The Dimorphophobia of Trans Activism
Trans activists exhibit a persistent, excessive, unrealistic fear of biological sex, and it's time we give it a name.
Watching the live-tweets as MP John Nicolson testified at the LGB Alliance tribunal today, it struck me how deeply averse he is to any acknowledgement of biological sex. For example:
(KM is Karon Monaghan KC, Counsel for LGB Alliance.)
KM - do you agree that sex based rights are at risk?
JN - and I'm going to completely disagree.
KM - a male that gets a GRC [gender recognition certificate], and is a heterosexual, does that make that person a lesbian?JN - I just do not understand this obsession with people's genitalia, LGBA appears to think about nothing else from the moment they get up in the morning until they go to bed at night.
KM - it will destroy same sex rights if sex becomes something you simply declare.JN - you are a lesbian because you declare yourself one. No one has to inspect you and confirm you are a lesbian. All the of the lesbians in my committee agree, this will not diminish them.
And a few moments later…
JN - they are linking predators to transpeople, that is prejudicial.
KM - they are linking men to predators.
JN - prejudicial to transpeople.
This sparked a connection in my mind to something I had read in the paper just this morning: The National Post reported on a rift within Canada’s Green Party over a pronoun mishap on a Zoom call to kick off the party’s leadership contest. After Interim Leader Amita Kuttner was inadvertently designated with pronouns “she/elle” instead of her self-declared preference for “they/them,” she (no, I won’t call her “they”) put out a statement that “in moments like these I wonder — how can I ensure other people’s safety if I can’t even ensure my own?” She then tried to capitalize on the incident by launching a campaign fundraiser with the goal of raising over $60,000 to combat the “hate” of those who don’t take her claims of misgendering victimhood seriously. Green Party President Lorraine Rekmans, the first Indigenous woman to be president of a national political party in Canada, resigned in protest against the “manipulative” guilt-tripping by Kuttner and others, stating she’s “constantly distracted by claims of harm” within the party.
We’re all unsafe together.
The idea that some people are “unsafe” if we acknowledge the fact that sex is dimorphic and immutable is the central tenet of gender identity ideology today, and it’s what links these two events. Even though the vast majority of gender identity adherents don’t themselves identify as “trans” but rather just “allies,” they nearly all exhibit a kind of vicarious fear-learning, which goes something like this:
Some trans people exhibit fear of the acknowledgement of their biological sex.
People who acknowledge the reality and immutability of biological sex are therefore a threat to trans people’s sense of safety.
I am in solidarity with trans people. They are an integral part of my peer group.
Therefore what is a threat to them is a threat to everyone in my in-group, because we must have solidarity against the out-group.
Therefore anyone who acknowledges the facts of biological sex is a threat to the in-group and must be pushed out.
Therefore I express my solidarity with the in-group by adopting this fear of biological sex and the people who acknowledge it.
You can see this in John Nicolson’s professed inability to comprehend that males are stronger than females, despite the fact that anyone can plainly see this is true. Or his professed belief that anyone can be a lesbian on mere say-so, despite the fact that Nicolson himself is a gay man and knows full-well the difference between a male and a female body. Or his rejection of the idea that men are more likely than women to be predators — not gay men or trans-identifying men or some subset of men, just a statistical fact about the male sex in a broad, general sense — claiming that such a plain truth is “prejudicial to trans people.”
This is an astonishing denial of reality. These facts are not simply inconvenient to “allies” like Nicolson; I get the deep sense that he, like so many gender ideologues, is irrationally and excessively afraid of them, and phobic of the people who acknowledge them. I suspect this is why more and more trans “allies” adopt they/them pronouns themselves, first alongside their correctly-sexed pronouns in solidarity with others (e.g., “he/they”), but then eventually, as their anxiety about biological sex grows, they come to reject any notion of sex within their bodies by declaring themselves nonbinary, transgender or both, and un-sexing their pronouns entirely, and then going so far as to claim fear for their safety if their sex ever gets noticed, like Amita Kuttner has done.
They pull it in vicariously, then they project it onto others.
Like most phobias, the fear is irrational and unrealistic: the acknowledgement that sex is dimorphic and immutable does not put trans people or their increasingly anxious and fragile allies in any real, physical danger. It just makes them feel unsafe. (Kinda like how I feel about ordinary household spiders. Ugh. Just typing the word creeps me out. But the kinds of spiders we have here are not physically dangerous.)
So it’s perhaps not so surprising that these people are obsessively on the lookout for “transphobia” and seem to detect it everywhere. That word, transphobia… For the longest time I just assumed it was a lazy co-opting of “homophobia” (itself a word that I have my gripes with: anti-gay discrimination isn’t always as simple as an irrational fear). But I’m starting to think it’s more a sign of good old defensive psychological projection: Any acknowledgement of the presence of biological sex immediately triggers irrational feelings of fear within themselves. They can’t accept their own phobia as an explanation for what they’re feeling, so they project that it’s others who are experiencing a phobia of the non-existence of sex (for that’s how they’ve come to define transphobia: belief in the existence of sex is a sign of fear of the non-existence of sex). They tell themselves that whatever they are feeling is just a reaction to defend and rescue their victim allies against the out-group who’s out to persecute them.
We should call out their phobia. Give it a name.
This is why we should call out their phobia for what it is. It’s an irrational fear of perfectly normal facts, fuelled by a toxic in-group/out-group dynamic. Every time they call someone or something “transphobic”, remind them that they’re just projecting their own phobia about the harmless facts of sex onto the world. Remind them it’s not even possible to be phobic of the non-existence of sex, because you can’t be afraid of something not existing.
So what should we call it, then? Alas, sexophobia is already taken. I googled. And it means exactly what it sounds like: fear of the other kind of sex. Of course.
So I propose dimorphophobia. That one doesn’t seem to be in use apart from a handful of references that were probably misspellings of other words, like dysmorphia.
Ultimately, what people like John Nicolson and Amita Kuttner are afraid of is that we can see the difference between males and females. We can see that human sex dimorphism is real, it matters, you can’t change it, and that it’s perfectly harmless to acknowledge it, as so many reasonable transsexuals do.
The next time someone says to me, “Shut up, transphobe!” I’ll reply, “Ok, dimorphophobe” and link them right here.
Unrelated: I have great news! If you enjoyed this post I posted from twitter user @helenhairnets a couple weeks ago, rejoice, for she has her own Substack now: Literally Called Laura. Please do follow and subscribe:
Hi Arty! I'm messaging from New Zealand, where I have been reveling in the awesomeness of 'The Mess We're In'. I've just signed up to Substack so I'm not quite sure how communication works on here, but I really found myself nodding along and going "Mmmmm, mmmm, mmmm" when you were talking. I'm wondering if you would be interested in discussing some of the things you raised in greater detail, maybe as they relate to some cultural similarities between Canada and New Zealand, and a potentially effective collaboration that could help spread the word here? Thanks again to you and Helen Staniland and Graham Linehan for 'The Mess We're In'. Listening to you all talking - it's really, really great.