There are plenty of these kinds of people out there, but I wonder what causes them to be that way? Anymore, I just can't bear to read the comments on a video or some article that pertains to a transgender person. There is bound to be a transphobe, and then I wish I hadn't.
So, what do you think are the reasons a person may be transphobic?
Fear of the unknown is one reason. Challenging assumptions about gender is another. Plus, some people are just aholes. Many transphobes probably lug around bad feelings about a lot of people.
This is just a gut reaction comment, but I think insecurity.
With that insecurity comes fear. With that fear comes hate.
Societal norms range wildly and those that think alike tend to attract like steel to a magnet. Other groups that think differently may see others as inferior or just that they are superior, but what drives that is fear of one another. Those norms when untainted perpetuate on down the line. Education seems to be the key to defeating that fear induced hate.
Just have to get them to listen.
Cognitive dissonance on a personal level. On greater levels, we threaten to disturb established order and human beings often don't like change, on the whole.
Ideology - like a religious one in which you are taught any deviation from the norm regards sexuality or presentation is some affront to god. Obviously believers are going to struggle to some extent with the cognitive dissonance of that when presented with us.
Upbringing - a force of habit. If your parents tried to beat it out of you or you wanted to please them by doing what they say and they say trans folks are bad...
Community - you might be surrounded by people who really don't like trans people. To go against the grain and step out of line in some communities is to come in for flak yourself.
Biology - I know from my own experience how "weird" being trans can feel. There's no denying that it can feel weird and wrong. Like something just isn't right and is off-kilter. It can cause severe emotional distress in us. And I think that's why it causes it in others as well... there's something about us that, while I believe we are natural phenomena, is off-kilter to the norm. People know this as much as we know it. The average person is not given to exploration and open-mindedness unless confronted with stuff that forces them to consider it. I think biology might be the greatest source of that cognitive dissonance. Our species is very dimorphic, sexually. As such it's primed to lock on to the differences between the sexes and sort people into categories. When they don't fit easily into categories, the human brain is either intrigued.... or repelled.
Sexuality - it's a delicate area. Not unknown for the most homophobic or transphobic people to eventually be exposed as secretly attracted to the same sex or to trans people. Without getting too heavy into psychology bumpf, there is something known as "disgust sensitivity" in the field of psychology that people exhibit. Some have more of it than others, but it's thought to be a means of how human beings and human societies (as well as animal societies) regulate behavior, and how morality is mediated. Notice how sexuality is often tightly bound up with ideas of morality in most human societies? and people often have a very strong response to the topic of sexuality that often goes immediately to whether or not they find it "disgusting?" and how if asked on a topic relating to sexuality (or transsexuality) some people will be fine with it and others respond with something like "that's disgusting?" That's because their sense of morality is closely tied in with disgust sensitivity. It's been found that people who are more conservative in outlook and political orientation are more likely to be easily disgusted. Their disgust sensitivity to things outside the norm is higher than that of more liberal-minded people, and the blurring of lines or crossing of those boundaries tends to illicit a response/emotion of disgust in them. Disgust does serve an important biological function - e.g. most people instinctively find human waste or a dead body disgusting, and it transmits disease so there's a good reason to stay away from it. But we also end up judging and processing lot of other social ideas through the idea of disgust, especially things that challenge us morally or biologically. Unfortunately, being trans does challenge other peoples' biological/sexual perception of us, as well as many moral ideas in society, and so we are sometimes met with "disgust" as a knee-jerk response. It's not just social though. It's not something society could be fully accustomed to and trained out of, when you consider that straight men or straight women also often have a disgust response to the idea of sexual contact with the same sex. This often seems to just be a visceral response, not necessarily coming from a place of malice... and so if they should discover a person they are attracted to happens to be a trans person, there is always that potential for a feeling of repulsion and/or disgust as an emotional response in such a person.
If you want to get into the guts of why societies so often have a problem with gay and trans people, that can branch heavily into evolutionary psychology, biology and psychology, which I find fairly plausible in most respects as to why people might have this reaction. While "hate" can certainly be a bi-product, hate itself doesn't come from thin air, and there is no biological reason to hate something for nothing. We hate what we see as a threat, usually. Or what we've been conditioned to see as one. It's clear at this point that many people see us as a threat because as a demographic we appear to be growing. As a demographic many people have joined us, whether they fit the medical definitions of being transsexual or not. As a demographic we now ended up on the cutting edge of the "culture war", as they call it, whether we wanted to be there or not, and we have been politicized. The latter example is indeed a credible threat to conservative values, if you consider how certain trans activists now advocate eliminating the idea of gender altogether, or of adding many more genders to the lexicon, or of scratching the biological/scientific definitions of sex, or of asking drag queens to read to schoolkids. Whichever way you look at these things, they are a challenge to the established order and as such will be viewed by some sections of society as a dire threat to all they know.
