An Analysis of Transphobia: Exploring and Exposing the Irrational
Despite what some people say, transphobia is a fear response.
I’ve written a few pieces lately diving into anti-trans politics in specific instances, but today I wanted to do something a little bit different, to try and understand the underlying motivations for transphobia.
When we just look at the term itself, “transphobia,” there is obviously the phobia aspect of the word which typically means a fear of something. At the same time, however, phobia in this context doesn’t necessarily mean that someone has the same fear of trans people that they may have of spiders for instance.
People who are often labeled as transphobic, such as Matt Walsh or others from the Daily Wire, will push back against the term by saying that they don’t have an irrational fear of trans people, which is what the word phobia often connotes. Now this might be true in the extremely literal sense of the term phobia. However, I do think that the idea of being afraid of trans people is true of the right, for reasons I shall explain.
For starters, just look at the way the right talks about trans people. Despite all of their talk and posturing about being on the side of facts over feelings, you can clearly see when you look beyond the surface that their emotions are what control their arguments.
Conservatives and right-wingers constantly try to sell us this idea of trans people trying to groom kids or invade certain spaces like women’s sports, or even in the case of Matt Walsh and others, being the ones who hold all the power in society. Following this, they talk about how trans people are using “gender ideology” in order to influence society in their own malicious ways.
Now at this point, I think it’s fairly clear that most if not all of the points that we hear from transphobes are ultimately driven by fear, especially when you consider that there is nothing to back up any of the nonsensical points they make.
Why do conservatives fear trans people?
For conservatives, trans people are the topic of political debate/discussion that has only entered their consciousness in the last few years. Trans people are often portrayed by the right as some kind of new phenomenon. In fact, this was part of the thesis of Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman?” film — however, this is of course not true. Trans people have always existed, it is merely the intensity surrounding the discussion of trans people that is new.
As is well known, most of the time when people are afraid of a given group of people, such as LGBT people, it’s because they don’t understand them or they perceive LGBT people as being some kind of threat to the status quo.
Right-wing politics has always been about preserving the status quo or more specifically defending social hierarchies. Any time throughout history when some social movement or idea has come along that has challenged the status quo in even the most milquetoast way, the right has fiercely fought back against it. Just look at various working-class movements throughout time or feminism as prime examples of this.
When it comes to trans people, we see the same kind of attitude. This actually does tie in with the right-wing opposition to feminism. Trans people challenge the ways in which we typically think about gender, and in many ways, they break down traditional gender attitudes such as the view of gender being immutable and unchanging.
Furthermore, trans people demonstrate and will talk about the various ways in which gender is socially constructed. Thanks in large part to the increased visibility of trans people in the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion in awareness surrounding trans issues, and this has led to a lot of people realizing that gender is not some rigid, hard binary but instead a relation that is socially constructed.
For the conservative or reactionary, this creates a whole host of problems that their ideology prevents them from truly reckoning with. Conservatives don’t like change, and in many ways, you can think of the fear of social change as being the foundation of conservatism. The conservative writer Michael Oakeshott famously stated:
To be conservative […] is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
Even if you want to go to more modern conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro or John Doyle, you will hear them make similar arguments that basically boil down to a fear of change. But also, conservatism is a defense of hierarchy. Conservatives perceive the differences between genders (they only believe in men and women) to be natural rather than the product of social relations and constructs.
As a result, when trans people come along and start poking holes in these traditional ideas of gender that conservatives cling so strongly to, they lash out with fear. Trans people and the experience of trans people do not align with the pseudo-biological binary view of gender that conservatives have and from here this creates a problem for how conservatives perceive and ultimately fear trans people.
The fear that conservatives exhibit when it comes to their fear of trans people is not the fear that one experiences when encountering something like snakes, spiders, or a great height, but the sort of fear experienced by recognizing the possibility that one might be incorrect in how they view the world. Fear that maybe some of the things they once learned or were told might be incorrect.
On another level though, I would argue that it also ties in with the closed-mindedness that conservatism encourages and by extension, prevents them from even acknowledging that people have experiences that set them apart from how they view the world. This is why they are so quick to deem being trans, gay, or even having a different political position than them to be a mental illness.
They literally can’t fathom that some people are just different, and so when they do encounter difference, they assume it is a defect rather than a problem with their own rigid thinking.
From here, this is how you get the relentless attacks on trans people from conservatives and the attempt to have them outright excluded from society at every level. Be it sports, politics, or anything else, conservatives see trans people as an attack on the very way in which they see the world and a reminder that their rigid, emotionally driven thinking does not line up with reality.
What conservatives could do in order to remedy their problems here is start with some introspection into why they think the way they do or even deconstruct what it means for gender to be socially constructed. From here they would be able to understand why trans people experience gender the way they do. Instead, conservatives choose to attack trans people.
In short, despite what some people might say, transphobia absolutely is a fear response. But it is not the kind of fear or phobia that we often think of when discussing these words; it is a fear that the way in which conservatives view gender or perhaps the world more broadly might be incorrect. A fear that, fundamentally, some people are different from established norms.
