Transphobia is the ideology of the ruling class.
To most readers, the existence of a ruling class is not something you learned today, but for the readers with a liberal proclivity it might. In short, ownership of the means of production gives the bourgeoisie power over the rest of society.
Their goal? To maintain power and accumulate more of it. This is done through exploitation of the workers, who produce more than what they’re paid (if they’re paid at all). Undermining the resistance of workers to their own exploitation is somewhat of an expertise for the ruling class, from very simple methods like shooting the workers when they ask for better conditions, to more sophisticated ones like creating controlled opposition, that takes the place of a genuine socialist movement. Here we will focus on repression of the working class through gender roles and discrimination.
Capitalism didn’t invent gender roles, it inherited them from European feudalism, and as material conditions changed through the industrial revolution, so have gender roles. And yet in some western countries full equality in law between men and women has only been achieved mere decades ago.
Gender roles are very useful to maximize exploitation, if you want to quell a rebellious population, give them somebody to look down to, that is what got us antisemitic pogroms in Europe, what gave us racial hierarchies, and of course, gender hierarchies!
And so working class men oppressed by capitalism tend to have their rage redirected elsewhere, at immigrants, at ethnic minorities, and of course, at women.
But what do gender roles consist in? A lot of things!
We are going to scratch behind the progressive patina of financial capitalism, and go directly at the reactionary core of what the bourgeoisie thinks!
-Women should be submissive and politically passive, every feminist has been
called unfeminine at the very least for fighting politically.
-Women have a double nature of person, and reproductive apparatus in service of the State and Capital. This is what gets you the endless bourgeois assault on reproductive rights, and the right to terminate pregnancy.
-Women should be at home and care about the family, which obscures the lack of public services for children, and hides the real value of the labor performed by women.
Some gender roles are also very contradicting.
-Women should be at once pure and sexless beings that turn into nymphomaniacs to validate a man’s virility.
-Women are frail and delicate people, who must be protected (aka controlled), and yet when they denounce being raped, their allegations will be dismissed by the police, questioned by the media and peers, a judge may order further violation of the victim’s body, because the legal system is built to trust men over women.
And then some gender roles are merely aesthetic, but they bear the weight of all those mentioned and more.
-Skirts, heels, makeup... Things that by themselves are totally fine, but are de-facto imposed by marketing departments.
We can call the whole of these gender norms and prejudices: Patriarchal ideology.
Or even shorter: Patriarchy!
Now into this gigantic gender wall, come ramming lgbt+ people. Our lives cannot fit into the cisgender, hetero-normative edifice. We haven’t mentioned male gender roles but they are there too, to marry a woman is one of those, something that is fundamentally unfulfilling for a gay man. Lesbians face a similar issue, with the added slaps to the patriarchy of subtracting themselves from reproductive labor [in the form prescribed by the patriarchy] and being sexually unavailable to men.
Gay people, lesbians and bisexuals often also trespass aesthetic norms, and they’re often punished for it.
Trans people go even further in challenging gender norms, not only our attraction is not defined by our gender, our gender isn’t even defined by our bodies!
Trans people break the norms entirely, and if a person assigned female at birth can live freely as the man he is, or not recognize themselves in the gender binary, this means that our station in life is not written in stone, or chromosomes!
And this is a very dangerous message for the ruling class, it might give funny ideas to working class cisgender women and men.
This is why to the extent to which States have accepted trans people, they have done it with many strings attached, first off we must be made to feel wrong, you cannot simply know yourself and your gender, you will have to depend on the judgement of a psychologist, who will tell you you’re not performing your gender enough, sometimes that you’re performing it too much. If we are homosexual we will be called liars and fetishists. If we are married some countries will force us to divorce; This is where transphobia and homophobia overlap significantly.
We may also be forced to undergo therapies and surgeries if we want legal recognition, whether or not we want to take the risk of those surgeries.
But this doesn’t mean that the therapies will be easy to obtain! Medical gatekeeping will try to push into the closet again, trans specific drugs may suddenly become hard to buy.
This is just the transphobia we face by the medical establishment and the State, and its only purpose is to force trans people to exist within the boundaries of patriarchal ideology. This has divided us into the good trans people, who are binary, heterosexual and perform their gender in the “correct” way; from the bad trans people.
In short: Transphobia is just recycled misogyny.
A few examples:
-When men complain that it’s a shame Elliot Page is living as his true self, what they’re implying is that people assigned female at birth, exist for the sexual satisfaction of men.
-Most insults thrown at trans women are about their beauty, and being considered less for failing to meet aesthetic standards is something common to both cis and trans women.
-When trans men are portrayed as “confused girls” we see a reiteration of the gender norm that wants women as weak, and thus in need of protection and control.
-The panic about trans women going to the bathroom has often lead to cis women being harassed by transphobes, and law enforcement, for the crime of not looking feminine enough.
Allowing transphobia to spread unchecked also means allowing sexism and misogyny to spread with it.
Like other reactionary trends, transphobia also serves to cover up the crimes of the patriarchy, and capitalism.
When 80% of rapes are committed by a person known to the victim, transphobia shifts the focus on trans people who make up 1% of the population.
When a member of the English royal family is caught raping teenagers with Jeffrey Epstein, it shifts the focus on “groomers” who allow trans teenagers to be themselves, or simply broaden the scope of accepted gender expression.
When the State creates brutal conditions for men and women in prison, and 40% of guards in UK female prisons are male (report), we blame the entire problem on extremely isolated cases of violence by trans women.
The liberation of the working class from the yoke put on it by the bourgeoisie cannot leave anyone behind. Every fracture will be an opportunity for reactionaries to undermine social and economic change. Everyone: Women, Black people, immigrants who just arrived and those who arrived long ago, LGBT+ people, Disabled people and so on. The international working class can only rise or fall as one.