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Did you know that there are multiple types of homophobia?
Understanding what they are and how they might affect you can help you overcome the serious negative impacts that they have. While it might sound like homophobia is a fear of gay people, like a phobia of homosexuality, it can mean a lot more than that too.
To me, homophobia simply means any form of negativity towards gay people or that gay people experience.
Then there's transphobia, which generally relates to transgender and nonbinary people. And an umbrella term for all of it is simply queerphobia, which helps us cover all the bases for the ways that queer people are discriminated against and/or just negatively impacted by the way our society operates.
Within queerphobia, when we're thinking about all the things that make it harder for us to be queer, to figure out who we are, to figure out who we like and don't like- there are two main ways queerphobia shows up in our lives; overt queerphobia and covert queerphobia.
Often people only think about overt homophobia, like people using slurs or violence specifically against gay people. It's overt. It's out in the open and we can see it with our eyes and point to it. Covert types of queerphobia are harder to spot, but they can be just as harmful, if not even more so in some cases.
Covert transphobia might be only having ‘male’ and ‘female’ boxes to check off at the doctor's office with no option for nonbinary or writing in our own gender identity. Another example of covert transphobia that can actually seem polite or positive at first is when people try to be formal and use the terms sir or ma'am when talking to someone that they don't know. It might seem harmless at first, but underneath is an assumption about how that person identifies, and another assumption that you can tell that person's gender just by the way that they look. Taking it a step further to really paint the picture, even though it might seem like a small mistake, misgendering someone can and does make a lot of people feel really bad, especially if they were trying really hard to look a certain way or ‘pass’ as a certain gender.
There's something deeper going on in that example, too. In English, we really only have sir and ma'am to address someone in a formal way like that. And we could call this another form of covert queerphobia, not at an individual level from person to person, but queerphobia that is baked into the language that we speak, a language that assumes everyone fits neatly into two categories.
This is a form of queerphobia called normativity. In terms of homophobia, we call it heteronormativity- like it's normal to be heterosexual, and homosexual people are the other option. In terms of transphobia, we call it cisnormativity. Like it's normal that everyone is expected to be cisgender or the gender that they were assigned at birth. And there are other types of normativity too.
For example, monogonormativity is when people are expected to be monogamous or only date one person. And this excludes polyamorous people who might date more than one person, or aromantic people who don't want to date people at all.
Zooming out a bit, people can be really trying to do the right thing and be inclusive and affirming of any and every queer person…but it still feels off. For example, I remember when I was a kid, someone said, “I don't care if you're gay, just don't do it in front of me.”
Okay…? At face value, it's not overtly hateful. That person did not physically attack someone for being gay or shout at them or use the f slur. Okay…but they said they don't care about whether or not someone is gay… and I care about that, maybe it's something that it's important to care about? And then… ‘don't do it in front of me.’ What is ‘doing gay’ or is that like just being gay? Like, don't be gay in front of me, or don't kiss someone in front of me, or don't engage in a gay sexual act in front of me?
The point is, even when someone might think of themselves as accepting, like, “I accept that gay people exist. I don't care if you're gay or not” which is generally a neutral sentiment, it can be helpful to think about different stages of queer acceptance.
Back in 1974, psychologist Dorothy Riddle created a scale from ‘repulsion’ to ‘acceptance’ and then beyond mere acceptance in order to measure attitudes toward gay and lesbian people.
The stages of the Riddle scale include;
Repulsion is like hatred and disgust and wanting to enact violence on queer people.
Pity is like, “Well, no, I don't want to do violence myself. But isn't it a shame that my poor child is gay? I just wish she could be normal.”
Tolerance is probably where I would put the person from the quote I mentioned before, “I will tolerate that queer people exist in our society, but please try not to be queer in front of me.”
Acceptance is like “I accept that queer people exist. It's fine. Whatever.”
Support is the stage where I would say generally people have to do some sort of reflection and introspection in order to overcome that normativity or internalized queerphobia. Like, “okay, I know people use different pronouns than I would expect, so I got to work on that. It's just so hard.” The ‘it's just so hard’ shows that a cis person might feel like it's a burden to support trans people, even if they feel like it's something important that they want to do.
Then we have admiration and appreciation and ultimately we all want to get to a place of nurturance, which means that we view queer people as indispensable to the health, creativity and wholeness of our society.
Nurturance is recognizing the beautiful art that queer people make, the amazing advances in science, the power queer people bring to social and political change, the queer love that we have and that we share. Nurturance is recognizing that these traits;
and all the amazing things that queer people have done throughout history…
…would not have been possible without queer people. And that by allowing queerphobia to continue to restrict and harm people, we as a society are blocking the real potential that queer people have to shine in this world.
Lastly, I think it's vitally important to zoom out once again and talk about intersectionality, which I've sort of already hinted at here and there.
Coined by legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality describes how these systems of oppression like homophobia and transphobia can overlap and cause more harm in multiple ways.
I lumped them together as queerphobia in order to explain the concept, but there is privilege in being a gay person who identifies as cis. He might have no problem going to the doctor and checking ‘male’ for the gender he was assigned at birth and have a pretty normal doctor's appointment and go about the rest of his day. He might encounter some covert homophobia if the doctor assumes he's straight by asking about his wife or girlfriend, which could make him feel uneasy in the appointment, or even deter him from feeling safe enough to ask his doctor about PrEP.
But someone else who identifies as pansexual and feels like a third gender is the best way to describe their lived experience; they might experience multiple forms of discrimination and barriers to getting the healthcare that they need. For example, discussing and learning from the doctor about the right form of birth control for their sexuality and the sexual acts that they engage in, and hormone replacement therapy for their gender identity. Those are two separate things.
Intersectionality is vitally important because these forms of overt and covert discrimination and normativity exist for just about every part of our identity in some way;
our disability status (whether we were born disabled or acquired a disability later in life)
our religion and spirituality, or lack thereof
or ethnicity and our race,
our socioeconomic status (which includes things like poverty or what types of education are available to us)
indigenous and native heritage,
national origin and immigration status,
So, it's just as important to think about where you might be on the Riddle scale for each and every one of those parts of our identity that I just listed. Because…
…that's important. Full stop.
And, because there are queer people in every single one of those groups. So, if we're not investigating the internalized racism and ableism and ageism and colonialism, we're never going to truly get to nurturance.
The good news is, now that we know where we're headed, the path gets a lot clearer
and we can help each other along the way.
