Susan's Place Transgender Resources

And by transphobic, I mean things like scared of trans people, thinking trans people are mentally ill, thinking they're weird/gross, etc.

I feel like this is an interesting subject and I've yet to see people talk about it. Please be honest.

As far as I go: yes, if I were cis, I'd probably be transphobic. Because trans people have bad portrayal in the media, like trans women being displayed as men trying to trick other men into sleeping with them (Ex: Hangover 3), and trans men being portrayed as butch lesbians who scare straight women... the list goes on.

I'm from a rough area, and since Primary School (well, especially Primary) the majority of my peers have been, or expressed opinions that are racist, homophobic and definitely transphobic. A lot of the people around me came from poverty and 'disadvantaged' upbringings - I myself have always had a family with just enough money, and a family who are supportive and tolerant.

People around me and the media have been mostly negative, but being around LGBT people from a young age it was never something that struck me as wrong, or weird.

With friends (until the age where I realised it wasn't cool) racist, homophobic and transphobic remarks were normal - but I never thought that there was any truth to this.

Everyone is different - everyone has different influences, being family, friends, media and personal experience - if I were cis I wouldn't think that I would be intolerant of groups because my parents taught me otherwise (and strictly, I'll add).

It's a difficult question to answer. Asking if I was not me, how would I think? But if I'm not me, how would I know?

Based on how I am and setting aside my gender issues, I don't think I would be trans-phobic. When needed, I can get along with virtually anyone, even people that are rude to me. I don't care about things like gender, race, religion, etc when I come across someone new.

I've also come across people that have beliefs that internally I find very strange. As an example, I've met people who truly believe they are vampires (their version of it at least). In my head do I think it's kind of weird, yes. But when interacting with these people I am still respectful and am perfectly fine with letting people think or behave any way they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone.

So if I was born cis, internally I might find trans-gendered a bit odd, but I'm confident that I would still be respectful. And really...odd is okay. It breaks up the monotony of normal.

Nope. I have always thought that prejudice, discrimination in any form is amazingly stupid. Being born as a cisgirl would not change that.

I used to have internalised transphobia... and I'm trans! There's no way I can answer this question it's way too hypothetical.

I'm sorry to say that I certainly would have been.  In fact, I was DESPITE being trans, for a very long time, before I finally accepted myself, though I had to learn to accept others first.  I can definitely blame mine on my upbringing.  Many of my family members are still having trouble accepting me, and a couple have outright rejected me.

Probably I would be transphobic, unless I had a closed loved one who transitioned or was trans, and felt there pain. You got to realize, perception is shaped by your values, environment, culture around you, without having direct contact with someone close to you who is trans, you may have negative perceptions of a set of people, it also depends on your education, in the social, psychological, anthropological sciences, medical sciences(ie.even then some of the latter are prejudicial), sans hard sciences, unless you or someone you care about is trans.  I still see prejudice towards gay, lesbian, bi, other ethnicities to this day, sad to say.

Not at all, I'm the type who would be curious to better understand and try to help in some way

I see mental illness as a separate issue in that there may be transgender people who suffer with mental illness as well but being transgender is not a mental illness in of itself

I can't see why I would be, I've always been very open to everything, like I'm really against any religion but it never really bothered me to have anyone discussing their beliefs or philosophy or moral.

It's a highly hypothetical question, I'll never know what it feels like to be a cis female.

There is something in the eye of the cis women I go by on the street... I don't know yet what it is. But there is something. I'm certain they don't look other cis women like that... or do they?  :o I think it looks like a competitive look, but maybe I'm wrong.

I really don't know what to put.
If I was going by my parents/siblings standards, I would be a hypocritical religious, slightly racist, sexist, LGBT intolerant, judgemental person.
Being raised "sheltered", I didn't know what trans* was until I heard about "The Pregnant Man" on Oprah at 13, and thought it was an odd story that didn't make sense. Not a "mental illness" or "gross", just didn't make sense.
Sitting in a car with my mom at 14, she says that the goth person walking down the street "shouldn't come out of their house if they are going to dress weird". There I am wearing dark jeans and a black t-shirt wishing I could look like them.
I always was arguing with my family about how they shouldn't judge people based on their appearance or how they are, and judge people based on their personality and how they treat people. None of them could understand why I cared to defend someone if I wasn't "one of them".
At 14 I thought it was stupid if someone had an eating disorder. I had anxiety disorders my whole life, yet silently judged those internet people for "just wanting to be thin". Funny enough, by 16 I had an eating disorder (ironically, due to gender dysphoria).

