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Transphobia encompasses a range of negative attitudes, feelings and actions towards transgender people.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that many though not all people would decide that faced with an opponent whose entire position is the total denial of your humanity as the kind of human being that you are, the only winning move in such a game would be not to play. —Abigail Thorn
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- Transphobia and antitrans statements should not be treated as just another viewpoint that we should be free to express at the happy table of diversity. There cannot be a dialogue when some at the table are in effect (or intent on) arguing for the elimination of others at the table. When you have “dialogue or debate” with those who wish to eliminate you from the conversation (because they do not recognize what is necessary for your survival, or because they don’t even think your existence is possible), then “dialogue and debate” becomes a technique of elimination. A refusal to have some dialogues and some debates is thus a key tactic for survival.
- Sara Ahmed, "An Affinity of Hammers," Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 3, Numbers 1–2, May 2016, p. 31
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- All around the world people are saying that we want to struggle to continue as global communities, to create a world free of xenophonbia and racism, a world from which poverty has been expunged, and the availability of food is not subject to the demands of capitalist profit. I would say a world where a corporation like Monsanto would be deemed criminal. Where homophobia and transphobia can truly be called historical relics along with the punishment of incarceration and institutions of confinement for disabled people; and where everyone learns how to respect the environment and all of the creatures, human and non-human alike, with whom we cohabit our worlds.
- Angela Davis, "Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities", Birkbeck Annual Law lecture at Birkbeck, University of London (25 October 2013). Transcript
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- Transphobia, too, emanates from a prejudice that a person’s stated identity is more trustworthy if it reflects their ‘natural’ role in human reproduction.
- Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice. Allen Lane. 2021. ISBN 978-0-241-42314-1. Chapter Six
- Misgendering: As of 2023, seven states have laws allowing (or requiring) public school teachers to refuse to use the preferred pronouns of students if they don’t match their official sex. This behavior is called “misgendering” and it’s more than a violation of common courtesy. It’s a denial of another person’s being, their actual existence, and can have a lethal effect. Such repudiation of trans and nonbinary young people significantly increases their chances of committing suicide.
It also increases the chances that their non-queer peers will come to view them with the kind of disrespect and even contempt that could also prove lethal and certainly increases their chances of becoming targets of violence. In 2022, for example, CBS News reported that “the number of trans people who were murdered in the U.S. nearly doubled between 2017 and 2021.” It’s no accident that this increase correlates with an increase in high-profile political and legal attacks on trans people. Sadly, but not surprisingly, race hatred has also played a role in many of these deaths. While Blacks represent about 13 percent of trans and nonbinary people, they accounted for almost three-quarters of those murder victims.- Rebecca Gordon, The Right’s Attempted Extermination Campaign of Queer People Is Textbook Fascism (4 July 2023), The Nation
- Medical care: Laws allowing or even requiring misgendering in classrooms are, however, only the beginning. Next up? Denying trans kids, and ultimately trans adults, medical care. As of June 1st of this year, according to the national LGBT rights organization Human Rights Campaign, 20 states already ban gender-affirmative medical care for trans youth up to age 18. Another seven states now have such bans under consideration.
What is “gender affirmative” medical care? According to the World Health Organization, it “can include any single or combination of a number of social, psychological, behavioral, or medical (including hormonal treatment or surgery) interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity.” In other words, it’s the kind of attention needed by people whose gender identity does not align in some way with the sex they were assigned at birth.
What does it mean to deprive a trans person of such care? It can, in fact, prove to be a death sentence.- Rebecca Gordon, The Right’s Attempted Extermination Campaign of Queer People Is Textbook Fascism (4 July 2023), The Nation
- It may be difficult to imagine this if you yourself aren’t living with gender dysphoria (a constant disorienting and debilitating alienation from one’s own body). What studies show is that proper health care reduces suicidal thoughts and attempts, along with other kinds of psychological distress. Furthermore, people who begin to receive such care in adolescence are less likely to be depressed, suicidal, or involved in harmful drug use later in life. As Dr. Deanna Adkins, director of the Duke Child and Adolescent Gender Care Clinic at Duke University Hospital, notes, young people who receive the gender-affirming care they need “are happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Their schoolwork often improves, their safety often improves.” And she says, “Saving their lives is a big deal.”
