I’m Not Transphobic, You Are Normaphobic

There is nothing irrational in not wanting to be erased

Just because you are afraid of spiders does not mean you hate them. Image by Musthaq Nazeer from Pixabay

According to the dictionary a phobia is an extreme, persistent, excessive, unrealistic irrational fear of or aversion to an object, person, animal, activity, or situation. It is a recognized type of anxiety disorder. Most people with a phobia try to avoid whatever triggers this response or can only endure it with great anxiety or distress.

A couple of well-known phobias are a fear of spiders (arachnophobia) and agoraphobia (can be a fear of public places or a fear of leaving one’s home/going outside). Two much rarer phobias are anatidaephobia: fear of ducks watching you and trypophobia: fear of clustered patterns of irregular holes. (I thought my spell checker was going to stroke out with these two.)

English can be a rich language or a poor one, and in the case of transgenderism, it is very poor indeed. At various points in my life, I have learned and spoken other languages and some of them really do a better job than English does when it comes to some ideas.

Because fear is not always irrational or unfounded. If you have a cancer diagnosis, none of your friends or family would think that your fear of illness, treatment or death is irrational so to fear cancer is not a phobia. Ditto for losing your job if the company you work for goes out of business. The fear of being unemployed is not irrational in these circumstances.

English does not appear to have a word that means “rational or well-founded fear” and this creates a problem.

Doing what they do best - changing the meaning of words to suit their agenda

One thing that applied postmodernism and its bastard child queer theory excel at is changing the meaning of words from those which are universally understood to some definition that only those in the know understand. Obfuscation, boundary blurring and general confusion are not a flaw here, but a feature.  

So no longer is women’s health about the health of those humans who are natal females, who are born without a penis and who all grow from girls to women. Nope, that’s so yesterday. Now if you want to do any work in women’s health, you may well find the new definition of “woman” includes anyone who considers themselves to be one. Conversely, this also encompasses “pregnant men” who are confused individuals who believe that pretending to be a man means that global health care systems should be required to change all of their health messaging to exclude the over 99% of the “birthing population” who remain tethered to the reality of biology.

Because: inclusion, which I suspect will win a contest for the Word of the Century.

Don’t get me wrong, inclusion is a wonderful concept in general, but it is not always appropriate or useful. If inclusion was a universal good, then highly trained and well-established orchestras should be including beginner musicians, but they don’t.

Inclusion in today’s world means restricted speech and is the reason given for ideological purges that Stalin and Mao would respect. This works by making a small minority of people feel “welcomed” by banning anything that they find offensive and attacking the freedom of speech and beliefs of the majority. It means chiding us dinosaurs who think that biology outranks the big feelings of delusional thinking and compelling our speech to include those who actually should be excluded, such as male bodied persons who enjoy hanging out in public swimming pool female changing rooms watching the girls get ready for their class. Or men who want to affirm their “womanhood” by breastfeeding a baby.

One of the more egregious new vocabulary words is transphobia, which has been expanded well past any point of “fear of trans folx” to include hatred of transgenderism.

There is nothing in the definition of phobia that includes hatred or even dislike, so to state that people can’t change their sex is in no way phobic.

Twisting a viewpoint inside out

Phobias are fears or conditions that are owned by the person who has them. If you are petrified by spiders, you will state that “I have arachnophobia”. If you can’t walk to the end of your driveway to collect your mail, you will get someone to do this for you by telling them “I have agoraphobia”.

This is not the case with transphobia. I’m sure they are out there, but I have yet to meet a person who tells me “I have transphobia”. No, this term is imposed on us by others.

If we are called transphobic, we are being told that we feel this way. It is an imposed label from others, applied from the outside so is a slur, an epithet or an ideological label by someone else onto us, without our participation or consent. It stigmatizes us.

We can reject this framework and not be intimidated by what is a made-up word. Remember this word is used to get you to ignore your concerns about gender ideology and what this means. It is a word designed to remove all societal safeguarding that has been put into place to keep women and children safe from men.

Adult trans people of course share in the basic human rights that we all enjoy. But for some trans people and their allies their preoccupation with gender ideology eclipses other aspects of themselves and they demand that others validate their gender fixation back to them in a particular and prescribed way. It’s not enough for them to “know” themselves to be transgendered, they need everyone around them to repeatedly acknowledge their “special” status using preferred and specific terminology (hence the proliferation of “neo pronouns” and the choice of a major breastfeeding support group to use “a variety of terms” in place of that horrible, gendered word “mother”).

Terminology, which due to its narrow meanings, or outright prohibitions of the use of certain sex-based descriptions, is disrespectful to their heterosexual “audience” who may not even realize they are now only relegated to the role of bit players or participants in someone else’s life.

In today’s world, intimidation is a common technique to gain compliance with the trans agenda, which is why so many go along with things such as putting pronouns in their email signatures.

If you have a loved one who is convinced that they were “born in the wrong body” (or any of the other reasons given for a “gender change”), it may help you to realize that they are essentially at war with their body and their reproductive system. Confirming their confusion around this is not actually a compassionate act at all. In fact it might even be described as co-dependence. Focusing on other aspects of that person, while you remain firmly grounded in the truth may ultimately better serve your relationship, rather than encouraging them in their self-rejection.

Yes they will lash out because they have a lot invested in getting everyone around them on board and this may hurt, but not as much as some fictional relationship will.

I personally believe that transgenderism is a mental health disorder, but I acknowledge that this has been removed by the “bible” of psychiatry, the DSM. However if my good friend is afflicted by depression and I choose to ignore it, no one is going to call me a depressive phobic, or accuse me of trying to erase depressed people or deny they exist.