I would like to think that I care about people enough to not judge them without knowing them, but without the experiences and life I had, and without my suppressed gender dysphoria underlying everything, would I still be the same person who thinks the way I think? In a somewhat twisted way, I am grateful to be born how I was due to the paranoia of acting like the rest of my family.

Probably not. I've despised sexism and homophobia as long as I can remember, and provided that I would know about the existence of trans people, I would probably defend our rights the same way.
If a little bit more uninformed, as I wouldn't have a reason to look up everything possible about trans people, which is what I did when I started to seriously suspect that I was trans.

I would think yes; which is one of the few good things about being trans. I grew up going to a secondary school where LGBT stuff wasn't discussed at all. I wasn't really aware there were gay people; let alone trans people. I may have seen stuff on TV about mtfs but I didn't understand it. I saw a doc on the pregnant man bit didn't understand that either. I assumed gay people chose to be gay because it wasn't found in nature; while knowing now it's found in 465 animal species. I was taught in school age of consent for gay people was 18 (which I believe was outdated and the law was changed by then) so assumed that gay sex must be horrible and painful. So I'd definitely be trans phobic.

If i wasn't trans i would have ended up being transphobic because i think for me i had a hard time understanding it
and i think it scared me. So me being transgender has taught me a lot about myself and about understanding things and being more open minded.  ;D

There's no "if" about it. Before I knew I was trans, I WAS transphobic.

I didn't have any ill will toward trans people and was supportive to the transfolk I came across. But I believed they were weak people who couldn't resist their urges.

I don't know.  Everything about me my whole life has been influenced on way or another by being trans.  I can't begin to unravel how these things, including my attitudes, would have developed differently if I had been CIS.  Maybe I would have been very different, better or worse.  I would hope the same or better but it's impossible to know.


Sapere Aude

If thinking that people are "weird" counts as phobic, then I'd have to say that the answer is yes.  A big part of my years of denial was that I thought being trans was too weird for me.   I still think it's weird, but now I embrace my weirdness. 

I don't equate weirdness with being immoral, which is where I think the line on phobia lies.

I said yes because I was raised to think like that. I was homophobic, transphobic, and every other -phobic supported by my conservative, fundamentalist Christian parents until a bit after I moved away. I changed after I was able to do some self-reflection without their twisted words surrounding me, but only because I was able to admit to myself that I was bisexual and transgender. I think I was able to tap into a lot of well-hidden empathy after that. I'm not sure if I would have changed my tune so much without that, since the indoctrination into hatred ran so deep in my family. Maybe I would have since (I think) I'm an otherwise nice person. I guess I'll never know.

When I was younger, before I knew and understood what being transgender was and all that. I was homophobic, as in school  from peers and in church as a kid I learned that "gay was bad and gross" (IT'S NOT SND IS COMPLETELY FINE) it wasn't until my senior year of highschool I really started to change and mature, after befriending my punk  (music genre) friend's friend at the time, who ultimately saved me from a lot of my demons I had chasing me from childhood.

This would be an easy question to answer back 50 years ago when I was far younger. Of course I would be. EVERYONE (essentially) was. Society was built in part on homophobia and transphobia. I've seen a lot of changes since I was a teen. Astronomical in their scope. Minor in terms of actual numbers.

As my wife loves to say, "We speak the language spoken when we were children". This applies to everything, not just the spoken word, but also to how we view and interact in the world.

No. I was raised in a small town where homophobia and intolerance were rampant but I was raised in a family that taught tolerance and respect. The only thing I was taught to be intolerant of was wilful intolerance (intolerance born from ignorance was to be countered by education).
Therefore, if I was cis, I wouldn't understand what trans people were going through but I would have been raised to be an advocate for their rights and inclusion.

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk

I was a racist, a homophobe, and a misogynist. Not proud of it, but there it is. I've spent a lot of time teaching myself that we're all equal and deserve the same respect. When I figured out I was transgender I realized I was going to be the target of people like myself.

Thanks for making us think.

Hugs, Devlyn

Hello,

I am so confused.

If I were cis I guess I would also be heterosexual, as I am now. So I guess my filters would be less porous. However, I work in a very LGBT friendly hospital and we are very liberal. So I hope I would have the compassion and understanding to be trans supportive.   

No, I don't think so. It's always been my philosophy that if it's not hurting anyone let people be happy.  I've also always tried to imagine myself in another person's situation before I judge.       I've never looked at minorities as statistics or numbers, but always as humans.   Not saying that I would have been an advocate or anything, just not transphobic.