Denial of life-saving care may start with young people. But the real future right-wing agenda is to deny such health care to everyone who needs it, whatever their ages. In April 2023, The New York Times reported that Florida and six other states had already banned Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care. Missouri has simply banned most such care outright, no matter who’s paying for it.- Rebecca Gordon, The Right’s Attempted Extermination Campaign of Queer People Is Textbook Fascism (4 July 2023), The Nation
- And the attacks on queer people just keep coming. In May 2023, the Human Rights Campaign listed anti-queer bills introduced and passed in this year alone:
• Over 520 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures, a record;
• Over 220 bills specifically target transgender and non-binary people, also a record; and
• A record 74 anti-LGBTQ laws have been enacted so far this year, including:
• Laws banning gender affirming care for transgender youth: 16
• Laws requiring or allowing misgendering of transgender students: 7
• Laws targeting drag performances: 2
• Laws creating a license to discriminate: 3
• Laws censoring school curricula, including books: 13
We’re not paranoid. They really do want us to disappear.- Rebecca Gordon, The Right’s Attempted Extermination Campaign of Queer People Is Textbook Fascism (4 July 2023), The Nation
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- I will not stay silent when I spot racism," Jones, 49, said during her speech, delivered at the city's Omega Center. "I will not stay silent when I spot homophobia or transphobia. I will not stay silent when I spot xenophobia. I will not stay silent when I spot religious intolerance. I will not stay silent when I spot any injustice."
- Tishaura Jones, as quoted in "St. Louis Elects Its First Black Woman as Mayor: 'I'm Ready to Get to Work'", people.com (April 7, 2021)
- Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.
- Christopher Miller, "Department of Defense," Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise: 2025 Presidential Transition Project (2023), edited by Paul Dans & Steven Groves, Washington: The Heritage Foundation, paperback, p. 104
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- While the American public may have a broader understanding of the experiences of people who are transgender, non-binary and gender-nonconforming, violence against these communities — in the form of killings and prejudiced American policy — has continued to rise. This year is on track to be the deadliest on record in America, with 29 trans and gender-nonconforming people killed. At this time in 2020, which was a record-breaking year for such killings, 13 had been reported, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Though recently proposed legislation, like the LGBTQ Essential Data Act, aims to combat that violence by better tracking those deaths, more than 100 anti-trans bills have meanwhile been proposed this year — the most in U.S. history — by conservative lawmakers. Thirteen of those bills have passed.
“We don’t want more data. We want less deaths,” said Eric Stanley, an associate professor in gender and women’s studies at UC Berkeley. “Trans people are positioned in relation to a normative culture that is both fascinated and repelled by us. It’s not usually, ‘I hate you, get away.’ It’s more often, ‘I hate you. Come really close so I can terrorize you.’”
“The culture war has landed on trans communities, and that violence is specifically brutal and very corporal,” added Stanley.- Ivan Natividad, "Why is anti-trans violence on the rise in America?" (15 June 2021), Berkeley News
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- Today, America and the conservative movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970s. Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.
- Kevin Roberts, 7th President of the Heritage Foundation (October 2021-present), "Foreword: A Promise to America" in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise: 2025 Presidential Transition Project (2023), edited by Paul Dans & Steven Groves, Washington: The Heritage Foundation, paperback, p. 1
- We’re currently in this time of LGBT formal equality. The troubled language of “full citizenship” is used to make it seem like transgender communities are no longer living through contiguous harm. Yet, at this same time, along with the waves of anti-trans legislation, we still see these vicious attacks. Paying attention to this violence forces that narrative of progress back. We are in a very different space than the one that the dominant culture wants us to believe we’re in. We have to remember that these beautiful people were stolen from their lives much too early, and that is a loss for us all. We must also be clear that Black, brown and Indigenous trans women continue to be hyper-impacted by these and other forms of violence. But this is not to say that people remain singularly abject; these same communities are organizing to end the deadly world and create one where we might survive. So, anti-trans violence is always racialized within the idiom of gender. And that’s important to remember.
