How anti-trans sentiment and sexism end up in the same bed, and take us all with them.
by Mauve Maude
December 6, 2020
As Elliot Page became the latest public figure to come out as transgender, the announcement was met with relatively little fanfare, but with messages of both support and resistance. Negative reactions to trans acknowledgment, especially with public figures, often vary from eyerolls, to jokes, to pointed misgendering and deadnaming, to outright aggression. These reactions spring from complex personal issues that don’t really have anything to do with transgender people themselves, at least not until the reactor tries to make it somebody else’s issue. But no matter what the reaction or how much intention is behind it, it’s a personal exposure that can say a lot about what and how a person thinks.
And consequently, as much as it reveals what a person thinks about transgender people, it may also reveal their thoughts on the opposite sex. Maybe more.
What’s the big deal?
Anti-trans sentiment has much to do with the American gender binary, the cultural normativity standard equating “man” with “male” and “woman” with “female.” The idea of gender transcending that mold comes as a direct challenge to that norm, and subsequently, to the ideas some people use that mold to protect, such as their view of family, or of feminism. The challenging idea presents as a threat to the embraced idea. Their instinct, like everyone’s, tells them to fight the threat, and in some basic way, that manifests as resisting the whole idea of gender transcending body. So despite living evidence to the contrary, some view trans or non-binary people as a threat to their own way of life or their own beliefs. The only way they will see otherwise, as others have, is through some positive personal experience. Admittedly, that’s difficult to give someone when they’re actively against the idea, but it happens.
When someone is hard-set on men being male and women being female, a certain level of utility is implied. That maleness or femaleness has to serve a purpose. Although Americans value individualism for ourselves, people also want easy categorization of others. They want other people to fill as few slots as possible, so as to avoid the challenge of getting to know who people are. Of course, the purpose for maleness or femaleness is sex. People typically don’t focus on other people’s hidden body parts unless they have sex somewhere in mind, even if it’s way in the back. And it’s easier for, say, some men if women look a certain way, and assumptions can be made about the candy in the wrapper. When those assumptions can be made, utility is that much easier. When this dynamic gets mixed with expectations and entitlement, finding a difficulty–a disruption–is often a problem. And depending on the person who’s finding it, it could be a huge problem.
Allow me to clarify.
What does this mean for the opposite sex?
If a man, just for example, finds a woman who doesn’t offer him the utility (sex) he wanted, how he then behaves says a lot about him. Whether this woman is transgender or cisgender doesn’t really matter in this regard. Either woman could find herself in this situation. And either way his reaction or response will reveal what he thinks about women, and more specifically, their purpose. If woman is equated simply with vagina, that doesn’t say much for women as people. If the man cares about the woman simply as a person, he’s more likely to back off and let her be, no matter how he feels.
Of course, this doesn’t only apply to men. If a woman sees another woman peacefully using a public restroom and she intuitively suspects the other woman is transgender, how she then behaves says a lot about her. Whether the other woman is actually trans or not doesn’t really matter either, not to this point. The woman’s reaction or response will be witnessed by whomever is with her. And either way, it will reveal what she thinks about men, and more specifically, their motives. If penis is equated simply with danger (and, well, men), that doesn’t say much for men as people. If the woman recognizes that a penis is just a body part people may or may not have, she’s less likely to react negatively, to a person in the restroom who may or may not be transgender but apparently just came to use the restroom.
Our thoughts about what men and women are, or should be, or do, can get very tangled up in utility mode. In reality, people are people. They’re not here to be used or to meet our expectations, and they often won’t.
Our cis-het world
The way our society in general approaches the subject of transgender people is also worth noting. The two scenarios I just outlined both potentially involved transgender women, and trans women do seem to get the most press in discussions regarding trans people as a whole, in our society. Whether the subject is surprised suitors, women’s restrooms, or women’s sports, it seems the focus, and the perception of threat, is almost entirely given to women who were born boys. Much less “threatening”, apparently, are men who were born girls. What is society telling us there about how it views men and women, assuming it views trans women as really men, and trans men as really women?
cisgender – possessing a gender identity that fits social and anatomical expectations, by fulfilling the social roles assigned according to one’s birth anatomy; male men and female women
Perhaps the woman in the restroom has heard a rumor or two about men. Society, however much it may defend good men, and however much it may be dominated by men, views maleness as a bit of a threat. For some, it’s actually a point of pride. The woman in the restroom thinks a male adult in the ladies’ room is a danger, because that’s what she’s been taught.