Sent from my SM-S902L using Tapatalk

Having grown up in the environment that existed in my family, there was a constant tension between me and my parents. What ever they would say, I would disagree with. If they didn't like someone, I would ask "why?" And me being me caused a lot of tension as it was. Now in my career (working in the health care field) I deal with all kinds of people. So to answer the question, since I was born as I am, I don't know if I would be phobic towards others.

If I were born cis, than I wouldnt be me. How could I know then how would I think if I was someone else?

Make your best guess.  ;)

Hugs, Devlyn

Quote from: Devlyn Marie on May 30, 2016, 10:51:34 AM
Make your best guess.  ;)

Hugs, Devlyn

My best guess is maybe.  LOL.  My parents were not homophobic even though they were pretty conservative.  They didn't accept it as normal but they did accept my gay cousin pretty easily back in the 70s.  They were also not religious fundamentalists, being Episcopalian instead.  So in that respect I was raised to accept and not judge this sort of thing.  (Except when it came to me they judged harshly, but that's another story.)

Any homo and trans phobia I might have developed would have happened after I became a religious fundamentalist.  However, a big part of why I fell into that pit was because I was trans.  I got it into my head that maybe God would fix all the trans conflicts if I could find him.  I thought I needed to believe all that fundamentalist stuff in order to have the right kind of faith.  This also led me through a succession of denominations ending up as Catholic before I ended that futile search.  Maybe if I hadn't been trans none of that would have ever occurred and I would have remained as I was raised.

So everything in my life is tangled up in the Gordian Knot of being trans and trying to make it go away. 

Given the people I associate with, I'd wager I wouldn't be. All prejudice and any phobias I may at one time have had I absorbed from an American missionary school I went to. However, these never got rooted very deep, and on exposure to the real world mostly dissolved naturally.

That said, if working strictly with the definition of the original post—which includes the word "weird"—I guess I might at least sometimes be. I find I more easily accept people who act naturally and gracefully than anyone who seems to be putting on an act or a facade. I believe this would most likely also apply to some transgendered people who are just learning to assimilate the posture, speech and other mannerisms of the gender they were not brought up as.

I feel this is also true elsewhere. While unfamiliar styles look good on models, this only comes after they've learnt to wear them naturally and with confidence. Moves of students first learning to dance may first look staged and ungraceful, but with internalization can become automatic and beautiful. An ugly duckling stage is easy to understand and accept at workshops and other like situations, but in the context of chance daily encounters and mundane activities is more likely to seem weird.

If i was cis I'd still be queer, so likely not - but you never know, there is a lot of transphobia still about in the wider LGBTQIA community.

I don't know if I'd be educated about trans issues, because a lot of people aren't if they don't have a direct reason to be. So that might lead to some more subtle forms of transphobia and internalised transphobia that really come from ignorance and making assumptions instead of outright hate

Trans people are rare enough that they wouldn't be on my radar until our paths crossed. Transphobia would certainly be a paranoid overreaction.

Quote from: JMJW on May 30, 2016, 12:21:11 PM
Trans people are rare enough that they wouldn't be on my radar until our paths crossed. Transphobia would certainly be a paranoid overreaction.

Aw, you made me do it! From Kinky Boots:

"You're never more than ten feet away from a ->-bleeped-<-."

Hugs, Devlyn

Quote from: Peep on May 30, 2016, 12:18:11 PM
If i was cis I'd still be queer, so likely not - but you never know, there is a lot of transphobia still about in the wider LGBTQIA community.

I don't know if I'd be educated about trans issues, because a lot of people aren't if they don't have a direct reason to be. So that might lead to some more subtle forms of transphobia and internalised transphobia that really come from ignorance and making assumptions instead of outright hate

I'm gay. If I were born cis, I'd still be gay. However, cis gay men are some of the most transphobic people I've ever met. Most gay people want people with the same set of genitals as them, just like straight people want their partner to have the opposite set. One thing that I've always known is that I can get over not having a penis- I'm just scared my partner wouldn't, since so much of the "gay culture" is surrounded by penises<mod edit> and being proud of loving penises <mod edit>. For example, in Key & Peele's sketch, "Office Homophobe", Keegan plays a flamboyant gay man who really loves penises... it's just phalus, phalus, phalus<mod edit> all up in Gay Land. So it's no wonder a lot of gay men are transphobic. 

Moderator edit: A repeated use of a slang word was edited to a more inclusive biological(clinical) term. We want this to be  a safe site. Thanks.

