Glossary /
Transphobia
Formaltransphobia · anti-trans prejudice
Prejudice, exclusion, or hostility toward transgender people — often expressed as denying their gender, refusing their pronouns, and institutional barriers.
Transphobia is prejudice, exclusion, or hostility directed at transgender people. Common forms include insisting on addressing someone by their assigned gender, refusing to use their pronouns, putting up barriers around documents and healthcare, or framing being trans as “mental illness” or “a trend.”
Like homophobia, it can be institutional and it can be internalized. Worth noting: a lot of hostility disguises itself as “concern” or “just being scientific” — but wherever it lands on denying a person’s sense of their own gender, it is stigma at the core. For specific claims like “trans people are mentally ill” or “they’ll regret it,” we have separate myth-busters (see Is being transgender a mental illness?).