Is Transphobia Survival Instinct, or a Social Construct

[Michelle789]

I will keep this question very simple, yet the topic is probably far from simple.

Is prejudice towards transgender people, cross-dressers, homosexuals, and other variants outside of the gender binary, a result of survival instinct, or something that was created as part of a system to control the masses (e.g. patriarchy)? Maybe it's caused by something else entirely.

The same question could easily be applied towards racism, sexism, greed, and being mean. Since this is a forum about cross-dressing and transgender issues, let's keep the focus on prejudices towards gender variance.

My answer: I literally waiver from thinking it's a survival instinct to be prejudiced, and other times I feel like it's a construct of human patriarchy.

Anyone who is a member of this forum may answer.

[Persephone]

Funny, Michelle, a friend and I were just discussing this very concept over lunch last Thursday!

As a survival instinct it goes way back in human evolution, probably even beyond human as virtually all animals, even insects and bacteria, as well as many plants engage in it.

BTW, there are crossdressing creatures of all sorts, many of whom use their unique nature to evade the system. There is, for example, a species of beatle in which there is a dominant form of male -- bigger, more aggressive, intent upon protecting his female and his next -- and a less common male that looks and smells exactly like a female. So while the big guy is defending his nest, the crossdresser calmly visits "her" ladyfriend in his nest and gets a shot at fertilizing her eggs!

Hugs,
Persephone.

[Robin777]

I believe it is a reaction to anyone that does not fit to their social norm. They justify it in some cases by using religion. Or it could be something passed from generation to generation. and I also believe it is caused in some cases from the lack of a advanced education where they are exposed to different viewpoints.

[noeleena]

Hi,

The names may have changed the intent allso and the end result is pretty much the same you cant blame socity unless its a group of people living in a box or walled in and can not see out side, so they only know whats there were they are, and in many case's been taught, and then belive that. till they ether escape or refuse whats taught,

So with that in mind something that is different wont be accepted, out side that wall they learn maybe that its not so scary after all or they shut thier mind and wont accept,

Remember as a kid you belived what if you had them what your folks said till you ?' nd or accepted out side info.

i know there are groups like this been with them till i left, because i had been told by some they will not accept ( ill use my self here, ) my difference because of what they have been taught, so first hand i know what rejection is,

Now not all with in that group are like that , you think you can choose your friends maybe, though really its they choose you. and then you may have a friendship.

Oh and by the way i explained to them what my difference is .

...noeleena...

[mechamoose]

I would think that it depends on your initial culture as well.

For instance, many asian cultures regularly have men dressing as women for entertainment, festivals, religious events, etc. Some cultures, like American Indians or Hindu people, have revered spots in the social structure for cross-gendered people.

When I look at older cultures like the Greeks or the Romans, they were accepting of it too. It was part of the social structure.

- MM

[Adriana Moretti]

could it be ignorance????? lotta that floating around.......in all forms

[Marcelle]

Hi Michelle,

Very thought provoking thread. IMHO I don't believe it is a "survival instinct" as there is nothing in our biological make-up which would make us want to hate gender variants in order to survive (i.e. propagate the species). If that was the case we would all experience it to some degree, much like we do for the "fight, flight or freeze response".

This is all behavioral IMO. Some people just prefer to hate not because they want to but for a variety of reasons. It could be because it was the way they were socialized or perhaps their lives are so miserable they feel better when they can make someone else feel miserable. Nothing gives a person a sense of control than when they can pick on someone else, especially if others are doing it (I belong to something now). In this degree you also have the "toady effect" I'll do anything to belong to a group even if that means hurting someone . . . especially if they are different.

I also agree with Adrianna that ignorance may be a factor. TG/CD/TS are not very mainstream and there are a lot of bad perceptions about us out there. Creepy and perverted men in drag trying to get a look in the women's bathroom (is one I have heard personally). If a person has preconceived notions about CDing then they will express those regardless of how good a person they are. My older sister is one such person. She read somewhere (not sure where) that pedophiles will dress like women to lure small children . . . she actually believed this :eek: Now my sister for all intents and purposes is a wonderful and loving person but she took this as truth. Now imagine her "short circuit" when I came out to her :confused2: It took a lot of questions and answers to get her over this preconceived notion (BTW she is fine with me and has since changed her perception).

Fear is another possibility and it kind of goes hand in hand with ignorance. Not that we are scary (well perhaps me close up :)) but when people don't understand something, it is easier to retreat to a position of comfort (disdain or ignore).

In the end we are experiencing the human condition, if I can't understand it, if it doesn't fit in my neat little definition of perfect, if I feel it makes me question my own feelings or just plain "how dare you be happy when I am not", it is easier to hate than to deal. Hate is an easy behavior to pull up . . . far easier than understanding and tolerance. However, for all the truly rude, ignorant jerks out there, there are some people doing so not because they are the Master/Mistress of the Netherworld :devil: ... some just simply don't know they are doing it (like my sister).

