I have a notion - and you can make of it what you will - that transphobia is likely to be a far more difficult issue than any of the others that have arisen.

You see, racism is in many respects something that changes from culture to culture. The Romans, for instance, had no problem with Black people. Lots of Black people joined the Legions, did their 25 years, became Roman citizens and received their honesta mensa, a plot of land of their own somewhere in the empire. But they did have issues with Jews, Celts and Huns.

The same goes for gay or bisexual people, who have been accepted or despised in various cultures over the ages. The Greeks were fine with them, for instance, but the Romans not so much. The Japanese also accepted gay people,

However, Transexuality is different, because the idea of male and female as fixed characteristics is such a fundamental one in all cultures, It is almost species-wide and certainly as old as humanity - older, when you consider animal species as well. The idea that someone can be one gender biologically and another psychologically strikes to the very root of many peoples' sense of indentity and can be, on a visceral level, deeply disturbing. All of us regard our gender as one of the basic pillars of our identity, and we transfer that attitude to everyone around us. It governs our most basic reactions to other people. If that certainty goes, if one cannot be sure that the person in front of one is a man or a woman, it takes a particular level of self-confidence and self-awareness not to feel that something fundamental has been taken away. That one more level of certainty, of knowledge and understanding of the world, has suddenly become fluid and ungraspable. That's hard for many people, especially those who want the world to be simple and straighforward.