Calling people transphobic is literally transphobic

One of the features of our Stupid New World is ‘cancel culture’, which under any inspection at all amounts to ‘thought policing’. I wincingly admit to having removed people from my Facebook friends list when they posted things that I found distasteful, whether they were gushing about Trump or offering opinions on such topics as immigration that I might have classed at the time as ‘racist’. Maybe they even were being a bit racist, but I don’t know if I should have removed them for that. Perhaps it was the act of being cancelled myself by a bunch of dullards that has given me a bit more perspective on the topic.

Point is, there’s a neologism that has appeared and become very widespread in the last 10 or so years amongst those eager to cancel, namely transphobic. I just saw it used by mods in a Facebook group - one supposedly devoted to ‘science shitposting’, but I think the mods were serious - to describe people who said that only women ovulate, and threatening to delete such people’s posts and ban them. Insisting that men can ovulate is the kind of intentionally-obtuse backwards thinking that has infected the minds of many people online, most if not all of whom would disingenuously describe themselves as being ‘on the left’, although that obtuseness does nothing but damage and derail real left-wing politics.

So the mods were prepared to ban anyone who made light of the idea of men ovulating, on the grounds that doing so is ‘transphobic’. How do they justify the application of that label? The suffix ‘-phobic’ means ‘afraid of’, so do they think that people laughing about men ovulating are somehow afraid of trans people? I rather doubt it. Since terms like homophobic have long mutated the meaning of the suffix from ‘afraid of’ to ‘hateful towards’, one can assume that the mods are banning people for laughing about men ovulating because they think that this offers proof of their latent hatred of trans people.

I think I speak for all adults who find the idea of men ovulating funny, when I say that I do so because the concept is inherently ridiculous, not out of hatred of gender-dysphoric women1, or of any other group. To believe that recognising this absurdity for what it is belies some sort of hatred, is to assume a whole staircase-worth of extra steps between what one says and what it is assumed that one secretly thinks. However, the internet being what it is and people being what they are, these extra steps are indeed assumed by a lot of people, although it’s not clear why. Presumably because they know that to question the reasoning is to open oneself up to accusations of that same transphobia, but it’s paradoxically impossible to know whether this is true, because those people would never admit it if that was the case.

On a purely etymological level, the term ‘transphobic’ means ‘afraid of trans [people]’. That description would actually much better fit those like the aforementioned Facebook mods who wield the twin sabres of Delete and Ban to cancel those daring to laugh at or question their ideology, because they act like they are actually terrified of what trans people might think of them (or what others on their side might think that trans people would think of them) if they don’t do what’s expected of them. And they’re right to be afraid, if what’s happened to those who resist is anything to go by. Trans activists intimidated and threw tomato juice at Posie Parker (and reportedly injured others) at an event in New Zealand in 2023, although those activists had claimed that her presence would bring a threat of “anti-trans violence”:

It’s all terribly conformist and mutually reinforcing; one can never openly ask what is the correct opinion, rather one must simply show that one is ready to unquestioningly repeat whatever new slogans appear and to berate those who flinch, lest one flinch and become the berated, or worse. If that sounds hyperbolic, think how recently a statement like “only women ovulate” would not have been controversial; nothing has changed in the world of biology since then, all that has changed has been the blurring of the definition of what a woman is. Yet even to acknowledge that any change has taken place, or to suggest that such a change is not wonderful and necessary, can itself lead to hysterical accusations of transphobia. Those who have the platform to make the accusations know that they must make the accusations, or the trans mob will come for them instead, because the cult needs the spectre of oppression to retain any legitimacy.

I asked one of those Facebook mods if saying that only women ovulate would be transphobic, and she replied that yes it would, because trans men and non-binary people (I guess she meant female non-binary people) also ovulate. I asked her if she could define ‘transphobic’, and she asked me what I was getting at. I said that maybe if she thinks that saying that only women can ovulate is unacceptable, she might just have joined a cult that explicitly rejects science, so she should feel free to ban me, but also maybe think about whether affirming people’s delusions is actually helping them or not.

She banned me within minutes. What other choice did she have?