Politics - we were less politicized in the past and certainly seen as less of a threat than we appear to be now. If transphobia is on the rise, I am not surprised, given that we have stopped being quite so passive as a group and trans activists now managed to gain the upper hand in some circles. Difficult situations like the desire to teach young children about LGBT in state schools haven't escaped the notice of many people and some see this as a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate kids. Once we moved from the arena of fighting for our rights to this sort of thing, we effectively shifted from being seen as a persecuted group to one who seeks to impose itself on the rest of society. This has intensified transphobia among the more conservative-minded.
Closed minds. People who are open are able to learn and accept. I have seen open and closed minded siblings, so it's not genetics, must just be the way individuals are wired.
Allie
"Ignorance leads to fear. Fear leads to hate."
Religion.
Quote from: Janes Groove on May 18, 2019, 11:31:18 PM
Religion.
Religion itself is not always a problem. Most live by a doctrine of love thy neighbor, but unfortunately there are extremists that misunderstand the peaceful message.
There are three kinds of people. Educated, ignorant, Stupid. Ignorant can be educated but stupid is forever.
Quote from: DawnOday on May 19, 2019, 12:46:26 AM
There are three kinds of people. Educated, ignorant, Stupid. Ignorant can be educated but stupid is forever.
Yup
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Hello Everyone
I agree with all comments made so far.
I think the two main reasons are religious extremism and pure ignorance.
Just to add a couple of other thoughts to the debate, if I may please:
1. Transgender matters are relatively new to most people. We have always existed but the matter was generally "brushed under the carpet" right up till the end of the twentieth century. It takes time for society to adapt and longer for culture or thinking to change. There was significant homophobia here in UK right up to 1990 but in the last 29 years society has adapted and there is relatively little homophobia now and those that understand and support gays are in the majority and hence the minority who remain homophobic are corrected accordingly. There is still significant transphobia here in UK and society is gradually starting to adapt but it takes time. I believe we will gain acceptance and understanding and support in the normal course of time. Culture and thinking takes time to adjust to anything they see as new.
2. On a more personal level some people (and it is not always older people like me) simply cannot change their minds on anything. They are inflexible - whether by force of habit or whether by upbringing. They cannot change and do not wish to. They will remain transphobic simply because they do not like us - usually due to insecurity and fear.
Hugs to all
Pamela xx
Ignorance. They don't know what transgender really is, so they make up stuff or read it on the Internet. (And we all know that if it's on the Internet, it must be true.) They lack critical thinking skills, because schools don't teach them any more. They make assumptions. Many have been brainwashed by false prophets and demagogues. It all boils down to ignorance.
See above for some excellent answers to the question. For me, the question brings me back to my first adventures to school. Back in my day, there were no trans people. Hmmmm, well most were hidden weren't they? (If you couldn't hid being trans, you were in real trouble.) There would be grouped the 'weird kids.' They weren't weird of course, but they didn't fit in. Mainly the words applied to 'the different folks' were 'gay' or '->-bleeped-<-' or, if you were lucky, just nerd or dork. Anyone who could not see their way to fitting in became the stepping stones for those who fit in but wanted to fit in in super fashion. "If I am seen as picking on the odd ones then I am safe myself or even better, 'cool.' " Kids who have no power in their lives because of parental power find that picking on others gives them power. Of course, they model the previous generation that did the same thing. Then add in the television, which up until a few years ago absolutely loved to see us as the most ridiculous thing on the planet. Uncle Miltie comes to mind! For some, religious prejudice adds to the mix. 'Be a good ______, hate anything outside our teachings, sex being something never to speak of in polite company. Now image our 'cool' hero all grown up and happens to find us in there proximity or, heaven forbid, attracted to one of us, then 'cool kid' suddenly is associated with something he/she has been hating all their lives. Bottom line is we did nothing to deserve hate other than not go along with what our society says is acceptable. Thanks to 'pointed ears and pitchforks' that this is beginning to change for many young folks.
