Misogyny Masquerading In Transphobia
Six months or so after my attempt at suicide I went to live with my family in Hawaii. A few years earlier they had abandoned me in Utah and absconded to the island paradise after several very rough years on the mainland. We had lived in Hawaii for a few years when I was very little—the only time in my young life that any of us were really happy—and I think a yearning for that nostalgia had driven my parents to seek refuge from the cruelty and judgment ever present in Mormon communities (which ironically they did not see in their own behavior).
Flying over Maui the island looks like a real life Neverland, motionless clouds casting their little shadows onto the verdant slopes of two giant volcanoes and the virgin jungle and farms growing sugarcane and pineapple. I was expecting my parents to be waiting at the terminal for me when my plane touched down, but as I walked out onto the curb, wrist hidden beneath a long-sleeve shirt to hide my scars, I saw nobody.
“Oh,” said my mom when she picked up her phone, “we forgot you were coming.”
I napped on the curb near some birds of paradise as the smell of fresh ocean air filled my lungs. My parents arrived two hours later and chauffeured me to their small apartment. It was an entirely hideous affair, after being trapped in the car they compared me being gay to pedophilia and murder. At the time my mom was unaware of my suicide attempt, as if that could be an excuse for treating your own child in such a way, though my dad was fully aware of it as he demanded I keep my sexuality from my younger sisters.
Several days went by, my sisters cold and distant, unsure of what to make of my presence and ignorant to my struggle with depression, having been indoctrinated to view my being gay as deviant and sinful wanted almost nothing to do with me. One day my mom mentioned that some women from their church wanted to meet me. That she had told them about me and they wouldn’t leave her alone about coming by to be introduced.
I almost refused, suspecting some kind of conversion or intervention scheme, since Mormons are known to do terrible things like send their so-called misbehaving children to rehabilitation camps or conversion therapy. I knew the women coming by were native Hawaiians, though, since my mother had made it a point to mention it, and because I was somewhat familiar with Hawaiians thought they might actually have more altruistic intentions and agreed. Later that evening four grown Hawaiian women came by with food and two ukuleles and fed us and chatted and played me songs and sang. It was a rare moment of respite in those tumultuous years and kindness such as I had never seen from any of my white Mormon community.
Too wracked with psychological illness to care for myself and accept such warm invitations of community I instead just waited my time until I could once again get away from my family. One day my sister in a fit of anger called my Dad the worst homophobic slur, right in front of me. Later when we were alone I took the opportunity to come out to her. She apologized, and during our conversation she told me that two of the girls who played on her volleyball team were transgender. I saw them play when I went to some of her games, and having come from an extremely bigoted community in Utah and only been out of high school for a few years I was shocked to see LGBTQI+ kids not only allowed to openly be who they were but fully embraced by their families and community. It seemed such a foreign concept, having come from a bigoted world where, as a kid, I had hidden who I was for fear of friends and family turning on me. I could not imagine being loved for who I was, and witnessing families and communities treat me and their transgender children with such unconditional love was transcendental.
In her article defending her transphobia author J.K. Rowling repeatedly references experiences of sexual assault and domestic violence which made her question whether she wanted to be a woman at all. Spending just a few minutes on Twitter in a moment of explosive transphobia it becomes clear that most women perpetuating the hatred and vitriol toward transgender women have also experienced some form of severe sexual abuse, misogyny, prejudice, or domestic violence. One woman I coached who espoused anti-transgender sentiments was raped by her own father throughout her childhood.
Gay men can be homophobic, and cis women can also be misogynistic. Not in a rhetorically exploitative sense such as many anti-transgender activists are currently using the term but in the real sense of despising or having contempt for women or, in their case, being a woman. Very often—in fact I have not yet had a case that did not proceed this way—women have enormous amounts of resentment and guilt for being female because of the very many prejudices, violence, insults, harassment, taboos, and limitations the world has set upon them. I often work with women to help them understand how these experiences did not occur to them because they are women. They occur because other people can be violent, hateful, exploitative, and abusive. It often takes a great deal of work to overcome the trauma and pain that women experience, a lot more so than men, because the amount and severity of trauma is so much greater and thusly much more devastating.
One trend I also observed when writing my book The Perfect Child, which is about overcoming childhood abuse, was how mothers often treat their daughters with far more harshness compared to their boys. Fathers by default often treat their girls as less intelligent, less capable, even or especially when they are more intelligent and capable than they, but I was most surprised seeing mothers do this too. Boys, they know, are going to make it in life because of the system of patriarchy in which we live in which men are often handed success simply for showing up. Knowing their daughters will be treated with prejudice and resenting the vulnerability of being a woman reflected in their daughter mothers often treat them with as much or more prejudice as men, demanding a higher standard of behavior and being more cruel and critical than to male children.
Women who are transphobic believe that being female is the reason for their own personal trauma, bias, and prejudice they experience in their lives. Believing this, they become defensive and angry when persons they perceive as male seek to come into the spaces which women have carved out for themselves. Indeed, the extreme preoccupation with genitals and purposed debasing of transgender women and crude and crass language used by anti-transgender activists betray their hatred for women and being women and people who identify as women. Heterosexual, cis-gendered males are the primary perpetrators of sexual assault and harassment of women. Nobody who abused J.K. Rowling was transgender, but her anger is unleashed onto transgender women, not cis men, even when those transgender women no longer have even a shadow of masculinity.
