Transphobia refers to the fear, hatred of and prejudice against people who are transsexual or transgender – people whose very presence in the world challenges gender norms (either intentionally or not). Transphobia impacts people’s lives in many ways, making it more difficult to live in the world and be happy, healthy and safe.
If you live with a disability, transphobia results in very particular kinds of barriers to sexual expression, which includes the way you experience and express your gender identity.
Ableism
It’s hard to talk about transphobia and disability without also talking about ableism. This is because ableism influences the way we all think and talk about disability. It even influences the way people who are disabled experience life with a disability.
Ableism creates an understanding of disability as something bad and of disabled people as fundamentally broken. The “logic” of ableism asserts that disabled people really just want to be like “everyone else” (code word for “normal”).
These beliefs are so pervasive that most people think them without ever questioning how they came to think this or why. And certainly most people never bother to actually ask people with disabilities if they feel themselves to be fundamentally broken or bad. (Spoiler alert: If you do this you’ll find the answer is NO).
What does this have to do with gender or transphobia? Well, the assumption that people with disabilities want to be “normal” covers sexuality as well. And mainstream ideas of what is normal sexuality includes gender expression.
Specifically, normal gender means that the gender you identify with now is the same as the sex assignment you were given at birth. So if you were called a girl when you were born, the assumption is that you will grow up and always feel like a woman. If you were called a boy at birth, you’ll grow up to be a man.
These are incorrect assumptions.
First of all, not everyone feels as if the thing they were called when they were born accurately describes who they are or how they feel. People who identify as transgender, gender variant or who are transsexual (as well as Aboriginal/First Nations people who identify as Two-Spirit, Sistergirls, to name only two) have for centuries lived and described their experiences of living somewhere across or between the gender binary of man/woman. It’s worth knowing that many people who don’t easily fit into the categories they were given by society aren’t interested in being called “normal” or falling in with whatever the cultural and social norms about gender are where they live.
And the assumption that if you are disabled you would want to be more like “the mainstream” is equally incorrect. It’s true that if you live with a disability you experience more pressure to conform. You are told to hide your disability, ignore the support you need. And over time people can come to believe this themselves. In other words they internalize that ableism, just as they can internalize transphobia. They can feel as if there is something wrong or inferior about them because they don’t feel themselves to be the same gender as they were called when they were born.
But these are false beliefs imposed by a system that demands conformity. There is nothing wrong or inferior about being disabled, just as there’s nothing wrong or inferior about being trans. These ideas are reminiscent of similar racist ideas that black people are inferior to white people, and sexist beliefs that women are inferior to men. Those racist and sexist ideologies have been challenged more publicly than ableist and transphobic ideologies, but these remain just as wrong and just as harmful.
Transphobia creates barriers for disabled people to express themselves sexually. Some of these barriers are similar to those created by homophobia. The pressure to conform and not to “rock the boat” will keep many people in hiding. In addition to this:
Transphobia results in violence
People who are out about being trans, or even people who may not be completely out but who are read as somehow challenging traditional ideas of gender, are at much greater risk of violence. Disabled people are already at greater risk of both sexual and non-sexual violence; for some, the threat of violence that would accompany coming out as trans is just too much.
Ableism in trans communities
Ableism exists in trans communities just as it does elsewhere. Some of the ways that some trans people and communities talk about their bodies (or bodies in general) can feel hurtful or offensive to people living with disabilities. While it’s rarely intentional, the result can be that disabled people who are trans do not feel safe or welcome in trans spaces. Of course these are often the spaces they feel they do belong, which can make the experience of exclusion even more painful.
Reliance on others for support
If your experience of disability includes needing physical support with everyday activities like getting dressed or support to seek counseling, therapy or medical services, you will need the people who are supporting you to be on board with your gender identity and whatever you want to do to express or live that identity.
So, for example, if you were born female but your gender identity is male and you want to wear clothes that fit the way you feel about yourself, the people who you rely on to help you get dressed may decide that the clothes you want are “too masculine”. They can refuse to help you get dressed as you want or refuse to go with you to men’s clothing stores.
If you need support in communicating with healthcare providers and you want to explore changing some aspect of your body through surgery or through hormones, you need your communication assistant to be willing to support you in those conversations. Here transphobia may look like someone refusing to provide communication assistance or pretending not to understand what it is you are asking.
Many people who are actively exploring their gender identity report being denied access like this from personal support workers and family members providing support.
Working Against Transphobia and Ableism
When you write it out, this all sounds pretty bleak. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that for a lot of people it is. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t resisting the assumptions heaped on them and finding ways to explore their own desires and identities on their own and with others in community. There are no easy answers, but here are a few things you might find useful in thinking about how to shift things in your life or in the life of someone you care about:
Get Resourced
All our experiences are unique, but isolation can make it seem like there’s no one else out there who can relate or who struggles with transphobia and ableism. There are, and some of them are talking, writing and performing in print and online. A great place to start is with the poet, teacher and activist Eli Clare. Eli wrote the groundbreaking book Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, and he maintains a list of other folks and resources on his website. There are also many more resources developed by trans people for trans people. While these resources often won’t be inclusive of disability, they may offer information and support that you will find helpful.
Seek Out Allies
Easier said than done, but finding people (friends, partners, family) who are safe to talk to about how you are experiencing your gender and what transphobia feels like in the context of disability is crucial to surviving. Many people do manage to survive in isolation, but it’s so much harder and we all deserve to have people in our lives to listen and support who we are.
As described above, the difficulty is that disability communities can often express a lot of transphobia, and trans communities can be very ableist. But there are people who are interested in working with their own prejudices and who want to genuinely connect across divides of experience and power. They may not be people you think “look” like you, and they may not have the same lived experience as you, but they can be valuable friends and allies and provide the kind of support we all need to deal with the barriers in front of us.