Idiocy and dare I say it, a great deal of anti trans WOMAN stuff is stemmed entirely in mysandry. this belief that ALL people born with a Y chromosome or a penis automatically have it magically coded into their dna to be predatory.
I don't know where that stems from, why there are women who believe this, but that's definitely the motivation behind Terfdom. It's twofold, the refusal to believe trans people are the gender they say they are and conflating biological sex with gender and secondly, this horrifying belief that ALL assigned at birth males are wannabe rapists.
It actually makes me very angry. I've spent most of my life as "one of the guys" and let me tell you, the guys i've hung out with have been nothing short of gentlemen toward women. Not one of them would EVER touch a girl without permission, not a single one would oogle a woman, I never felt at all unsafe around any of them and neither did any of the cis girls.
Even if I was literally in just a bra and underwear these guys wouldn't touch me, wouldn't stare at me and sure as heck wouldn't make any crass remarks.
why? because 99% of men are DECENT civilised people and not animals! I've interacted with a LOT of guys over the years from all backgrounds and in my experience, the great majority really are not at all predatory or unable to control base urges.
An awful lot of transphobia sadly I think stems from this. Because these people refuse to view transwomen as women and instead suspect them to be "men trying to prey upon them like ALL people with penises do" they react with hostility.
I've noticed transmen are far more likely to encounter pity "oh poor dear, you've internalised so much mysogyny you've come to hate being a girl" or seen as a traitor "how dare you abandon femininity!" than being regarded as sexual perverts like a lot of the transwoman rhetoric.
And the reason is stemmed completely in mysandry. See transmen, we're just "misguided by the eeeevil patriarchy", transwomen? Predators so intent on that they'll do anything to achieve it (do these people actually listen to themselves and how insane they are!??)
On the flip side, the reason a lot of MEN are transphobic is toxic masculinity. This idea that admitting you're attracted to a trans woman somehow means you're "a bit gay" and being "gay" is the worst thing ever (so ridiculous)
Again it's all based on this insane idea that transwomen aren't women, again because of this conflation of sex and gender.
it's all just exhausting frankly and the more i'm exposed to it the more angry I become.
I'm just.. eugh.. increasingly tired of bigotry and prejudice.
I suppose in my case being trans, on the ace spectrum AND pan/bi romantic means i'm a member of THREE groups that right now suffer an awful lot of erasure or flat out hostility and it's quite grating.
It doesn't help that the trans community itself has become increasingly hostile toward it's own members with this nonsense about "trans trending" and "fake trans" (are you actually serious?) and increasing gatekeeping and promininant advocates making out like there's some trans rulebook you have to follow to be "trans enough".
I just.. eugh.
why does transphobia exist? becuase people are stupid and because people suck.
Basically.
thing is, what we're seeing with trans folk is very much history repeating. didn't this same thing happen with gay people 30 odd years ago?
Homophobia still exists but it's becoming increasingly less acceptable.
I just really hope it doesn't take another 30 years for transphobia to become similarly unacceptable.
What I find most depressing is the hostility trans people get from the other lgbt folks. I mean you'd THINK they'd be the most accepting but sadly, just not the case.
I suppose I can accept hetcis folk being bigoted, they don't know better. their privilage has always protected them. but from other lgbts? I just find that utterly unacceptable and frankly hypocritical.
I also wonder if some of it is related to this mentality some people have that life is a zero sum game. As in, there's only one cake and every time someone else gets some rights they take a slice of YOUR cake and you get less cake.
that isn't how privilage works of course, but there are a great number of people who seem to believe this is the case. If x group gets equality they'll get less slices of cake.
I wonder if that's why we're seeing a lot of LGB transphobia too. They fear losing some of their hard fought for cake.
I really hope things are changing for the better though. With more visibility more people are coming out of the shadows and saying "hey, me too!" and honestly? Ultimately I feel like humanity was never supposed to be rammed into two narrow boxes like we are. That the natural human state isn't binary but a spectrum, both in sexuality and gender identity and we're only now starting to go back to that natural state.
hetcis isn't the norm, it's just the expectation and I wonder, given no societal pressure and conditioning, how many supposedly hetcis folk actually wouldn't be.
We're seeing more and more pan/bisexuals and more and more non binary folks. It really does suggest that this idea of binary sex and sexuality is actually totally wrong.
and this delights me.