The truth is that trauma and abuse was not and is never done to you because you are women or girls, but because there are people in the world who commit those kinds of crimes and assault and abuse people they can take advantage of. This misunderstanding is often the result of a tool used by abusers and rapists which is to blame the victim and convince them that they brought it on themselves. It is a heinous and purposefully maleficent abuse tactic meant to control and dominate and to absolve the perpetrator of the guilt they feel at committing such egregious acts. But boys often get abused as children too. I’m six-foot seven and have been sexually assaulted three times as a grown man—twice by men and once by a woman colleague ten years my senior who tried to shove her hand down the front of my pants in the middle of the day, completely sober, knowing also full well I am gay. Yes, because of my size I was able to fend off the woman and one of the men, but the third I was too inebriated, and young, and being male nor enormous didn’t save me from the trauma of being assaulted. Sexual assault is about power, and those perpetrating it seek to assert themselves and choose those they perceive as vulnerable over which to assert their power.
The argument that transgender women should not be allowed in women’s sports because men have inherent advantages to women is a foundationally misogynistic argument, literally arguing that men are better than women, and women who believe this nonsense do so because of their own misogynistic views of womanhood. I know so many men who could never compete in any sport, and many women who excel far beyond their male counterparts. Indeed many women in sports that don’t depend on specific physical factors like height have proven women to be even better than men, such as the Williams sisters and Billie Jean King in tennis who are the best there have ever been. In swimming the top men are only around 10% faster than women, and because they are on hormone therapy transgender women do not have the anabolic muscle advantage of higher testosterone, which is why transgender women perform the same as their cisgender counterparts (Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer, only placed fifth in her NCAA championship).
Men have has much variation in physical characteristics as women, and the pedantic, obsessive misogyny of this straw man argument only serves to perpetuate misogyny and patriarchy by perpetuating gender stereotypes and gender roles that confine both women and men to traditional, limiting societal taboos and expectations. My sisters to this day could beat my ass in volleyball even though I was an athlete and am six-foot-seven. One of my sisters was better at basketball than I ever could have been. Yes, some transgender women will have some advantages over some women, but so do tall women, or strong women, or women from families with wealth who can afford trainers, diets, equipment, and pharmaceutical enhancements. The fixation on the possibility that a transgender woman might have an inherent biological advantage and shouldn’t compete is simply transphobia looking for an excuse to exclude people who make them feel uncomfortable, simply because they don’t adhere to the stereotypes expected of women inherent to a misogynistic worldview. Bigotry. And then cisgender women who do not also fit the stereotype get caught up in the bigotry, and now we have anti-transgender policies and politics to authorize the inspection of girls’ genitals in order to participate in sports which seems more like an excuse for child predators to get access to vulnerable young women. I can’t think of anything more anti-woman or dangerous than mandating genital inspections.
There is a reason why so many cisgender men murder transgender women, because of their inherent disrespect and contempt for women which motivates such heinous behavior in the first place. It’s also no coincidence that cisgender men who support transphobia act entitled to sexual attention from women and treat women as objects, demean them, or demand they fulfill traditional roles, and why the persecution of women such as the jailing this week of Lizelle Herrera who had an abortion in Texas always also coincides with homophobic and transphobic movements. There are no transphobic men who also believe in protecting women or dismantling patriarchy, because transphobia is just misogyny masquerading under a different visage, and failing to recognize this also perpetuates violence and prejudice against women because it is all a system of patriarchy meant to control, coerce, and subjugate women.
The plain and obvious truth is that there is no kindness in the anti-transgender movement. Unlike the Hawaiians who embraced me with open arms even though they were a different religion than me and openly accepted and loved their transgender family members, the absolute absence of kindness and compassion toward those who are transgender is all the damning evidence needed to condemn transphobic actors exploiting the most vulnerable for their own self-centered purposes, and if transgender people make you uncomfortable and you don’t understand it you need to stop looking to the world for answers and look inside yourself, because it comes from a place of trauma, fear, and absence of self-esteem which makes you vulnerable to the very exploitation and oppression you support.
The truth is that a transgender person’s experience has absolutely nothing to do with you, and the preoccupation with their lives, their genitals, and intervention in their wellbeing is nothing more than projection of your own fears and insecurities. If you can’t support LGBTQI+ people the least you can do is leave us the fuck alone. Please and thank you.
If you’d like to know more about sex and gender and what makes transgender people transgender read Why Transgender Women are Women and Trans Men are Men. If you want to know more about transgender health and wellness read Transgender Hormones, Health, and Happiness. If you want to know more about women’s equality read What is Feminism and Why are Equal Rights for Women So Controversial? For men, misogyny and resentment of women and by extension bigotry toward the LGBTI+ community is often driven by insecurity and shame about sex, dating, and relationships, and you can start resolving these internal conflicts by reading my article How to Get Laid.