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i don't really understand homophobia, what causes people to be so angry at gay people? does someone know?
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@taylan @helene homophobia/transphobia/etc are from the first naturally occurent products of human evolution, as it is reproductively fit to split the world into strong categories of "mates" and "rivals" (with all the associated "primal urges" around sex and competition that entails) rather than to have a more accurate, "cerebral" understanding of mammalian biology and the messy mixed gradient of sexual dimorphism. and from a group perspective, strict social roles (which naturally develop to accommodate this built-in misunderstanding of biology) make for more stable and productive groups that can handle specialisation.(also it's a little ironic you should respond here to "disavow" the very thing you spend all your time obsessively reinforcing for some reason
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@helene Beliefs that are held very deeply for no other reason than the fact that others in your environment do so as well...Of course that leaves the question of who came up with the idea originally.I'd say it was originally rooted in patriarchy, then also encoded into various religions (which were invented by men), and later also e.g. white supremacism (again, mainly men).Why did patriarchal ideology invent homophobia? Well, the ideology says that men are strong and dominant, that their nature is to be on top (both literally and figuratively).Gay men subvert that to some degree, as many of them are somewhat effeminate, and they don't want to take control over a woman. Some patriarchal cultures would tolerate this, but only in limited ways:- Greek pederasty, where the older manly man can use a younger man for pleasure on the side, but are expected to marry (take control over) a woman, and those boys themselves have to become manly men at some point.- Various cultures with "third genders" (two-spirit, hijra, fa'afafine, kathoey aka "ladyboys," etc.) would assign gay/feminine men into a separate social category, apart from the manly "real" men.Other cultures just deemed all gay behaviour to be abhorrent, to make sure the myth of the naturally manly man on top vs. the naturally feminine woman at the bottom is kept believable.Homophobic religions just try to further establish these sex roles by saying that "god" wishes it to be so rather than "nature."White supremacism also has a strong connection to the image of the powerful, straight white man, as opposed to the "degenerate" fake-men of inferior races, which is why white supremacists use terms like "globohomo" to say that there's some globalist conspiracy led by Jews to force homosexuality upon humanity or something.
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@taylan What do you mean exactly?
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@helene Dogma.
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@taylan @helene might do well to bother reading before responding (though maybe it's as much my failure of clarity1. humans, like other mammals, have a built-in pattern matching system for differentiating "males" from "females" (as proxy for e.g. "mates" from "rivals"2 from 1. when presented with cases that cannot be cleanly placed into one of these categories, cognitive dissonance tends to occur, oftentimes leading to distress being relieved by punishing the difficult subject3. in order for a group (at the small, "tribal" community scale that was the human norm for millions of years) to be optimally successful, it must have strict task specialisation to ensure necessary upkeep is performed4 from 1, 3. task division tends to fall along the "male"/"female" divide as an easy built-in decision method (though some small degree of flexibility often appears for difficult to pin-down cases, e.g. allowing a person to choose to be "male" and take a "female" wife, or to choose to be "female" and take a "male" husband5 from 2, 4. can't-categorise-cognitive-dissonance is oftentimes exacerbated when faced with a person who also does not comply to the local system of social roles, yielding more more anti-gay and anti-trans persecution 6. 4 can be mitigated in a modern setting by governments enacting laws (which simultaneously lead to social instability, but seems an acceptable trade-off to have fewer people dying), but 2 will remain an issue regardlessas for the later part, not sure what you mean by "activism", but "trans" is a modern term roughly associated with a range of intersex conditions affecting sense of self, the existence of which is a natural side-effect of mammalian genetics and sexual developement. different terms have been used at different times (see e.g. the modernist writers Bryher and John Radclyffe Hall, who would today be called "trans" and at the time referred to themselves as "inverts")as to your 1., though it applies to some cases, it is very clearly does not when coming from the sort of themselves-lesbian you spend your time with who say things like "death to all trans women" and spend their time harassing people on the internet in the hopes they'll kill themselves. and in the case of trans men in the "western world" this latter sources is actually now the more common, coming often from people who themselves eventually transition (which is to say self-hatred fuelled, e.g. people who have been abused by men and hate themselves for their own need to be menand to 2., if such a person was to exist i guess it would just be down to never having learnt how mammalian biology works? (not uncommon). i'm not sure i've ever met such a person, though, as anyone who cares enough to voice such an opinion is generally somewhere in the last paragraph's categories
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@shmibs @helene There's no reason why straight men should see gay men as "rivals" of any kind, least of all in a sexual context. A heterosexual male trying to secure a female mate has no reason to be concerned about competition from a homosexual male, for obvious reasons.Them vs. us mentality might be in part human nature, but there's nothing biologically different about humans that make up some of the modern democracies in which things like homophobia are extremely reduced relative to some other societies (past or present) in which these issues were/are much more pressing.I'm pretty sure, for example, that you don't believe that Northern Europeans are less biologically inclined to be sexist and homophobic than people from the Middle East, right? It would be very ironic if you believed that. :blobcatjoy: That extreme difference in levels of homophobia despite the same biology is good evidence IMO that these things are primarily ideological, even if they tie in to human nature to a limited degree.And it's not like Saudi scientists or the Saudi population are dumb or uneducated about "real biology" either. Least of all the rich elite that keeps the state-enforced homophobia intact. Many of them are probably quite well educated and aware of the softer gradients in sexual dimorphism, disorders and differences of sex development, etc.Also, it's not a coincidence that the most homophobic societies also tend to be the most sexist/patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia. Again goes to show how tightly sexism and homophobia are linked to each other.>it's a little ironic you should respond here to "disavow" the very thing you spend all your time obsessively reinforcingTrans activism is just the newest form sexism has taken in the west, there's nothing pro-patriarchal about opposing it. Violent men bashing women is basically patriarchy 101, and the trans movement encourages that behavior:https://feministwiki.org/wiki/TERFI also disagree with your lumping together of homophobia with "transphobia." The way it's currently used, "transphobia" can refer to any number of completely unrelated things, such as:1. Hatred towards a transwoman or transvestite based on them being perceived as "gay" somehow (regardless of their actual sexual orientation) and thus being seen as a "failed man" or "making a mockery of what a man is supposed to be." This is actually just homophobia. If it happens to target a male person who's actually heterosexual, you could say it's "misdirected homophobia." Analogy: I had a German coworker who looked slightly middle eastern (he was part Spanish I think) and apparently had people holler anti-Turkish racist slurs at him. I'd call that "misdirected racism."2. Literally just disagreeing that a transwoman is female / a woman, but not having any sort of hatred against them or unjustly discriminating against them. In my opinion, it makes absolutely no sense to call this "transphobia" but apparently that's how the word is used now, which is why I can't take accusations of "transphobia" seriously anymore and don't see any sense in comparing it to homophobia.
Hélène
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