I think it's among the same reasons some of are college/university educated and some are not: Some are willing do what's necessary to develop critical thinking skills, attend class, study and pass exams and some are not.
Just as some are willing to learn and accept people as they are and some never will.
I also think some people use ignorance and negative comments as an attempt to deflect the spotlight away from themselves because they are afraid someone will expose THEIR weaknesses and see they are no different; everyone has challenges, differences. Some are willing to accept others and some are not.
One aspect which hasn't been covered is the sexual fetish belief. Many people, if not most, still believe trans people do it for sexual thrills, and are thus, perverts. We know this is wrong, but porno films, and the previous high percentage of trans people who work in the sex industry are the main exposure to a lot of people. 10 years ago, if you asked someone what they knew of trans they would likely mentioned Thai Ladyboys or a Drag act, but more reecntly that will include more positive stories like Andreja Pejic. Positive public exposure is our path to diminishig phobias!
Allie
Lots of good comments...
There are situations where some transgender people may be transphobic themselves. This is something that sounds crazy when this concept is first heard by a transperson but does eventually make sense.
One can begin to see this when you see or experience a transgendered person not approving of some other type of ->-bleeped-<-, their progress, including the physical transformation status of other transgendered persons, or even the perceived authenticity of someone who says the she or he is transgendered. It can be cliquish, biases, even bigotry. Others here have expressed this aspect far better.
Chrissy
Quote from: pamelatransuk on May 19, 2019, 07:58:48 AM
2. On a more personal level some people (and it is not always older people like me) simply cannot change their minds on anything. They are inflexible - whether by force of habit or whether by upbringing. They cannot change and do not wish to. They will remain transphobic simply because they do not like us - usually due to insecurity and fear.
Hugs to all
Pamela xx
Pamela:
Unfortunately, I have a real personal experience of something somewhat similar to your observation.
I tried to befriend an 85 or so year old US Veteran from our church. He has no local family so my spouse & I tried to help out.
I ultimately blew up because he would hit on my spouse. I tried to ignore the hits but they ultimately became too much for me. It was a very ugly situation which resulted in my spouse & I separating for a few days. (Where back living together and in couples counseling...)
His children don't live close, but we always did communicate in an effort to coordinate his care. I've forced a disengagement. OK, with that background:
Shortly after my blow up about him hitting on my wife, his daughter called us about her daughter / his granddaughter. She had just entered a lesbian marriage.
The daughter was so concerned that her father would never understand or accept her daughter, his granddaughter; even though the tendencies had been there for years.
I feel for her situation, if for no other reason than what I created by being honest with my situation. I feel she may be in a tougher situation because she is caught between her daughter and her father... I've only set off a WMD in my marriage relationship....
Again, I think you're on to something.
Kate
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I just did a speech about this exact topic yesterday....and IMHO... in part I said it was down to the media and that as a society we are taught that feminity does not have value. It is acceptable for a female bodied person to become more masculine far more than it is for as male bodied person to become feminine.
As a society we are somewhat conditioned by our media to respond in the way many do..."men in dresses" has been a theme of ridicule for years...from dress up nights where guys caricature women to the TV and movie portrayals of "men in dresses". This conditioning is subtle but constant and still goes on today. New programing is better but many of the older sitcoms still get plenty of air time and they are full of terrible jokes at our expense. Even if its not blatant...a look a wink or a snide remark it all amounts to the same thing. Its not the only reason but I think its a strong one.
Liz
Thank you Kate for your support and for your example.
I have also thought of another reason - obvious perhaps but not mentioned in this thread - which I would describe as "tribal".
Some people are transphobic as they see us crossing a boundary that should never been crossed or even encountered. They see it on the same lines but more acute, as changing your religion or changing your political affiliation or changing the sports team you support. One side loses a member of the tribe and the other side gains a member.
A silly view to have of course but these people believe that particular boundaries should remain and be protected alas.
Hugs
Pamela xx
What about superiority? Men believe they are superior to women simply because most are stonger. It offends many men, and some women, that a man would choose to become a 'lesser' person. I suspect it also challenges their primal superiority when a man declares that being a woman is better. Women don't seem to be as phobic as men, even to transmen (yes, there are extremists, but generally). Men see transmen as affirming mens superiority by aspiring to be like them, though believing transmen can never be considered as equal due to impotence. This answers the vitriole often associated with transphobia.
Allie
doesn't explain terfs though.