Hugs

Isha

[Lynn Marie]

Those of us who have been called "homo" or "queer" or any other derogatory names questioning our manhood by bullies and the ignorant fully understand transphobia. It's simply a dread that so many men have that it might be true, or that others may think that we are. How's a guy ever going to find the love of his life if he's thought of as gay? Facing those fears and putting them to rest is a true test of one's manhood, not the foolish and ignorant labeling of others for an ego boost.

[stephNE]

It seems to be a natural reaction to be wary of things with which we are not familiar. So maybe transphobia is because everyone in the LGBT community has been hidden for so long. I hope that the more we are out, the more familiar the general population will become with us, realize we are not a threat, and start accepting us.

[Ms. Laura]

I think there is some sort of evolutionary programming to reject homosexuality. The reaction is so visceral, it just has to be. It is reinforced by millenia of social programming, with some variations depending on the society. (look at ancient Greece) Trans people are lumped in there by social construct however, I think. After all, were there trans cavemen? Possibly there were, they just wanted a different role? Maybe it was even acceptable.

But, are we not beings of reason? I hope so.

[Katey888]

Michelle, it's just age-old people being people...

Humankind is a rather nasty specimen really - intelligent, capable, adaptable - but a fair number of bad traits, I'm afraid. Prejudice, bigotry, cruelty, selfishness.. If you don't happen to fit with the 'tribe' (whatever that is...), if you're different, you're an easy target... The tribe can be; a family, a neighbourhood, a football team, a country, ethnicity, a religious belief...

I don't believe survival comes into it - it's a construct - it's about culture - and we femme folk totally fly in the face of the archetypal male of the late 20th and early 21st century. It's still a macho world out there, and in some strange way, I think we kind of scare macho males because we are capable of that gender variance and shift.

And anything humans fear, they tend to want rid of - just ask Karen H about spiders! We're the spiders for a lot of folk in society...

Katey x

[Tina B.]

Well when you think about it, a thousand years ago, you are standing up against a saber tooth tiger, who do you want with you, the big burly guy that looks like he could whip that cat single handed, or the cute little guy playing with those damn sea shells he's wearing?
OK, maybe a thousand years ago, it wouldn't have been a saber tooth, but you get the idea.

[Beverley Sims]

I thought that was the train that ran between Chicago and NOLA?

[~Joanne~]

created as part of a system to control the masses

I think it's this one. I think it's a lot easier to control us if we are divided than it would be if we were together. This is why we all have different religions, different political parties, and list the list goes on and on. They purposely divide us and work diligently to make sure it stays that way.

[Barbie Anne]

Ignorance in the true sense of the word, is what it seems to be, and both of your reasons here can be traced to the saying; "We fear what we do not understand".

Fear is a powerful emotion and just like master yoda says, it leads to hate. So whether it's social or ingrained it's still the same thing. IE: fear leading to prejudice. That's just my humble opinion but it pretty much covers everything from homophobia to xenophobia to racism. The ignorance just means you don't know. To me ignorant is not a bad word. STUPID however is ignorance compounded by pride and an unwillingness to learn. Stupid kills.

[carhill2mn]

Prejudice against a group of people probably stems from several sources. Ignorance, learned from family members, religous teachings, fear of someone who is different are some of them.

[Eryn]

Any time you get a group together they will immediately start examining each other and looking for similarities and differences. If differences are discovered the non-conforming individuals will be pressured to conform in one way or another. If they won't or can't conform they will be ejected.

How often do you see a group of GGs walking along together and notice that they are dressed similarly? This seems quite strange for a segment of the population who supposedly take pride in their personal expression and have an extremely wide range of options in clothing. No rule has been clearly defined but all members of the group are more comfortable if they conform to the standard set by unspoken agreement.

[Taylor Ray]

Cultural constructs evolve over time and are passed on from generation to generation. Anything on the "fringe" is a threat to the status quo. It is an unconscious process mostly. The survival aspect may manifest, not in terms of some original male/female dichotomy, but as a result of attempting to maintain the status quo of the predominant social construct. It is like high school for many people: to survive is to try to adapt to what is most popular. High school was the only time in my life I didn't express my interest in men, because I would have been beat up and ostracized from friends and family.

