Is there a word that means “a hatred of gay people”, rather than “a fear of or aversion to gay people”? Surely there are people who simply hate homosexuality without necessarily fearing it, and vice versa. Someone who hates homosexuality should probably be condemned for their unreasonable and hateful prejudices, but should someone who actually fears homosexuality but without hating it be condemned in the same way? Why isn’t there a distinction?
And similarly, why do we have words like “arachnophobia” which means a fear of something (not necessarily a hatred of it; though you might hate what you fear, that isn’t necessarily always the case, nor is the opposite always true either (fearing what you hate)), but “homophobia” is used to mean “hatred of homosexuality” rather than a genuine fear of it without necessarily hating it?
It makes me feel a bit sorry (as much as one can) for people who might genuinely be afraid of the idea of homosexuality, maybe even struggling with their own sexuality or possibly in denial of being homosexual themself, but without hating it at all (even possibly being supportive of it), not having a word that conveys a fear of the concept/phenomenon without any kind of disdain for it, since “homophobia” would generally be interpreted to mean something far more negative. Usually when someone has a phobia for something, we support them to deal with it in a non-accusatory way, but in this case, well, I guess there isn’t even a word for that kind of phobia if it’s actually a phobia in the usual sense.
You’re trying to take a prescriptivist position on the meaning of the word “homophobia”, defining it as meaning “fear of homosexuality or homosexuals”.
But English doesn’t work that way. English words as defined descriptively not prescriptively. The definition of a word is changed to match how people use the word. When a word is commonly used with a new meaning the people who make dictionaries will change the definition to match how the word is used.
Homophobia can describe a fear or homosexuality, but it’s more commonly used to describe hostility or discrimination against homosexuals.
And as a result the Oxford English Dictionary now defines homophobia as “Hostility towards, prejudice against, or (less commonly) fear of homosexual people or homosexuality.”
Most words that end in -phobia do generally just describe a fear. But when we’re talking about a class of people, words ending in -phobia (e.g transphobia, Islamophobia, etc) we tend to use the hate, prejudice, and hostility meaning instead.
It doesn’t matter that “phobias” were at one time exclusively just irrational fears. If the majority of English speakers use the word to describe hate, that’s its meaning.
If anything, we now need a new word to describe “fear of homosexuality without prejudice towards homosexuals”. Because homophobia already means, to use your words, “a hatred of gay people”.
Xenophobia and racism are not related. Xenophobia is about foreigners regardless of race, and racism is about race regardless of nationality. The two get mixed in the head of people from the USA because a lot of guys claim they’re Irish or Italian without ever having set foot in any of those countries. If you dislike your [insert ethnicity] neighbour who was born and grew up in the same place as you did, you’re being racist. If you dislike your [insert nationality] neighbour who’s the same ethnicity as you, you’re being xenophobic.
-phobia means an irrational intolerance, for a lot of things we express intolerance by showing fear, but to others we show aggressiveness. It depends more on the person than the subject matter, some homophobics are actually afraid of gays, thinking they’ll corrupt the children or whatever stupid fearmongering propaganda they’re up to these days, meanwhile some arachnofobics will kill every spider they see. And their line of thought is often quite similar, e.g. I don’t hate [gays/spiders], I just don’t want to see them.
Every European: “but my hatred of the French is prefectly rational, does that mean it’s not xenophobia?”
Europe is not just UK. UK isn’t even EU anymore, and I have never seen negative sentiments towards french people in the rest of Europe.
As a German, I can assure you, there are plenty of people with negative sentiments
I lived in Rhineland-Palatinate when I was young and I remember asking my neighbors why every Saturday they all came out to trim their grass and sweep their sidewalks and gutters clean. They said it was to show that they are not French.
I hoped it’d be read as sarcasm
It’s not a serious hatred, but most major/Western European nations (at least Germany, UK, Spain, Italy and probably France themselves) have at least a friendly rivalry with the French despite being on friendly terms either since 1945 or even longer, with France having been fairly positive for Europe since at least the 80s, so it’s incredibly hard to justify that the “hatred” of them is rational
Although the Italians may have a valid case, just ask about how almost all famous French food is just Italian recipes with a French name and they will be incredibly convincing even if it may not be objective fact
Is there a word that means “a hatred of gay people”, rather than “a fear of or aversion to gay people”?
No, because that’s just semantic wiggle room to give bigots a way of excusing their bigotry.
