Transphobia Is A Sin

On TDOV, mental illness, and Easter Sunday.

It’s true and you should say it!

Increasingly, I’ve seen online commentators compare transphobia to a sort of mental illness. “JK Rowling’s Downward Spiral”. “Conservatives obsession with trans kids”. “Graham Linehan blames trans movement for ending his marriage”. The way that hatred of trans people seems to consume someone’s entire personality, the way people seemingly make it their life’s mission to harm us, can often look like a bad mental health episode. They engage in their worst, most selfish habits. They alienate themselves from their loved ones to nurture an unhealthy obsession. They insist that they’re right and shut out anybody who tries to help them. One need only look at Graham Linehan, who became so obsessed with attacking trans people online (including hundreds of tweets per day and even tweeting at midnight on New Years about trans people) that his wife left him and nobody would hire him as a TV writer anymore.

We should be wary, though, of pathologizing bigotry. Much like how conservatives accuse leftists of being mentally ill as a way to delegitimize their ideology (something I discussed last week), we shouldn’t make the same mistake of saying that transphobes only believe the things they do because of some biological defect.

Bigotry is not something that you can solve with medical interventions; it’s baked into the fabric of society. Anti-black racism, for example, is a global world order propped up by economic policies designed to subjugate Black bodies, from policing to prisons to redlining to denied bank loans. Misogyny is a pervasive system that exists, in part, due to cultural expectations and actual written laws (abortion being illegal, marital rape exemptions, inheritance laws, etc.) These and other forms of bigotry are, unfortunately, the status-quo. They are normal, so to insist that people only hold bigoted beliefs due to some deviation from the norm is a tragic misunderstanding of how this violence works. Even though people who are both bigoted and possibly mentally ill can execute the worst forms of this violence (e.g., mass shootings), a culture that glorifies violence will inevitably produce violence, with or without mental illness. To quote Jeremy Adam Smith of the Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute, “Prejudice and xenophobia are consciously embraced by many otherwise functional, healthy citizens, and racial associations persist in the unconscious minds of many explicitly anti-racist people. People are rarely either racist or not-racist. Almost all of us fall along a spectrum.”

So no, transphobia should not be understood as a mental illness. In fact, transphobia is better understood as a sin. Allow me to apply what little I still remember from Catholic Sunday School…