[devida]

If transphobia had anything to do with a survival instinct you would expect to see it in hunter gatherer and tribal societies. But these societies have many examples of niches within the tribe carved out for gender non conforming people. Men, in particular, who are gender non conforming tend to be viewed as shamans, magicians and having a special connection with the supernatural. There are even examples of gender non conforming art in cave painting (drawings of people with breasts and penises) so it's pretty old. When agriculture appears 10,000 years or so ago it becomes very important for people to remain in the same place and conform to fairly rigid hierarchies. This is because agriculture requires lot of people working together in fields to produce food. But even then there are niches that are carved out for gender non conforming people in Egyptian, Greek, and even Roman cultures, though less so in Roman. There are many more of these exceptions made in Indian and Chinese civilizations. Native Americans, of course, are mostly hunter gathering nomadic tribes so they continued to accept gender variant individuals. It appears that it is the development and dominance of Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions that start to suppress and oppress gender non conforming people. It doesn't appear to have anything to do with survival. It's just culture and mostly religious effects in culture. You can test this today by asking whether religious areas of the world are more or less critical of gender variance. It's pretty clear, isn't it? This intolerance of gender variance is unfortunately still going on today, sometimes exported, it is sad to say by American religious figures to places like Uganda and Russia where Vladimir Putin will shortly be hosting a World Congress of Families Conference, a primarily American religious right group implacably opposed to gender variance and the LGBT community.

[Kate Simmons]

Honestly not sure Hon. I don't pay much attention to it myself Have better things to do. ;):)

[Tinkerbell-GG]

From an outside (GG) perspective, I don't see it as any different than all the other species who literally tear a member of their 'group' apart for being being born with one extra whisker or whatever. Just because we're up the intelligence ladder, doesn't mean we're not animalistic.

Other than that, if you're looking at CD in particular, I think a lot of people think you're all just being frivolous with your time. They see a grown man playing 'dress up' and this enrages them. Only children and sports stars are allowed to spend their time 'playing'. They don't understand the true depth of your need for this. I still don't really get it but I don't deny now that you need it either. But from the outside looking in, it can appear as though you're not fully engaged members of society. That's akin to having three extra whiskers :)

[Ms. Alexis]

Devita is quite right!
Really there should not be any biological reason for fear or hatred for any male that is Transgendered or Genderqueer as for the most part they are not competition for passing on the gene pool which is every males biological drive, the exception to this is where the female views a Trans / etc. to be better suited. I guess this must happen to some degree though or we would already be extinct!
The truth is I think that most cultures accepted us until the Christian and Muslim religions appeared. Even the Native Americans accepted males or females who identified with the opposite gender for the most part and referred to them as "Two Spirited". So I don't think most of the issues we face are biological I think they are primarily a social construct, and often based on fear.

[Michelle789]

I think Ms. Alexis, Devida, and Joanne have some valid points. I find it difficult to believe that transphobia is survival instinct given that we were revered and promoted to spiritual leaders in tribal societies. Also if it were survival instinct to discriminate against gender variants, gender variance would have gone extinct before there ever were dinosaurs. Think about this, gender variance survived an asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. The mighty dinosaur couldn't survive, but third class citizens (gender variants) did. I do feel like prejudice and discrimination does come from survival instinct, but it's never directed towards gender variants in animals or in tribal societies. Upon the creation of the Judeo-Christian religions, we invented a gender binary to control the masses. A lot of other things were invented too, including the family unit. It has been shown that in nature that gender variance and homosexuality both exist and are quite common. It has been shown that in nature there is no family structure either. I think it's a valid point that agriculture influenced a lot of this too. I also think much of this was caused by human migration away from the equator and into colder climates where we have a winter season where no food grows, so agriculture was invented to save food for the winter. Most of our tribal ancestors lived near the equator where there is no winter season and food is available year-round.

Also, why do you think that many religious people believe the world is only 6000 years old. That's around the time the Old Testament and modern patriarchy was invented. Somebody decided that we had better erase history before 6000 years ago, because if we knew there was life before then, we might discover that modern patriarchy did not always exist and that might begin the tearing down of the status quo.

Also, the idea of the "soul gender" - the idea that a soul reincarnates mainly as one gender, is a western view of reincarnation. According to both Buddhism and Hinduism, the soul has an equal chance of being reincarnated as male or female. We an even be reincarnated as a different animal.

I do believe Jesus Christ was a preacher of love, not hate, and much of his purpose was to start eliminating the woes of 4000 years of Old Testament patriarchy. LGBT friendly churches exist because they believe that Jesus Christ's teachings supersede the Old Testament, while hate is based on the Old Testament superseding Jesus Christ. Islam is also based on the Old Testament way of thinking too.

Just a thought, and could transphobia, as well as a lot of other modern problems, be an adaptation of us being a species that was designed to live near the equator, trying to live in the middle latitudes?

[Persephone]

It appears that it is the development and dominance of Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions that start to suppress and oppress gender non conforming people.

Lovely as it is to buy into the "Avatar myth," that all of the primative cultures were warm and welcoming and loved nature and made shamans of crossdressers, it is modern myth, not historical fact. Sure there were tribes and cultures that treated us as just another "whatever," and/or that thought of us as two-spirited favorites of the gods but there were plenty of tribes and cultures that tortured us, tore us apart, and fed us to the vultures.