- Eric Stanley, Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Pedagogy, Gender & Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with Ivan Natividad, "Why is anti-trans violence on the rise in America?" (15 June 2021), Berkeley News
- It’s never just one thing. It’s always a constellation of systems that are rubbing up against each other. It’s racial capitalism. It’s the ongoing impact of settler colonialism and imperialism. It’s also the institutions of policing, imprisonment and deportation. These are all different forms of domination situated together that produce this atmosphere of violence. So, in responding to these murders, we need to be thinking about all of those things, all the time. That is hard and doesn’t make for a very good mainstream news story: They want a single bad person, not a whole deadly system. But most forms of anti-trans violence are specifically brutal. They’re also very corporal. Trans people are positioned in relation to a normative culture that is both fascinated and repelled by us. It’s not usually, “I hate you, get away.” It’s more often, “I hate you. Come really close so I can terrorize you.” We see this in the ways trans people are produced as props in the latest culture war. These anti-trans bills are rooted in an obsession with the idea of trans people’s bodies. The politicians authoring these bills are saying, “Let me study you, produce you as a singular object outside of yourself, so that I cannot just terrorize you, but produce your life as terror.” This is, as I explore in my book, the other side of assimilation. But, I mean, compared to 20 years ago, people have a broader understanding and lexicon of trans, non-binary and gender-nonconforming people. So, there is that. And we are seeing more media visibility, but the violence is still increasing.
- Eric Stanley, Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Pedagogy, Gender & Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with Ivan Natividad, "Why is anti-trans violence on the rise in America?" (15 June 2021), Berkeley News
- If you’re interested in supporting trans liberation, then figure out who is organizing against the street sweeps of homeless people living in Berkeley and join them. That’s a trans issue. Housing, access to health care, prison abolition, defending the West Berkeley Shellmound. Those are all trans issues, not only because they impact trans people, but also because trans people are there fighting back. Working toward another world is our only way out. Attempting to reform a system, like the prison industrial complex, will not eliminate its violent foundations. Reforms, as insurgents remind us, actually make the system bigger, make the system much deadlier, make the system more racist, more classist and ableist. You can’t reform a system that is built on slavery, on Indigenous genocide, on transphobia, and through all forms of degradation — we have to abolish it. So, we also can’t lose sight of the radical transformation that we want and need, our collective life depends on it.
- Eric Stanley, Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Pedagogy, Gender & Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with Ivan Natividad, "Why is anti-trans violence on the rise in America?" (15 June 2021), Berkeley News
- Since the position of the transphobe is that trans people don’t really exist, as trans people, and the position of trans people is obviously that they do exist, immediately we can see that no compromise is possible. Things either exist or they don’t, there’s no middle ground. So in any debate on this issue, it’s gonna be winner takes all. The trans person then is in the impossible situation of having to prove their own existence to someone who’s every response is gonna be, “How do you know?”
It’s perhaps unsurprising that many though not all people would decide that faced with an opponent whose entire position is the total denial of your humanity as the kind of human being that you are, the only winning move in such a game would be not to play.- Abigail Thorn, Transphobia: An Analysis | Philosophy Tube, 12.08.2018
- The US routinely searches for new legal scapegoats to deposit its fears and anxieties around gender/sexual deviance. In the past, this has included the Witch Trials, sodomy laws, hyper-criminalization of suspected gay pedophilia in the late 20th century, and most recently dozens of state and local anti-trans bills across the country. While the face/identity of the alleged perpetrators have changed, the supposed purity of the "victims" has remained quite stagnant. These days the narrative is that freaky transgender people (or as they say "crossdressers") will come into your bathrooms and abuse innocent little girls. This type of legal/carceral culture relies on two things: The construction of morally abhorrent perpetrators/scapegoats AND the production of pure, innocent victims. In this case, as in so many cases in the past, these victims are archetypical (white) (cis) innocent little girls. We totally need to challenge the white Christian supremacist, right-wing rhethoric around trans bodies, absolutely, But we also need to seriously overhaul the idea that there is a perfect victim anywhere.
