Quotessence
Home / Topics / Transphobia Quotes

Transphobia Quotes

Browse 42 quotes about Transphobia.

Transphobia Quotes

“School staff are trained to believe that if they "out" gender-confused children to their parents, those parents will reject their "queer" children. Parents are presumed "transphobic" until proven otherwise. And being "transphobic," in the view of many of these indoctrinated adults, equals being abusive. Parents aren't safe. The reality is almost always precisely the opposite.”

“When Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling published the piece "TERF Wars" on her blog in the summer of 2020, she specifically mentioned her fear that many transgender men are actually Autistic girls who weren't conventionally feminine, and have been influenced by transactivists on the internet into identifying out of womanhood. In presenting herself as defending disabled "girls," she argued for restricting young trans Autistic people's ability to self-identity and access necessary services and health care. Rowling's perspective (which she shares with many gender critical folks) is deeply dehumanising to both the trans and Autistic communities.”

“Western borders are currently being reasserted in the context of economic crisis, to protect the global ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. And reactionary feminism is complicit with this capitalist and neo-colonial project. It foregrounds narratives of scarcity; it claims resources and support for the ‘good’ women rather than the ‘bad’.”

“Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become. This perplexing consequence came fully to light as soon as equality was no longer seen in terms of an omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death. Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is “normal” if he is like everybody else and “abnormal” if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more conspicuous.”

“I trust that the publication of my life story will contribute to a correct estimate of androgvnism on the part of scientists, the molders of public opinion, and the lawmakers, and to a more kindly treatment by society of those born with this curse. It is only expressing half the truth to say that they are more to be pitied than scorned. They are wholly to be pitied.”

“Trans-exclusionary and anti-sex-work feminism amplify the mainstream movement’s desire for power and authority, and pursue it by policing the borders of feminism and womanhood. The mainstream preoccupation with threat becomes an overt ‘us and them’ mentality, and the necropolitical desire for annihilation is deliberately turned on more marginalised people.”

“Reactionary [trans- and sex worker-hostile] feminism accelerates the white feminist ‘war machine’, using the media and social media outrage economy to maximum effect. Although its numbers are small, this movement is tightly networked and highly organised. Its tactics are similar to the notorious harassment campaign Gamergate: it identifies and then relentlessly attacks target after target, seemingly with the aim of total submission.”

“Today’s reactionary feminists are descendants of nineteenth-century ‘vice-fighters’, Christian moralists and anti-miscegenationists, the bourgeois women enlisted by Fordism to ‘improve’ the working class, and those who ran the reformatories for ‘wayward’ Black girls and who abused them ‘for their own good’.”

“They say, “We’re here to help.” You don’t know what help is. Try walking a mile in my shoes. Fuck walking a mile— why not wear my shoes, throw on my hair, wear this tight-ass dress, tuck my dick and balls into a gaff, child, and then run in front of police, jump over cars, and then snatch off your hair, put on different clothes, change your shoes and then walk down that same street past the motherfucker that was looking for you in the first place. Then you can give me some shit about who the fuck I am.”

“Cookie Concepcion, one activist leader we worked with at Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), speaks to the fraud of “gender responsiveness” in a Feministing.com blog post dated May 13, 2008. Explaining how the prison doesn’t allow female-assigned prisoners to wear boxers, Cookie writes, “Lately a lot of time and money has been spent on mandatory ‘Gender Responsive’ training for all officers and staff. The objective of this training is to define differences between female and male inmates. The basic ideology is that females commit crimes because they are victims, whereas males are just bad and mean. This must be where they learned how dangerous it is for females to wear boxers.”

“I couldn't blame him for not believing me because it wasn't exactly true. The truth is that you /do/ care. Of course you do. And it hurts to hear people say those things about you. But the hurt changes, over time. At first, it's sharp and hot, like a fiery dagger stabbing you in the heart, but when you've heard the same insults over and over and over, the pain changes. It becomes a dull, throbbing ache -- like a toothache. A sort of background pain that you can ignore for a few minutes at a time, except when you're lying in bed at night, trying to sleep. That's when it really gets to you.”

“Cisnormativity is a set of ideas, and the practices which reflect them, that assume 'sex' is binary (male or female), that 'gender' is necessarily and always the same as 'sex', and that people live in the gender they were assigned at birth. Moreover, it assumes that genders, bodies, and personal identities match each other.”

“The main reason why trans-woman-exclusion evokes such passion and frustration in me is precisely because it is both anti-trans and antifeminist. And as a feminist, it gravely disturbs me that other self-described feminists are so willing to overlook or purposefully ignore how inherently sexist trans-woman-exclusion policies and politics are: they favor trans men over trans women, they rampantly objectify trans female bodies, and they privilege trans women's appearances, socialization, and the sex others assigned to us at birth over our persons, our minds, and our identities.”