And people very commonly suffer under the mistaken idea that transgender women or girls are really males on the attack, with ulterior motives in mind. In reality it hardly makes sense for a trans woman or girl (a student in secondary school especially) to have changed her identity–the way she lives her daily life–just to attack other women or somehow defeat them. This hardly seems necessary or practical. Because also in reality, trans women are disproportionately attacked by cisgender people, who’ve never felt the need to dress a certain way first. Neither, historically, have male predators who want to attack cis women, in restrooms or anywhere else.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that males are the stronger sex, and that men are instinctively, by nature, brutal and forceful, sometimes predatory. That leaves us to believe that females are the weaker, more vulnerable sex.
That sounds sensible, but the primary, front-facing argument for most of the “bathroom bills” initiated or proposed across the country, is actually not that transgender women are predators (though some do believe this). It’s that if trans people are allowed to use the restrooms befitting their gender identity, men will use that “permission” as a loophole in plotting public restroom attacks against women and children. The idea is that male predators can put on a costume and call themselves transgender, in order to gain legal access to their victims. But in reality, male predators have already thought of endless ways to attack women and children without the costume (usually women and children they know), and transgender people have already been using the restrooms of their choices for ages.
That’s because using the opposite one can cause fairly obvious issues. If a trans man walks into a women’s restroom, he’ll be perceived as a threat too, not because he’s transgender, but because he’s a man. In a men’s room, that man would more likely feel threatened himself, by other men. This would further apply to a trans teen boy in a locker room, or a trans man in a men’s correctional facility. We can imagine a transgender boy walking into a girls’ locker room or a boys’ one, and envision how the other students might react in either scenario. We can imagine a trans man being incarcerated with other men, or on the other hand being incarcerated with women. We can predict what would happen to a trans woman incarcerated with men too. We wouldn’t necessarily make the same prediction for a trans woman incarcerated with other women. Maybe more importantly, we could all imagine how these situations might make a person feel. To put it simply, most of us would perceive that anyone who’s biologically female or a trans woman, might feel uneasy surrounded by cisgender, heterosexual men or boys. Because that’s what we’ve all been taught.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that males are the stronger sex, and that men (male men) are instinctively, by nature, brutal and forceful, sometimes predatory. That leaves us to believe that females are the weaker, more vulnerable sex, and we’ve been taught to believe that women (female women), by nature, tend toward controlling behavior and mental manipulation. Controlling behavior typically comes from a feeling of lacking control, or more accurately, power. We’ve also been taught that men and women (but mostly women) can and should be tamed, kept in line, for our own good. Men should step away from the brute controls, and women should step away from the mind controls. But, if he does exercise his physical strength, man equals threat, and woman = no threat. That’s the mental scheme under which we operate.
Do we all fit those ideas? No. Any man can be naturally docile, or submissive, or a pacifist, and some women can be quite cold and brutal. Any man or woman can be aggressively controlling, or dominant. Men and women can be predators, transgender or cisgender (though most are undeniably cisgender, on sheer mathematical principle). Some people just don’t care much about other people; it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with their sex or gender. But most of us, at heart, do, regardless of ours.
So if we find ourselves threat-reacting to a trans woman, for example, in a ladies’ restroom, or on a first date, solely because of what we think is, or thought was between her legs, what we’re really reacting to are our ideas of men, or our ideas of women. And if we truly believe that males are inherently worse than females, or that females are less valuable than males, we are now engaging in sexist thinking. If we tell ourselves that transgender men and women are somehow less real than cisgender men and women, that they somehow don’t level up to a standard, one that relies exclusively on the body parts we were born with, we are engaging in thinking that’s diminutive as well as sexist. And in doing so, we’re demeaning ourselves as well.
Because the truth is, all of us, cisgender and transgender, are people. We are more than what’s between our legs. It’s our behavior that determines who we are, whether we’re innocents, or predators, or most likely, someone in between. If that applies to one of us, it applies to us all.
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