For example. “I don’t hate gay people, and I’m not afraid of them, so I’m not homophobic. I just don’t want to see them, and they shouldn’t be able to get married”. It’s a statement that is clearly biased against queer folk, and that’s the issue that needs to be addressed. But discussions like the one you’re suggesting just lead to irrelevant arguments over exactly what type of bigotry is being displayed, rather than telling the bigot to get bent, which suits the needs of the bigots fine.
I appreciate what you’re saying, certainly someone could claim to be just afraid of homosexuality while using that as a cover for actually hating it or being prejudiced against it or homosexual people. But I think bigotry, meaning “obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group”, doesn’t exactly fit the hypothetical I described of a person who’s just afraid of the concept without harboring any hateful feelings or displaying any discriminatory behaviors toward it. Shouldn’t we help that person come to terms with their fear and be understanding, while certainly helping them to tackle that fear (without accusing them of doing something wrong, presuming that they weren’t hypothetically)?
certainly someone could claim to be just afraid of homosexuality while using that as a cover for actually hating it or being prejudiced against it or homosexual people
It’s not that someone “could” do this. They already do. They will come up with a million excuses as to why they’re not bigoted/prejudiced.
You know the cliche “I’m not racist, but…” That’s the phenomena in action.
doesn’t exactly fit the hypothetical I described
And that’s the core of my issue with your whole question.
You’re trying to solve a hypothetical scenario that doesn’t occur in any meaningful way, with a solution that makes it easier for bigots to display their bigotry with less pushback. It doesn’t solve any real world issues that can’t already be addressed by conversation with a therapist, and it does it by creating further opportunities for bigots to pretend that they aren’t bigoted.
Boy am I glad I didn’t meet you when I was young and didn’t know much of anything about the gay Mafia.
See back then, I was ignorant and at times scared based on stupid bullshit I learned, but some very kind and patient people helped me to learn the truth about the community.
My fear now is that had I met you, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn what a wonderful group of people the gay Mafia is because in my ignorance I would have been treated like a piece of shit instead of like the ignorant idiot I was. In place of love you would have met me with disbelief and dislike.
You’re welcome to downvote me, I don’t care but it needs to be said people can be scared without being hateful and you specifically should have nothing to do with outreach.
“I’d be a bigot at the first sign of someone being mean to me” is an interesting argument to make.
BTW, maybe avoiding the use of “gay mafia” to refer to the queer community would make it more believable that you aren’t ignorant.
Thats a term that my gay community friends have told me is fine to use.
It’s fine to use jokingly among friends, I do the same with my friend group. It’s hardly appropriate for a serious conversation about discrimination with strangers.
Except I didn’t ask them as a joke, I honestly asked “hey is it ok to use ‘gay mafia’ as a similar term for ‘lgbtq+’?” and was told " yeah that’s fine it sounds cool anyways"
And there it is! It’s my fault you hated folk like me when you were younger, and also my fault for not educating you.
Folk hating on me and trying to take my rights away is something I live with every day. According to your framing here, the fact someone didn’t take the responsibility for educating you, whilst folk are trying to remove the rights of folk like me is somehow the real issue, and it’s actually you that were wronged.
Do the work, and own your responsibility in the whole affair. It’s on you to undo the harm you do to others, not on the people you are harming. Don’t palm the responsibility on to the people you were throwing bullshit at.
Its your fault for acting like a dick to people who are ignorant. That was my entire point that you completely ignored. That are ignorant people out who’ve been fed some bullshit by society about what the gay community is and isn’t.
They aren’t hateful and would in fact be friends and allies but your approach of “there is no ignorance without hate therefore I’m justified in being a dick!” would result in you being an asshole and guess what, when someone is a dick to other dick people respond with hate even if they didn’t already dislike that person to begin with.
Here’s an analogy for you, if you go into a forest and find a stick and hit some animal with the stick the animal will respond defensively. It started off scared but not it considers you a threat. That’s what you’re doing and trying to justify it after the fact.
It’s worth mentioning that, while “phobia” can mean “an irrational fear of,” it also often means “an irrational intolerance of,” such as in the case of homophobia. It’s not a fear, it’s an intolerance.
What an absurd (and arguably harmful) distinction to make. Nobody is “afraid of homosexuality” for reasons unrelated to homophobia.
fuckerism — prejudice against people on the basis of who they fuck (or would like to fuck).