But you're right, there is a degree of mysogny here which is the same reason why being a "tomboyish" girl is fine but a boy liking "feminine things" like dolls or fashion or something is regarded with suspicion and contempt.
feminine is inferior, masculine is seen as superior so a girl is "bettering herself" and a boy is "demeaning himself"
It's so twisted.
You see this a lot with children sadly. The absolute FEAR with which some parents react when their son DARES to even LOOK at a barbie in a toy store, it's insane.
And my heart always aches for those poor children.
I collect dolls so it means i'm in contact with rather a lot of cis male doll collectors (gay and straight, there are indeed straight cis male doll collectors) and so many of them have the same stories of their childhood and a parent treating them poorly because they DARED to not enjoy typically masculine things and preferred their sister's barbies or whatever.
And it's fostered a lot of resentment toward their parents.
Ultimately that's all it achieves. Making your kids hate you and giving them lifelong self esteem issues.
Quote from: Kylo on May 18, 2019, 10:09:38 PM
Cognitive dissonance on a personal level. On greater levels, we threaten to disturb established order and human beings often don't like change, on the whole.
Ideology - like a religious one in which you are taught any deviation from the norm regards sexuality or presentation is some affront to god. Obviously believers are going to struggle to some extent with the cognitive dissonance of that when presented with us.
Upbringing - a force of habit. If your parents tried to beat it out of you or you wanted to please them by doing what they say and they say trans folks are bad...
Community - you might be surrounded by people who really don't like trans people. To go against the grain and step out of line in some communities is to come in for flak yourself.
Biology - I know from my own experience how "weird" being trans can feel. There's no denying that it can feel weird and wrong. Like something just isn't right and is off-kilter. It can cause severe emotional distress in us. And I think that's why it causes it in others as well... there's something about us that, while I believe we are natural phenomena, is off-kilter to the norm. People know this as much as we know it. The average person is not given to exploration and open-mindedness unless confronted with stuff that forces them to consider it. I think biology might be the greatest source of that cognitive dissonance. Our species is very dimorphic, sexually. As such it's primed to lock on to the differences between the sexes and sort people into categories. When they don't fit easily into categories, the human brain is either intrigued.... or repelled.
Sexuality - it's a delicate area. Not unknown for the most homophobic or transphobic people to eventually be exposed as secretly attracted to the same sex or to trans people. Without getting too heavy into psychology bumpf, there is something known as "disgust sensitivity" in the field of psychology that people exhibit. Some have more of it than others, but it's thought to be a means of how human beings and human societies (as well as animal societies) regulate behavior, and how morality is mediated. Notice how sexuality is often tightly bound up with ideas of morality in most human societies? and people often have a very strong response to the topic of sexuality that often goes immediately to whether or not they find it "disgusting?" and how if asked on a topic relating to sexuality (or transsexuality) some people will be fine with it and others respond with something like "that's disgusting?" That's because their sense of morality is closely tied in with disgust sensitivity. It's been found that people who are more conservative in outlook and political orientation are more likely to be easily disgusted. Their disgust sensitivity to things outside the norm is higher than that of more liberal-minded people, and the blurring of lines or crossing of those boundaries tends to illicit a response/emotion of disgust in them. Disgust does serve an important biological function - e.g. most people instinctively find human waste or a dead body disgusting, and it transmits disease so there's a good reason to stay away from it. But we also end up judging and processing lot of other social ideas through the idea of disgust, especially things that challenge us morally or biologically. Unfortunately, being trans does challenge other peoples' biological/sexual perception of us, as well as many moral ideas in society, and so we are sometimes met with "disgust" as a knee-jerk response. It's not just social though. It's not something society could be fully accustomed to and trained out of, when you consider that straight men or straight women also often have a disgust response to the idea of sexual contact with the same sex. This often seems to just be a visceral response, not necessarily coming from a place of malice... and so if they should discover a person they are attracted to happens to be a trans person, there is always that potential for a feeling of repulsion and/or disgust as an emotional response in such a person.