- In July, the Freedom Caucus, a bloc of 30 strong conservatives in the House, threatened not to vote for the budget unless President Trump instituted some prohibition on paying for gender reassignment surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender people serving in the military. Under Obama, transgender troops had no longer been banned from openly serving, although new recruits would not be allowed to join until July 1, 2017. On June 30, the day before the deadline, Mattis signed a memo delaying implementation by six months to review "the readiness and lethality of the force." During the campaign, Trump had proclaimed himself a supporter of LGBT rights. Now he told Bannon, "What the fuck? They're coming in here, they're getting clipped"- a crude reference to gender reassignment surgery. Someone had told him that each surgery cost $250,000, an inflated number. "Not going to happen," he said.
Gender-reassignment surgery can be expensive but is also infrequent. In a Pentagon-commissioned study, the RAND Corporation "fouund that only a few hundred of the estimated 6,600 transgender troops would seek medical treatment in any year. RAND found those costs would total more than $8 million per year."- Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (2018), New York: Simon & Schuster, hardcover, p. 201
- The four options: One was to retain the Obama policy that allowed transgender people to serve openly, two was to issue a directive to Secretary Mattis giving him leeway, three was a presidential order to end the program but come up with a plan for those transgender people already in the military, and four was to ban all transgender people from military service. The likelihood of being sued increased as they got to number four, Priebus explained. "When you come down, we want to walk you through on paper," Priebus said. "I'll be down at 10," the president said. "Why don't you guys come and see me then? We'll figure it out." Pribeus thought they had found an orderly process on at least one controversial matter. At 8:55 a.m., his phone signaled him that a presidential tweet had been sent. "After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow..." In two more tweets following at 9:04 and 9:08 a.m., Trump finished his announcement: "...Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you."
- Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (2018), New York: Simon & Schuster, hardcover, p. 202
- "What'd you think of my tweet?" the president asked Priebus later. "I think it would've been better if we had a decision memo, looped Mattis in," Priebus answered. Mattis was not happy with Trump's decision to tweet the news and the effect it would have on serving and deployed transgender troops. On vacation in the Pacific Northwest, he was caught by surprise. The confusion played out in the press, with a Pentagon spokesman calling the Trump tweet "new guidance." Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "The president's national security team" was consulted and that Trump had made the decision the day before and "informed" Mattis immediately after. Several White House officials told the press that Mattis was consulted before the announcement and knew Trump was considering it. Bannon knew that the generals, though hard-line on defense, had become progressive on social issues. "The Marine Corps is a progressive institution," Bannon said. "Dunford, Kelly and Mattis are the three biggest. They're more progressive than Gary Cohn and Kushner." The commandant of the Coast Guard said publicly, "I will not break faith" with transgender members of his service. Dunford sent a letter to the service chiefs: "There will be no modifications to the current policy until the President's direction has been received by the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary has issued implementation guidance." In short, tweets were not orders. "In the meantime, we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect... we will all remain focused on accomplishing our assigned missions."
- Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (2018), New York: Simon & Schuster, hardcover, p. 202-203
- Mattis aide Sally Donnelly called Bannon. "Hey, we've got a problem with the boss," she said. "We can't stand by this transgender decision. This is just not right. They are American citizens." "These guys are coming over to get full surgery," Bannon said. "We're supposed to pay for that?" Mattis was going to try to reverse the decision, she said. "You've got to take one for the team," Bannon told her. Mattis would have to get in line. The White House later issued formal guidance to the Pentagon. Mattis announced he would study the issue. In the meantime, transgender troops continued to serve. Lawsuits were filed, and four federal courts entered preliminary injunctions against the ban. On January 1, 2018, the Pentagon began accepting transgender recruits as required by the courts.
- Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (2018), New York: Simon & Schuster, hardcover, p. 203
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