Patriarchy and the relation of Sexism to Homophobia to Transphobia
Sexism, transphobia, and homophobia, have both an organized, institutional form which manifests as social oppression, and they also have an individual psychological/inter-personal form which manifests as personal prejudice and bigotry.
The institutional and individual forms are of course, closely related - people who actively work to maintain or expand social oppression very often (but not always) also exhibit personal prejudice - and people who exhibit personal prejudice typically (though not always) also support social/political/governmental oppression.
However these two forms remain distinct phenomena. An individual personally assuming that because someone is a member of group x, they have y attributes, is materially different from a government or economic system or social institution arranging society in such a way that being a member of group x means that one is likely to lack z privileges or to possess w burdens or disadvantages.
This distinction is generally relevant for issues of social struggle that are irreducible to simple worker vs capitalist struggle (including racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, islamophobia, anti-semitism, etc.) since these distinctions are applicable in any case that is characterized by both social oppression and personal prejudice, and we can see that in many cases social oppression will be the predominant area where struggle occurs and in others, personal prejudice is (such as in the use of 'culture war' for electoral politics).
The specific relevance here, when asking whether transphobia is closer to sexism or closer to homophobia, is that on an institutional level all three are elements of the same social institution, patriarchy, whereas on an individual level the way that patriarchal ideology affects any individual person's psychology and circumstances varies.
Sexism on the institutional level on its most extreme form as seen in feudal and islamist societies where women are legally owned by their husbands and fathers (under either a now abolished western law of coveture or an Islamic legal theory) is the legal enforcement, by the state, of patriarchy in its strongest form. This legally privileges men generally over women generally, while giving the strongest legal privileges to male relatives/owners of women. The result is that men enjoy greater comfort, enjoyment, and and life quality than women, and in part this is directly a result of women's legally enforced inferior status: by legally requiring that women are subservient to men, a great portion of the male population possess defacto domestic/sex slaves.* Consequently, a great portion of the male population has an actual socio-economic interest, a class interest, in maintaining women's legally subordinate status.
Less dramatic institutional sexism is found in laws that functionally serve to keep women inferior to men generally, but do not directly give individual men dominion over individual women. These include laws restricting abortion and divorce, laws forbidding women from joining certain professions or inheriting property in societies where men can do those things, etc. As a function of these legally imposed socio-economic disadvantages, women have less financial and social capital, and as a result are led to subordinate themselves to individual men. These men then gain the advantages of having defacto domestic/sex servants - and so a socio-economic or class interest exists in a large portion of the male population to keep a large portion of the female population oppressed in these ways.
Less dramatic still is the institutional sexism found in pay gaps that encourage a division of domestic labor, where it simply seems "logical" for the lower earning power female partner to make the "choice" stay home more of the time to take care of children - or to stay home all the time to "take care of the household." The subtler version of this is social invention of new seemingly necessary tasks for one partner in a household to do: clothing "must" be washed each time they are worn, sheets "must" be washed frequently, carpets must be cleaned and houses dusted frequently...when contemporary inventions threatened to "liberate" women from these socially invented busy tasks, the society responded by inventing new tasks. While it used to be thought that children could walk around the neighborhood and do homework on their own - after housework was simplified - social necessity required instead that children 'must' be supervised at all times by an adult, that they could not play on their own away from adult supervision, that they need adults to do their homework with them, that they need a constant parade of adult supervised and managed afterschool and pre-school activities - that formula feeding as opposed to breast feeding is child abuse or negligence (thereby compelling women to spend an inordinate amount of time on infant care while creating a fake justification for why men can't do it). All of these add up together to keep women dependent on and subordinate too their male partners - providing those male partners with a significant interest in maintaining that relationship of subordination.
How does individual prejudice fit into the picture of the institutionally sexist oppression of patriarchy?
Because this inequality is fundamentally at odds with most people's natural conception of justice and at odds with official bourgeois liberal ideology. No one can argue "I want my wife to be subordinate to me because it makes my life easier at her expense" in public political discourse and few can even admit that to themselves. People act on class interests without articulating them or even being totally aware of them however. Instead people will make things up like "The bible says the husband is the head of the family although men and women are equal" or "life begins at conception" if they are religious or they will make things up like "women are just naturally more nurturing then men" or "its important for children for their mother to take care of them in those vital first years" if they are liberals or phony leftists.
Many people will actually come to believe these claims, even people who are personally disadvantaged by them like house wives who may prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t. Even feminists who adopting ‘difference feminists’ who genuinely want to fight sexism will sometimes actually adopt patriarchal ideology through errors in their analysis (the error is that they falsely essentialize as supposedly feminine characteristics, what are in fact characteristics of domestic subordination and enculturation for future domestic subordination).
The result of all of this is to provide the ideological and social basis for consolidating and enforce patriarchal family relations…to keep women in a subordinate relationship to their male partners. The benefit runs not directly to capitalism but to men of all classes, but the relationship between male and female partners is a class relationship characterized by differing socio-economic statuses and a power differential between them based on these statuses.
In this context, we can understand that homophobia and transphobia in the west are, like individual sexism, ways of reinforcing patriarchal relations. When homosexual relationships are devalued in comparison to heterosexual relationships – the functional effect is to encourage monogamous, reproductive heterosexual relationships, the type of relationships that produce patriarchal family relations. It is a way of targeting people for openly abandoning patriarchal relationships. Gay people are also generally hated because a large portion of the gay population emulates behavior associated with the opposite sex and this undermines gender essentialism, the belief that certain behaviors are male (or masculine) and certain behaviors are female (or feminine) – and without gender essentialism the ideology supporting patriarchy loses much of its justification. Similarly transphobia functionally targets people who avoid patriarchal family relationships since transgender people do not procreate (and childcare is a primary fulcrum for male-female division of domestic labor and hence, patriarchy) and they are interpreted as providing evidence that people can radically reject the rigid gender roles that conservatives assume are natural.**
The individual bigot however, may adopt certain prejudicial beliefs without adopting other prejudicial beliefs, so it is possible to be specifically transphobic but not homophobic, or homophobic but not transphobic**, or sexist but not homophobic, or homophobic but not sexist, and so on – at the individual level. On the institutional level however, individual sexism, homophobia and transphobia all serve to reinforce and reproduce patriarchal relationships, they are all manifestations of a deeper social phenomenon. By looking at how the three forms of prejudice functionally relate to the deep structure of society we can see how they related to each other (why for example, most institutions that suffer from one suffer from the other two) – and by seeing these interconnections feminists and other leftists can better fight them.
*slave here is used in the sense of an individual legally bound to personally serve and obey another without compensation or through due process of law. There have been many slaves in history, the term does not apply specifically to the institution of black slavery in the American south. Slavery is a legally enforced relationship between a master and a subservient - it doe snot necessarily imply chattel slavery- which is to say that masters may not be able to sell their bound persons' on the market just as people own certain thi ngs they are disallowed from selling.
** though an alternative employed by Iran is to decide that people who don’t conform to expected gender roles for women or men must be members of the opposite sex, forcing gay and other non-conforming people to be members of the opposite sex so that the society does not need to tolerate ‘masculine’ women and ‘feminine’ men.
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