If you dislike acknowledging that men wearing dresses over their silicone breasts can self-identify as individuals that deserve special privileges, you will be pilloried for this, but if you don’t like lawyers no one is going to say you are harming them by being law phobic.

Some people think that it is wrong to send babies and toddlers off to day care so their mothers can participate in the paid economy, but to state this view is not considered to erase the existence of working mothers, nor is it considered literal violence to state your opinion.

No sane person is going to look at the skeletal figure of a girl who believes she is fat and offer her a free gym membership.

This young woman wants you to affirm her fatness.

Is “gender affirming care” a mental health intervention or elective cosmetic surgery?

If your gender is independent of and not about your body, then why does your body need to be altered to suit your idea of what it should look like?

If it’s mental health care than why is the only treatment to lean into the disorder?

If transgenderism causes so much anguish that many trans people are driven to suicide (as we are constantly told) and at the same time so sensitive to the opinions of others, then why does treatment focus on surgical procedures and hormonal interventions that don’t serve to heal mental anguish?  Wouldn’t treatment that supports and encourages them to develop their inner strength and resilience be more beneficial for long term wellbeing?

The ever-increasing numbers of detransitioners demonstrates that gender dysphoria is not a permanent state, but unlike other conditions where medical practice strives to alleviate or resolve troubling symptoms, “gender affirming care” actually reifies and celebrates physically life-altering procedures that leave bodies with permanent damage that cannot be reversed.

If cosmetic surgery is the default option for trans people, it is inappropriate to build mental health campaigns around this. It is also wrong to allow children and young adults to make permanent life altering decisions they can’t recover from (and parents do not have the right to allow this on behalf of their children). In many countries, girls can get their healthy breasts chopped off several years before they can legally get a tattoo. One reason given for an age restriction around tattoos is buyer’s regret, but I think that the intense grief that many women have who can’t breastfeed their babies well and truly outweighs the regret over an ill-chosen bit of body art.

Obsessive belief in a cult won’t end well

Recently, I watched a documentary about the cult group known by its chosen name, Heaven’s Gate. Founded in the USA in the 1970s, it was one of many New Age groups that flourished during this time period. It is remembered today as it ended with the largest mass suicide on American soil, when the remaining 39 members killed themselves in a suburban house near San Diego, California.

The way they looked at it though, was different. The belief system developed by the founder stressed the difference between the body and the soul, so these deaths were not seen as them killing themselves, but as releasing the leaving of consciousness from their “vehicles” (bodies) to ascend to the “Next Level”.

People today who are caught up in the cult of transgenderism endure results that are harmful to both them and to our wider society. The belief in a “gendered soul” that does not match one’s physical body is based solely on a faulty belief system and nothing more than this. The belief may be real, but the swamp it’s built on does not support anything real at all.

It is not necessary to adopt or accept an irrational framework to honor the dignity of others and you can respect another person's right to their beliefs without being compelled to participate in them. Gender ideology places identity before personhood and negates other often more important aspects of personality that remain ignored.

If someone reacts emotionally to something you say, it is not necessarily automatic that you are in the wrong or you are transphobic. This is a label we can reject. We are not responsible for the happiness or the reaction of others, especially those who have become unmoored from the truth.

There is nothing irrational in not wanting to be erased

I am a woman, a mother and a midwife. I am not a “non-man” or a “[insert body part here]- haver”, a “birthing person” or a “parent”, nor am I a “perinatal specialist”. I am not a “cis” anything at all. I do not “identify as” anything or anyone.

All those alternative terms are designed to hide the fact that every mammal on the planet is on one or the other side of a binary sex divide. That there are those who reject this statement is only proof that we are doing something very wrong in our educational systems, culture and societies that has allowed confused and delusional thinking to overrun biological and physiological facts.

If we adopted this strategy for say architecture and engineering, I personally would never enter a multi-storied building due to concerns about it collapsing.

The lengths that some companies, groups and individuals are going to, to erase the reality of our embodied existence compounds the harms to people as it moves through populations like some rampant new virus.

The fabulous author Milli Hill has been overwhelmed with examples of the erasure of women. You can find some of these in her The Word is Woman Substack.

June is Pride Month, but proud of what exactly?

Photo by Mercedes Mehling on Unsplash 

The origins of Pride Month go back to the days of gay liberation, when homosexuality could be dangerous for those who are same sex attracted and when goals such as same sex marriage seemed impossibly far in the future. Gay men, lesbian women, bisexual people and the tiny trans population worked together to have societal human rights become universal and not dependent on heterosexual marriage.

They have succeeded well past their wildest expectations in achieving their goals.

But they have exceeded their mandate because today’s Pride participants have a different agenda. Today’s Pride events only feature one letter: T, for transgender.

There is no pride in using a flawed ideology to groom children into premature sexual awareness, encouraging confused people to have surgeries and drugs that will leave them sexually non-functioning, mutilated and trampling over the bodies of women and children to assert a man’s right to put his penis anywhere he wants to because it’s a “lady dick”.

Betraying gay youngsters in the name of gender ideology and chemically castrating the next generation of gay adults is nothing to be proud of.

None of these statements are transphobic because they are true and not irrational. I don’t need to avoid transgendered people as a strategy to cope with a phobia, which is just as well as avoiding the trans agenda is no longer possible. The trans agenda has now been woven through every aspect of Western culture, institutions and governments.

It seems to me that the real problem is not transphobia, but normaphobia, an irrational fear of biologic norms, human development and reproduction and the very evolution that got us to where we are today.