Talk:transphobe

Reason for reversion

The whole premise of a phobia is having an irrational fear of something – excluding fear as the basic sense not only goes against the actual semantic meaning of the term, it also makes it blatantly clear that we've strayed away from linguistics and moved into politics. Wiktionary is not the correct forum for that and any more PoV-pushing and I'll consider protecting this page from any further editing. --Robbie SWE (talk) 07:41, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Words like transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, etc are not actual medical phobias. They have the same etymological roots, but that doesn't mean they have the same meaning. This is explained in the etymology section of the transphobia wikipedia article. Also if you're going to change this, you also need to change homophobe, which is where I got the wording from in the first place. And either way, if the "prejudice" part was your problem, I don't see why you had to reintroduce the offensive language that we already discussed on your talk page. Crockett623 (talk) 14:49, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

When this entry was created ten years ago the word transgenderism didn't have the connotations it does now. I wouldn't necessarily label it "offensive," but in my experience it is now mainly used by gender-critical commentators, often with explicitly negative implications. The word transexuality doesn't carry quite the same implications, although it's rather outdated, and that's its own kettle of fish. The reason for the "transgender/transsexual" construction is that an older generation of trans folk still self-identify as transsexual rather than transgender. In any case, the negative connotations of transgenderism have been elided by replacing it with transness, which also has the benefit of making the definition more concise.

And frankly it's bizarrely prescriptivist to insist that the -phobia suffix can only apply to clinical phobias. That's just not how the English language works. Surfing the web involves neither actual surfing nor spiderwebs. Wiktionary documents language based on how it's used. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 09:31, 7 October 2021 (UTC)