The Inherent Misogyny of Transphobia

They both rely on the same assumptions.

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Over the past few years anti-trans legislation has absolutely skyrocketed beyond belief. Ten years ago there were just 21 anti-trans bills introduced in legislatures nationwide. Halfway through 2025, as of writing this piece, we are currently looking at 923 anti-trans bills introduced this year alone.

And with it, whether it be the chicken or the egg, has been a massive increase in transphobic rhetoric. Outlets like the New York Times irresponsibly wielded the trust the general public places in it by publishing and giving front page space discredited anti-trans “science” in the name of “fostering debate.” Fringe groups with strong financial and staffing connections to the Christian nationalist movement have been presented to the average American as being as reputable as the American Medical Association, junk science has been presented to the public as “the truth Big Pharma is hiding,” and legitimate science has been decontextualized and misrepresented without question to feed a transphobic narrative. The fight for trans rights, which much of the mainstream thought may have reached a tipping point to the positive some ten odd years ago, has gone from a question of protecting the rights of a marginalized group based in mainstream scientific consensus to protecting the “speech” of people who “are just asking questions” and protecting the right to “free debate.”

At the heart of this has been the bizarre idea that trans people, who represent roughly 1.6% of the adult U.S. population, are somehow waging a war on women and womanhood specifically.

It’s everywhere in the government right now. From legislative language that specifically bans “biological males” from entering women’s restrooms or competing in girls’ and women’s sports while omitting language that prohibits the same for the opposite sex, to anti-trans bills being labelled “Women’s Bills of Rights,” to the Justice Department looking to use anti-Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) laws to prosecute hospitals and clinics providing gender affirming care to executive orders being titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” the messaging is clear: if you were born with a vagina, you are weak and in need of protection, and if you were born with a penis, you are a dangerous predator.

And somehow they call this feminism.

“Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism,” as it’s been coined, also sometimes referred to as “TERF-ism,” as a movement tries to cast itself as the only true defenders of women. (I've also referred to this concept as "Biological Calvinism," referencing its similarities to the theology of predestination.)

Aside from the governmental examples provided above, you see the same talking points ad-nauseum from its devotees. Trans women, or “biological men” as they call them, in their mind, are either sexual predators looking to ogle, grope, and rape “real women” in public restrooms, or greedy opportunists who can’t hack it in men’s athletics and competitive spaces, so choose to face the social stigma of transition and risk violence in order to “steal” medals from, again “real” women. Meanwhile cis women, despite the fact that there is no reputable evidence that trans women are dominating in women’s sports, and data suggests that there is no statistically significant increase in public restroom privacy and assault related crimes in jurisdictions where trans people can access facilities aligned with their gender identity, are completely incapable of competing against or defending themselves against these predators.

Trans men, alongside nonbinary people who were assigned female at birth (because they rarely, if ever, acknowledge amab nonbinary individuals), on the other hand are consistently cast as the victims of social pressure and misogyny. The proponents of the debunked “Social Contagion” hypothesis often places heavy emphasis on the fact that “young girls” are more “susceptible to trends and peer pressure” as if transness is akin to Stanley cups or makeup products. Many trans men and afab nonbinary people, including myself, are frequently told that they aren’t actually trans, and instead are merely being misled in an attempt to “escape misogyny.” Autistic afabs are particularly infantilized, as if we cannot possibly know anything about ourselves and our relationships to our own body and gender, and instead are only capable of being manipulated by predatory doctors and other trans people. (Note: There is some correlation between autism and trans identity, with some studies showing that autistic populations report higher rates of transgender identity than our non-autistic counterparts, but there is no data suggesting that autism causes transness or that autistic people are being manipulated. As anyone with a basic social science background will tell you, correlation does not equal causation.)

In the eyes of a TERF, if you are assigned female at birth, you are biologically destined to be weaker, less intelligent, and generally inferior to your amab counterpart. This is called “biological essentialism” – “a belief system that suggests certain characteristics, behaviors, or abilities are inherently linked to one’s biology or genetics[,]” and completely disregards the role that social, cultural, and environmental factors play in those same traits. In the biological essentialist worldview, trans women cannot even compete in women’s chess leagues, because they have a “superior” intellect by having “larger brains.” Trans women apparently also have a “biological advantage” that justifies bans on competing in women’s divisions of Irish dancing competitions, though I’ve yet to figure out how precisely that one works. The fact that “womanhood” looks different in different parts of the world with different histories and cultures means nothing to the biological essentialist, as in their mind, womanhood has a “biological” definition that impacts and limits everything that someone assigned female at birth is and ever will be. 

In the United States it’s important to note that the lion's share of this misogyny is deeply tied to conservative Christian gender theology and our history of Christian colonialism and supremacy.

The idea that women and girls are weak, easily influenced to immorality, and inherently inferior to men traces all the way to the book of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve. While there are multiple ways different faith traditions (including non-Christian religions that still consider Genesis a part of their creation tradition) interpret the story, it is still frequently relied upon to theologically justify misogyny, presenting Eve as simultaneously too weak to resist the serpent’s temptations yet powerfully influential so as to convince Adam to join her in the fall of humanity. The predominant conservative Christian worldview is that women belong under the subjugation of men, because when they aren’t, they will accidentally trip and doom all of humanity to eternal damnation. Much of mainstream and conservative Christian theology presents the assumption as well that men engaging in “feminine” activities and homosexuality are sexually deviant and a moral threat to the community. While this concept is primarily borne out of the interpretation of passages written at very specific times in very specific contexts in which humanity had a much different understanding of human sexuality and gender (much like we now have a very different understanding of things like weather and the spread of disease), much of our cultural understanding of sex, gender, and morality still draws from a failed attempt to map their logic into the modern world, whether we realize it or not.

The fact of the matter is that gender diversity is a morally neutral, normal part of human diversity. Sure, there are trans people that do bad things, but it’s not because they’re trans, it’s because they’re human beings, and human beings are equally capable of good and bad. 

Humans are weird and complicated and we’ve built weird and complicated societies that require complex thought, systems, and language to describe our vast breadth of experiences within it. Trying to limit the human experience to easy categories that you can define through an anatomical exam only serves to uphold a system that harms women, leads men to poor mental and physical health outcomes, and justifies centuries of oppression. Transphobia and misogyny, at the end of the day, are both always going to be about the diminishment and subjugation of women as less than men. Women cannot be liberated until we dismantle the very idea that there is some “biological reality” that makes them totally and inherently inferior to men in every single possible arena. And you cannot achieve that end without trans liberation.

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Kat (they/them) is a queer lawyer, activist, and theorist focusing on the intersections of law, queerness, religion, and politics, with the occasional bit of theology, political theory, and legal theory thrown in for good measure. Originally from rural southern Indiana, Kat earned their B.A. in Political Science in 2019 before continuing on to earn their J.D. in 2022, both from Indiana University- Bloomington. A former Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Kat has spent their professional career fighting for the separation of church and state and LGBTQIA+ rights. Outside of work you can find them at a ballet or contemporary dance class, sipping on dirty shirleys at their local gay bar, or playing video games with their cat, Merlin.