Transphobia

What the word says it is not

Transphobia is a classical compound patterned on homophobia: the prefix trans-, taken from transgender rather than directly from the Latin for across, and the Greek phobos. It joins Lesbophobia, Biphobia and Homophobia in a family of terms for intolerance and discrimination directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, along with the adjective transphobic, in 2013.

The English Wikipedia article states outright that transphobia is not a phobia as defined in clinical psychology, and points at Xenophobia as the term whose meaning and usage it parallels. That is an unusually clean statement of something this catalogue has to establish for most of the -phobia words that name social attitudes, and it is worth quoting because it comes from inside the literature rather than from a critic of it.

What the word does cover is a set: negative attitudes, feelings or actions towards transgender people or towards transness generally, which may include fear but also aversion, hatred, anger and violence towards people who do not conform to social gender roles.

Which predictor is strongest

Hailey Hatch and colleagues published a meta-analysis in 2022 on what underlies transphobic attitudes. The strongest predictor they found was a person's attitudes towards lesbian, gay and bisexual people: homophobia was strongly associated with transphobia. Other factors reached significance too, including aggressiveness, beliefs about gender roles, demographics and gender essentialism.

If the best predictor of one attitude is another attitude towards a different group, the object is not doing much explanatory work. That is the same finding the research on prejudice generally reports, and it is the strongest argument against reading any of these words as a fear of the thing named.

Why category beliefs predict policy

A 2019 study by Rad and colleagues surveyed 1,323 American adults and asked them to say what gender transgender people who had medically transitioned belonged to. Biological changes moved the answers: respondents identified the person more with their self-identified gender than with the gender assigned at birth.

Women were more likely than men to identify the person as their self-identified gender, and that difference was larger among respondents who were younger, more liberal, less religious and not from the Midwest.

The finding the authors draw out is the one worth keeping. Beliefs about gender category, meaning how a respondent rated the person's post-transition gender, were strongly associated with warmth towards transgender people. But when the two were tested against unseen data, the category belief predicted a respondent's preference on bathroom policy better than the warmth did. What somebody thinks a person is turns out to be a better guide to how they will vote than whether they like them.

Where the transphobia harm lands

The described pattern is age-structured. The pattern is age-structured. Transgender young people encounter:

• abuse from family members
• sexual harassment
• bullying or violence at school
• entry into state care and welfare programmes at higher rates than their peers Adults encounter sexual violence, police violence, public ridicule, misgendering, discrimination in healthcare and discrimination at work, with the result that many do not feel safe in public.

Two further points are recorded and neither is comfortable. Discrimination sometimes comes from within the LGBT community itself and from parts of the feminist movement. And people of colour who are transgender face discrimination beyond what a simple sum of transphobia and racism would account for, which is the finding that separates an intersecting disadvantage from an additive one.

The consequences given are mental health outcomes, drug use disorders, running away from home among minors, and suicide.

Which directions the trend runs

Since the 1990s much of the Western world has gradually built anti-discrimination policy and equal opportunity provision covering gender identity, and the pattern has begun to appear in some developing countries. International campaigns, including the United Nations Stop the Stigma campaign, work on social acceptance.

Against that, transphobic violence has been rising since 2021, alongside an increase in the number of discriminatory anti-trans laws enacted in many countries. Both statements are in the same article and both are supported. A rise in protection and a rise in violence are not contradictory; they are what a contested question looks like while it is being contested.