Transphobia is a Symptom of the Patriarchy

First is my series of three, we are going to consider how transphobia is a symptom of patriarchy. Transphobia is often framed as a debate about biology, language, or personal comfort—but at its core, it is deeply tied to how many societies are shaped by patriarchy and rigid ideas about gender.

Patriarchal systems rely on a simplified binary: men and women are expected to behave in specific, predictable ways. In the west cis men are taught to be strong, dominant, emotionally restrained. Cis women are expected to be nurturing, gentle, and compliant. These roles are reinforced through language, culture, media, and everyday social expectations. Over time, they stop feeling like rules and start feeling like “reality.”

When someone grows up inside that framework, those expectations become internalized. Gender isn’t just something people are—it becomes something people are supposed to perform correctly. Masculinity and femininity get treated like fixed categories with strict boundaries, and deviation from those boundaries is often read as confusion, disorder, or even threat.

So when people are later introduced to the idea that gender identity may not align with sex assigned at birth, or that gender itself is more complex than a binary system, it can create a kind of psychological friction. Psychologists often describe this as cognitive dissonance: the discomfort that arises when new information conflicts with what we previously believed to be true. It’s not just an intellectual disagreement—it can feel like a destabilization of the internal “rules” someone has used to understand the world.

That helps explain why these conversations can feel so emotionally charged. It’s not only about trans people—it’s also about what someone’s framework for understanding gender has been up to that point. Changing that framework can feel like losing certainty, even when the new information better reflects reality and lived human experience.

Children tend to navigate this differently. They are not yet fully locked into rigid cultural narratives about gender, so they often accept differences more fluidly. They respond more to what is directly present than to what they’ve been taught things “should” mean. It is socialization, not biology, that gradually builds the constraints adults often take for granted.

Within a patriarchal lens, even the idea of respectful language becomes entangled with those expectations. People are taught that certain terms are appropriate for men and others for women, and that crossing those lines can be insulting. So when someone transitions and asks to be recognized with different pronouns or a different name, it can trigger confusion: not necessarily because the request is complicated, but because it interrupts long-standing assumptions about what language is “allowed” to mean.

We already navigate similar shifts in other contexts without difficulty, though. For example, when someone gets married and changes their last name, most people adapt. (Miss Wilson is not only now a Lewis, but Mrs. Lewis.) We understand that names can change, and we update our language accordingly. We do not usually insist on holding onto an old name simply because it feels familiar to us. The adjustment is seen as a basic form of respect.

The difference in reaction reveals something important: it is not change itself that is hard, but whose change is treated as legitimate. Cultural norms have historically made certain forms of identity change easier to accept than others, depending on how closely they align with traditional gender expectations.

At its heart, respecting trans people is not about abandoning clarity or truth—it is about expanding the framework so that respect is not conditional on whether someone fits a predefined category. It means recognizing that language is a tool for acknowledging people as they are, not a mechanism for enforcing outdated rules about how they are supposed to be.

And while it is not possible to “unlearn” everything we’ve been taught about gender, it is possible to build a more flexible understanding—one that allows room for real human variation without forcing it into rigid boxes. That shift is uncomfortable for some, but discomfort is often part of any meaningful expansion of perspective.

Matriarchy supports everyone,

Eme xo