“Sometimes, sexual violence is a ‘cultural problem’ (but only when this culture is non white). Sometimes, it is a product of male anatomy (but only when this anatomy is assigned to a trans woman or a man of colour). Sexual violence is never the violence of heteropatriarchy or globalising racial capital. Instead, representatives of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism weaponise the idea of ‘women’s safety’ against marginalised and hyper-exploited groups.”

“This…exemplifies how trans-exclusionary feminism uses the experience of rape. Drawing on the radical feminist idea of the penis as a weapon, it ‘sticks’ this organ to trans women through an obsession with their surgical status. The ‘threat’ posed by the trans woman is then juxtaposed with the threatened (white) femininity of the abuse survivor. Cue outrage.”

“The more she thought about it, imagining those soft lips opening around her tongue, those long lashes fluttering in dreamy anticipation, the more she realized that no specific moment, no single touch, was to blame. What mattered was that she’d broken the silent rule. She’d touched a girl before the girl touched her, had laid her violent hands on tender skin. She should have known better. Self-pity pressed against her mouth and nostrils like a sodden rag. I’m a girl until a real one decides I’m not.”

“At the first trans health conference I ever attended, a parent asked about long-term health risks for people taking hormones. The doctor gave a full assessment of issues that trans men face; many of them mimic the risks that would be inherited from father to son if they'd been born male, now that testosterone is a factor. "What about trans women?" another parent asked. The doctor took a deep breath. "Those outcomes are murkier. Because trans women are so discriminated against, they're at far greater risk for issues like alcoholism, poverty, homelessness, and lack of access to good healthcare. All of these issues impact their overall health so much that it's hard to gather data on what their health outcomes would be if these issues weren't present." This was stunning-a group of people is treated so badly by our culture that we can't clearly study their health. The burden of this abuse is that substantial and pervasive. Your generation will be healthier. The signs are already there.”

“Those who were gay were told they were ‘too close’ to the work, and, according to one former senior clinician, anyone who spoke out was ‘made to feel hysterical’ in some way. ‘The more anxious and worried you became, the more it was framed that you weren’t really someone who could handle it.’ It was ‘a brilliant way to divert it away from what we’re actually doing, which was changing children’s bodies’, they say. It is not credible to explain away the concerns of so many experienced clinicians either by accusations of transphobia or allegations that they are simply not up to the task at hand.”

“There’s a subtlety to transphobia that we don’t see, because we’re not meant to see it. That subtly lies with making transphobic stereotypes so pervasive that they go unquestioned, unchallenged, undiscussed. So when trans and gender-nonconforming people call out these stereotypes, we should listen. Just because something is a common trope doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful, complicated and worthy of critique.”

“Despite the ubiquity of government-organized trans pageants in the Philippines, trans people themselves are not politically recognized. We are culturally visible but legally erased. To this day, trans Filipinas have M gender markers on their documents and cannot change their names in court. We don't have robust antidiscrimination protections. No amount of pageant glory can make up for the fact that our government still doesn't see and treat trans people as full citizens able to participate in society as we truly are. In a country of over 100 million people, only a few dozen certified endocrinologists offer gender-affirming care. Growing up, I relied on other trans people to find hormones, figuring out the right dosages through hearsay, transitioning entirely without proper medical supervision. There was no other choice back then - and for many today, DIY is still the only option. My community is littered with stories of injections gone horribly wrong. Even worse, when someone dies from an overdose or an unsupervised medical treatment, it's shrugged off as a sad fact of life. 'That's what happens,' the emergency techs will say, our lives stripped of value by the very institutions that ought to care for us. I will never forget when one of my Garcia clan sisters succumbed to death from a botched medical procedure, a victim of all the intersecting forces trans Filipinas have to navigate to get treatment.”

“The emergence of trans-exclusionary radical feminism [TERF] in the 1970s, with its own version of trans panic, is only one of many trans-misogynistic echoes in recent history. TERFs... didn't invent trans misogyny, nor did they put a particularly novel spin in it...portrayal of trans femininity as violent and depressed could have been lifted from the British denunciation of hijras in the 1870s, or from Nazi propaganda about transvestites in the 1930s... Recent work by historians has cat doubt in his popular TERF beliefs ever were outside a few loud agitators... If anything, TERFs, whether in the 1970s or in their contemporary "gender-critical" guise, are better understood as conventional boosters of statist and racist political institutions... TERFs, like the right-wing evangelicals or white supremacists who agree with them politically, are not the lynchpin to trans misogyny; rather, they are at best one of its latest manifestations.”

“Why would you want to be one of them?" she says. ”How could you live with yourself?" I've asked myself that so many times. How could I ever want to be a part of the section of humanity responsible for so much of my suffering? In what ways haven't men hurt me? But then again—in what ways haven't women? In what ways hasn't everyone? I say, "I don't believe in original sin." Mary looks at me askance, frowning. “What they've done isn't my burden to bear. It's theirs.”