Log In Register
Lost your password?
A password will be e-mailed to you.

Transphobia’s root is ignorance and spreading it damages the psyche and hurt trans people’s lives

By: Patrick DuBois*/Trans Headlines

In school, I remember being taught not to bully, laugh at or pick a fight with others, especially others who were different or smaller than me. “If someone hurts you, defend yourself, but never abuse anyone or hit anyone first,” said my father repetitiously. I went as far as stopping a fight or siding with smaller or different kids when they were being picked on or bullied. The message I received from my parents, really, was compassionate and born out of common sense. It was simply to stand for others less privileged than myself. And, I did.

But, ever since Trump and his minions took the White House hostage and have only made room for White Anglo Saxon Americans whose main purpose seems to be to annihilate—in one form or another everyone who doesn’t fit that bill. We’re in a world of trouble. All you see are copycats who follow the same hate-filled rhetoric everywhere they are because they know they can.

If such words and actions can come from the most powerful office in the world, then they can also come from fear and bias—all rooted mostly in projection and ignorance. Enter known transphobe, Ricky Gervais. Gervais has hosted the Golden Globes 4 times already and is about to host the Golden Globes again in 2020, but hopefully not after this. Well, Gervais decided to chime in and side with no other than Harry Potter’s author J.K. Rowling on anti-trans issues again—after having made anti-trans jokes himself and deadnaming Caitlyn Jenner at the Golden Globes in 2016.

Via Twitter, Gervais and Rowling irresponsibly sided with a woman who is known as a TERF, Maya Forstater. Forstater was fired from her job for saying that trans women are men. Judge James Tayler ruled against Forstater saying that her public comments weren’t protected under England’s anti-discrimination laws. Tayler, in his verdict, called Forstater an “absolutist” in her view of sex and “incompatible with human dignity and the fundamental rights of others [which] creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment,” as reported by The Guardian.

When Gervais and Rowling use their sizeable platforms to demonize trans women and trans men, they’re, themselves, inflicting the lethal knife wound, they are pulling the trigger and ensuring that the bullet enters the trans bodies it’s intended for, they are the hand that stifles the last breath of air taken by a trans person—a human that lived a life that didn’t hurt them at all, or anyone else for that matter.

They are guilty of spreading hatred, lies, ignorance, and division against humankind. Those are the Trumps of life, whether they fully act like him or not. They embolden murderers, haters, bullies, sexual assault perpetrators, and others to look at trans lives lightly and without the same human decency that any person deserves in this world. Like Anthony Ramos from GLAAD said recently, they put trans people “at risk.” Don’t we punish the masterminds behind the actual acts in life? Well, these are masterminds, Trump, Gervais, and Rowling—and anyone who takes advantage of, hurts, bullies, abuses or denigrates people who are less deserving, the “people who need your help,” like my father used to say.

You have to stand for truth, for love, for true Christianity or principles. When someone is down, you help them up, you don’t keep them down or further hurt them. What do you think trans people are going to do to you when you see them existing? Why does anyone feel the power to alienate others based on race, ethnicity, credo, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.? I bet you this is not what our Fore founders had in mind when setting the rules and the “checks and balances” for the Republic that that should mirror the same rights for us all. And, I don’t think that any prophet or Jesus for that matter ever meant to “hurt thy neighbor,” to “grab their pus$y” or to “go knock some sense” into them.

I wonder why Trump, Gervais, Rowling and their cronies hate trans people so much. Hmm, I’ll come back to that shortly.

There’s a study about homophobes and gay men that perhaps can somehow bring some light into this. Its name is “Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal” and it was published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1996 from the APA’s Psyc Net. The study found that “homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli.” It concluded that “homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.” And now I wonder, would the same apply to transphobes in terms of their own knowledge of or desire to transition? Does the trans body, the trans mind or both, arouse them? Do they hold, deep inside, a desire to be intimate with a trans person due to their own knowledge of who they are attracted to or who they truly know themselves to be—consciously or not? I’ll let you answer those questions yourself. I know I have my answers already.

*Patrick DuBois is a writer, a person, a husband, a lover of life, a parent and a sucker for love and unity. In his spare time, he creates music and travels.