Fact is that our culture of today is probably rapidly becoming the most accepting culture in all of human history. And we are the culture that has developed and provided HRT (know how some of those wonderful "noble savage" tribes did it? They simply cut off the TS's junk or tied him to a horse and rode him around bareback until his nuts cracked, then, if he/she survived they sent them over to sit with the women. After all, in their culture women were the scum of the earth anyway) and SRS, that is starting to offer medical insurance for such proceedures, etc., etc., and so on.

Wake up and smell the roses, folks, 'cause you live in the closest thing to CD/TG/TS paradise that there has ever been.

Hugs,
Persephone

[sometimes_miss]

Men adopting feminine appearance and/or behaviors make others in the society question his will to live up to the duty of protecting the society from attack. It's assumed that females are both physically weaker, and as nurturers potentially less likely to kill an opponent. That could make the difference in a society surviving, or not. Although we've outgrown those times, the instinct is still in our dna. Sure, some can 'think' past the initial impulse, but not all people are that smart, and they're much more comfortable living day to day with only basic urges directing their life. Witness the huge numbers of people who embrace Beavis and Butthead behavior. Idiots enjoying behaving like idiots. Any wonder space aliens won't contact us.......

[Melissa_59]

As in most mainstream religions it is a "sin" (why, I've always wondered, and "because the LAWD said so" isn't a good enough answer for me) to wear a woman's clothes or behave as a woman, I'm pretty sure it is a socialized trait and not something that is instinctive. While many of the filled-with-hate religious people do act like Neanderthals, I can't accept that this is something that predates organized religion. This is another one of those things that stems from ignorance and forced ignorance, in which because this is a "sin", you're expressly forbidden to ask why or even explore why - it's taboo, you know, and the LAWD won't like it if you ask questions.

Simple enough test: take 10 babies under the age of 1, dress half them all as the opposite sex, stick them in a room and watch what happens. Do this over and over, and also do a control group where they're dressed "gender appropriately" a few times as well. Observe behavior. Do any of the babies start trying to kill the crossdressed ones? As an observer of behavior in young children, I've never seen this sort of behavior at all, not that I have replicated this exact experiment. But if it is indeed instinct, the non-crossdressed babies will start trying to kill the crossdressed ones. I just don't see that happening.

It takes years of socialization to build up that sort of hate, and babies haven't been exposed to it yet.

[LilSissyStevie]

Persephone - What an utterly outrageous thing to say!!! And how TRUE! Thank you for the momentary reprieve from all the eye rolling I was doing reading this thread. I was starting to get a headache.

Transphobia is just another form of xenophobia and xenophobia seems to be hardwired to a certain extent. But once we realize the "strangers" are not an immediate threat, we need ideology to keep them in the "other" category. So the answer is "yes," transphobia is both survival instinct and social construct. And, by the way, so is transphobiaphobia - the "there's haters under every bed" syndrome.

[Aeslyn]

It might be my solid rejection of positivism when dealing with human cultures and behaviour but I don't think you can find a single reason and you would need to look at groups as individuals.
There was a construction of values which is intrinsically linked to survival and evolution but that would only have been applied to actually existing physical qualities. Strength was valued but a muscle bound dress wearer would have just as much ability to survive and provide as a muscle bound pants wearer (keeping in mind here of course that most of these earlier societies didn't actually have pants or dresses and most had little if any difference between male and female attire). But this set of values could very easily have lead to the prejudices in that they may have been the founding reasons. The prejudices themselves though, I would say, are socially constructed and transferred. Even the oft mentioned ignorance and fear are socially constructed and not physical or natural because while fear may be a natural response those things we misunderstand or fear are results of our constructed understanding of the world (world view). As all the people of the world are not a part of the same society of beliefs (including prejudices) it is likely there may be different reasons.
Some of the reasons could, and do, include ignorance and fear, as previously mentioned by others here but also beliefs about right and wrong that were constructed for various reasons and would probably require a full book to de-construct. For example, stating that the Bible says that wearing the clothing of the opposite sex is wrong would not be enough to understand why traditional Christians believe it is wrong. What the Bible says is only a statement of what the society believes, not why it believes it. The passage in the Bible reproduced the belief but did not create it.
Something that often seems to be over looked, however, is that it is not a necessity that such prejudice be shared or distributed across a culture. A person might have a prejudice against something for their own reasons. One which comes to mind is deceit. There are probably many who see crossdressing as an attempt to deceive. Imagine being a "typical" male, completely heterosexual, and checking out and hitting on every girl in sight and then realizing that some of those girls might have something different between the legs.
The unfortunate part of this is that it make prejudice that much harder to overcome because you have to fight against so many different founding beliefs.