If you want to get into the guts of why societies so often have a problem with gay and trans people, that can branch heavily into evolutionary psychology, biology and psychology, which I find fairly plausible in most respects as to why people might have this reaction. While "hate" can certainly be a bi-product, hate itself doesn't come from thin air, and there is no biological reason to hate something for nothing. We hate what we see as a threat, usually. Or what we've been conditioned to see as one. It's clear at this point that many people see us as a threat because as a demographic we appear to be growing. As a demographic many people have joined us, whether they fit the medical definitions of being transsexual or not. As a demographic we now ended up on the cutting edge of the "culture war", as they call it, whether we wanted to be there or not, and we have been politicized. The latter example is indeed a credible threat to conservative values, if you consider how certain trans activists now advocate eliminating the idea of gender altogether, or of adding many more genders to the lexicon, or of scratching the biological/scientific definitions of sex, or of asking drag queens to read to schoolkids. Whichever way you look at these things, they are a challenge to the established order and as such will be viewed by some sections of society as a dire threat to all they know.
Politics - we were less politicized in the past and certainly seen as less of a threat than we appear to be now. If transphobia is on the rise, I am not surprised, given that we have stopped being quite so passive as a group and trans activists now managed to gain the upper hand in some circles. Difficult situations like the desire to teach young children about LGBT in state schools haven't escaped the notice of many people and some see this as a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate kids. Once we moved from the arena of fighting for our rights to this sort of thing, we effectively shifted from being seen as a persecuted group to one who seeks to impose itself on the rest of society. This has intensified transphobia among the more conservative-minded.
Well said. Also there is a challenge for people. They are forced to think. They are forced to decide. And people resent being forced. Also presenting yourself as other or special is a challenge to power dynamics. And that challenge can be met by instinctive agression. Being special daring to be special or other is a challenge. It's daring to stand out while everyone else conforms. It's breaking ranks.
Quote from: F_P_M on May 20, 2019, 08:24:12 AM
doesn't explain terfs though.
Ideology explains them.
First-wave feminism developed an ideology that declares that the **ONLY** differences between men and women are physical size and strength, and reproductive plumbing. Specifically, the ideology declares that there can be no differences in brain structure.
The ideology served its first-wave purpose of getting people - men in particular - to rethink their subjugation of women. (To a degree: it's not done yet.)
Yet, because it is an ideology, its adherents believe that it is truer than fact. Brain differences cannot exist, in their view, because the ideology says they don't. Any evidence of brain differences, such as the existence of us, must be false, because their ideology says so.
A scientist decides what conclusions to believe based on evidence. An ideologue decides what evidence to believe based on their conclusions.
A better ideology, and one that seems to be acceptable to more modern feminists, would be that brain differences may exist, but should not be grounds for discrimination. But many of the first-wavers are still around, and their ideology still influences many.
Any difference from society's norms results in rejection by a large percentage of society. It is especially hurtful to our very being when we are even rejected by the people with whom we identify, e.g. trans women rejected by cis women. I am not sure that ignorance or stupidity is always the problem, or even that so-called transphobia is a true phobia. I watched a depressing interview with Germaine Greer, in which she said that trans people can go ahead and have SRS but it would not make them into women. She pointed out that she had a right to express her opinion and denied that it physically endangered trans people, and even suggested that support for trans women's rights to be regarded as women was misogyny. I vehemently disagree with her views but I would hardly consider her stupid or ignorant.
Quote from: ChrissyRyan on May 19, 2019, 04:16:08 PM
...
There are situations where some transgender people may be transphobic themselves. This is something that sounds crazy when this concept is first heard by a transperson but does eventually make sense.
One can begin to see this when you see or experience a transgendered person not approving of some other type of ->-bleeped-<-, their progress, including the physical transformation status of other transgendered persons, or even the perceived authenticity of someone who says the she or he is transgendered. It can be cliquish, biases, even bigotry. Others here have expressed this aspect far better.
Chrissy
Yes, even some trans people do not identify with other trans people, especially trans people who do not pass or who transition later in life. To an extent, I think that the perceived threat is political. I remember a television debate about trans women using women's rest rooms. Neither of the female trans speakers entirely passed, in my opinion, but one did look very feminine while the other looked, to be frank, very much less so. The less feminine looking one talked about her humiliating experiences when cis women reported her to security, but the more feminine looking one had a facial expression that seemed to say "please shut up and go away!" Trans women who do not pass may be perceived as fuelling transphobia and delaying positive changes in the law. (I do not agree with such a perception, regardless of whether it has any truth, as sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater good. All trans people need to be accepted, regardless of how well they pass.)
There's been a lot of controversy over trans athletes lately, and while that doesn't necessarily fall under the umbrella of transphobia, it is no doubt fueling it.