When I was doing the guy thing, I came across several LGBTetc people, and most of them I thought, "well...hey, they're not doing anything that harms me or mine..." and had a live-and-let-live philosophy.

I did encounter one person who was wearing a dress and low heels, and hadn't shaved in a few days. My then-wife made some comment under her breath, and I just said he's not hurting anyone, and if he has mental issues...no harm done by wearing a dress. He probably wants to, anyway.

So yeah, I was probably more of an ally.

I would say no because there was a brief time where I didn't know I was trans*, knew about them, and wasn't transphobic then. But I am probably an exception because of my background, I grew up in a liberal place with a liberal family and I'm part of the younger generation. Had I been growing up in a different environment maybe I wouldn't be so open minded. I was pretty ignorant in my young teens when it came to be lgbt stuff but that changed as I got older.

If I was a cis male (I can't grasp being a cis female as accurately), maybe I wouldn't have entirely discarded the racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic influences from my childhood and our culture (though, our culture is steadily becoming more accepting of human nature), and would feel a sense of superiority. For as long as I can remember, though, I've been constantly seeking new vantage points to understand. This characteristic isn't contingent upon me being transgender, but rather not having a father, or any single person I've wanted to emulate, or any single ideology I've strictly followed for very long (whenever I think I might be complacent, I always feel an impetus to learn something new). As a result, I often hear from people I rekindle my relationship with after a couple years, that they feel like they are meeting a different person. Therefore, while I'm sure I would be less empathetic of those struggling with gender dysphoria, I think I would eventually want to understand them.

I don't think I would be, going by the fact I'm not really gay but I'm not homophobic
_{my sexual orientation is a bit of a mess to be honest though i'm pretty sure i'm ace (i don't like the idea of a relationship like that and i've never had a desire for it)}

My household isn't like that either so I wouldn't pick up on that kind of thing from my parents q:

No, I wouldn't be.  I'm white, and my first best friend, when I was five (in 1967) was black.  In high school in the late 1970's I had friends who were part of the "sweater vest and manicure" set, and I never talked about them behind their backs or asked about their sexuality. 

Bear in mind I never thought of myself as trans* at the time, since I had no idea or knowledge that gender transition existed or was possible.

If I were a cisgender guy, I would still be just as liberal.

I can't say for sure but there is the possibility I would be.  I was raised Southern Baptist and the reason I left the SBC was, being trans and bi, I was tired of hearing what a horrible person I was.  If I had not left the SBC, I wonder if I would have succumbed to their indoctrination or would I have still been open minded.  I would like to think I would have been the latter.

I feel like coming out to myself as transgender, and then later genderfluid did so much character building for me. If that never happened, if I never identified as a gender minority, I would think I would have ended up much less accepting, and certainly a lot less knowledgable (I have memories of using that t six letter t word and thinking it was the right word to say).

To put simply, I wouldn't think I would be transphobic, but I would certainly be uneducated and stubborn to learn about it. So maybe, yeah, probably actually would've ended up transphobic, and that sounds so horrible to type (because this sentence makes perfect sense).  :embarrassed:

I'm about as socially liberal as they come and even in my less liberal days, i was very tolerant and a supporter of diversity. My parents taught me pretty well in that respect. They may have not been perfect in their tolerance but they evolved nicely.

I was reared in a very fundamentalist religion. The one in Utah. There is no way I would have cracked that shell without being trans myself. I had to break out and run away. Then, my eyes were opened. There is a comfort zone in a society where you view yourself and others as a small group of elites, chosen of God, whatever.

So, I answered Yes. I would like to think that the experience I would have gained over the years would have softened me up, but I'll never know for sure.

I would say most likely because I was raised in a rather conservative family and had some very conservative thinking friends and grew up during the time when, at least in our environment, people did not talk about things like that and anyone who was gay remained in the closet.  I was also a Southern Baptist.

What changed my views was getting to know an openly gay neighbor and then becoming friends with a couple of gay people.  Then I finally came to realize and admit that I was transgender and got to know a few other transgender people, so my views on those things had to change.

Quote from: Ms Grace on May 30, 2016, 01:02:04 AM
I used to have internalised transphobia... and I'm trans! There's no way I can answer this question it's way too hypothetical.

Same here. I used to be pretty messed up.

If there was a maybe or I don't know option, I would have checked that box. I do remember feeling transphobic because I was afraid of myself. I do remember though never hating or being homophobic. I am not saying back in the early 80's when I was in deep denial and repression (and hating myself) I was really as accepting of gay people as I am today, but I didn't hate them, or fear them. So, I am really just not sure.