In general, morphology doesn’t dictate meaning; the fact that “homophobia” and “arachnophobia” are similarly constructed words doesn’t mean they have to have analogous meanings.
Pornography is not played on a pornograph turntable.
Racism is not the same sort of thing as communism, cubism, masochism, autism, or Buddhism. The fact that those words all end in “-ism” doesn’t mean they are close analogies to one another. The words “sexism”, “ageism” and “ableism”, though, were coined as deliberate analogies to “racism”.
After researching your great word fuckerism (which I’m guessing you coined since I can’t easily find mentions of it online), I found this: Sexual orientation discrimination (also known as sexualism) is discrimination based on a person’s sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or pregnancy.. This isn’t entirely clear and could be interpreted as relating to “sexualising”, which means to make something sexual, and “homosexism” might be more specific to discrimination against homosexual people.
We also have a related concept of gender binarism (or in some uses, genderism (such as here, here) (though genderism can also apparently mean the opposite thing, to negatively describe gender-non-binarism(?), or what is referred to as “gender ideology” by people with “anti-gender” prejudice)) to describe specifically discrimination of “gender nonconfirming” (or non-binary-gendered) individuals (rather than transphobia or LGBTphobia for the same lexical confusion theoretically). Anti-genderism also makes sense as a term for this, I suppose. Anti-LGBTism ([Anti-LGBT rhetoric](Anti-LGBTism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-LGBT_rhetoric)) could also work as a term for discrimination against LGBT people in general (horrific paper).
I also found a term, HOCD, which can mean excessive fear of becoming or being homosexual, though it can also literally means a form of OCD relating to homosexuality, but it’s the closest thing to “fear of homosexuality” (“FOHO”?) that I found, albeit a form that only applies to a fear around one’s own possible homosexuality rather than a fear of homosexuality in general regardless of one’s own sexuality.
It doesn’t actually mean fear in those contexts. Etymologically yes, it comes from the Ancient Greek for fear. For all other purposes, that doesn’t really matter. If you’re anti-gay then you are a homophobe - case closed, just another English term with slightly odd etymology that is irrelevant to how it’s actually used by literally everyone. There are thousands of those.
People starting in on “well, achkchually that means FEAR” just want to either nitpick irrelevant trivia, or hide behind a difference that doesn’t really exist. It’s like pretending the term “hydrophobic” is wrong “because water can’t feel emotions”: incorrect, irrelevant, just… a weird argument, and if someone brings it up all the time, you sort of have to wonder what their deal is.
The hypothetical “unwilling bigots”, the ones genuinely afraid through no fault of their own, causing no harm and carrying no ill will… I’ll empathize with them when I get a reason to believe they exist.
Come to think of it, xenophobia doesn’t really work as a fear of other races since that’s associated with hatred as well. Is it like if it’s common to hate something, we just disregard the capability for some people to have a genuine fear of that thing without hatred? Seems almost like black-and-white thinking. Either you’re fully in support of something and not afraid of it, or else if you’re afraid of it you must hate it as well. No middle ground or nuance or understanding of people who have a fear they’re trying to come to terms with without any hatred.
Well, aquaphobia is the fear of water. That’s a good example because another word actually exists to describe people who are afraid of water rather than just disregarding their fear because the word that might be used for it (hydrophobia) already means something else.
You’re absolutely correct that “(anything)phobic” is not an appropriate term for bigotry. Being phobic is as much a choice people make as being gay is, and of all the various groups, classes, etc. the gay community ought to understand.
The issue you’ll run into is common sense, and it’s lack of being common ;). Good luck trying to get people to understand, accept, acknowledge, etc.
Fear leads to panic, panic leads to pain, pain leads to anger, anger leads to hate.
I don’t have an answer, I just wanted to say it blew my mind that I never thought about this
The suffix -misia meana hatred. Both -misia and -phobia come from Greek.
isn’t misia used as a prefix? As in Misanthrop or Misogyn
I’ve seen the word homomisia and the general suffix -misia used to reflect that a lot of “phobias” really mean hatred and not fear.
for people who might genuinely be afraid of the idea of homosexuality, maybe even struggling with their own sexuality
seems like autohomophobia would be the right word.
Then may I propose a neologism: “Homosexualism” or “Homosexism” (discrimination of homosexual people)? Or alternatively “FOHO” (fear of homosexuality)? It would be interesting if another word already existed though.
Heterosexist.
See also heteronormativity. The latter is a major cause of the former.
