers to the negative valuing, stereotyping, and discriminatory treatment of individuals whose appearance or identity does not conform to current social expectations or conventional conceptions of gender.[31][32]