What I think is really fucking phobic is feeling so nonplussed by your gender non-conforming child that you’re happy to help them match themselves - first with ‘gentle’ nudging (let’s face it, when a child acquires language in a house where things are talked about in terms of ‘girl’s clothes’ or ‘girl’s makeup’, the game’s up) and then with full-on reinforcement in the form of not ‘misgendering’ and so on once the male child assumes he is a girl after having absorbed the logical conclusion of these received ideas - to the opposite sex and go down the blockers, hormones, surgery route. That you’re happy to turn a blind eye and pretend that children do know, on the same level as you do, what girl, boy, woman, man, gender and sex mean. Putting the burden on your entirely unequipped child’s shoulders to be a critical thinker and not to faithfully latch on to stereotypes dispatched as fact is a parental choice and failure.
→Why is this choice being made?
Even female children, when they say they want to be a mum, have no idea what that actually means. Why do we not see it as unusual? Why isn’t it unusual for a child who’s never even had sex to say that she wants to push another human child through an opening in her body she may literally not even be aware of yet? Because female children are treated as mums-in-training. At 7 I didn't know where my vaginal opening was and yet I was being described as a ‘born mum’, this in the C21st. If a boy expresses a wish to bear a child it is (naturally more understandably) uncommon and seen therefore something as he must have really thought through, a concept with which he must be intimately familiar. Except no child has any clue what pregnancy is. I’m an adult who’s not thinking about having kids for a good many years yet and I don’t have much more of a clue (MN threads about birth were a bloody revelation I can tell you). It’s a special kind of arrogance to assume that the image of pregnancy we have in our heads is the same as knowing the reality of it, and we transmit this arrogance to children. So insisting it’s transphobic not to take your lead from children who don’t know the meanings of the words they’re using to OK irreversible medical intervention is at best incredibly shortsighted, and at worst willfully misguided. And if it’s the latter, what’s the agenda?
Many parents are embarrassed by a son in a dress and, to whatever degree of transparency, communicate this to their child, which they see as an extension of themselves, an annexe. And, more simply, we are uncomfortable at the notion that there could one day be a generation which, as pre-pubertal children, can’t be easily separated into ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ on sight. You can unambiguously identify as a 'boy' or 'girl' very few children by looking at their face – pop a long-haired boy in a dress, cut a girl’s hair & you can’t guess via dependence on the usual visual cues, and I think this is deeply unnerving for many. It is our separation as children which facilitates the gendering and exaggeration of sexual difference between the sexes to adulthood. As a society with an interest in maintaining and generating gendered division of the sexes (inc. AGP), we can't afford to miss the boat in childhood. I think we do have homophobia at play here, but also deep attachment to preserving the current significance of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ categories, which the gender matrix does beautifully. Of course radfems also promote the recognition of sexual difference – it's medically relevant, and because one sex has a rather spectacular track record of trampling on the other – but we are not repulsed by the absence of gender.
→ Fear of GNC, that’s the phobia I'm seeing.
I do see a little unnecessary mudslinging on Twitter, and there have been some very rare comments on TIMs’ personal appearance (which are immediately called out) on MN, but on the whole, I don’t see hatred or disgust. Political goals are identified and worked towards here - the vast majority of posters on this board recognise that what is noted as transphobia will impede this, so you can understand that being bigoted isn't in our self-interest (if nothing else will persuade you). I do see exasperation and indignance, but when you’re being force fed a more extreme incarnation of the essentialism women have spent centuries tackling, I’m not sure why we’re being asked to sit nicely and settle, you gonna ask us to sort the coffee, poppet, as well?