The problem with homophobia
With the term, that is.
The word 'homophobia' originated as a supposedly scientific description of a psychological malady. As such, it belongs in the same category as agoraphobia, claustrophobia, arachnophobia, hemophobia, and so on.
But its main usage, today, is as a way of denouncing someone as evil and worthy of being, say, fired from a job, denied the right to give a speech, rejected as a sponsor of a product, and so on.
But that's not the way we treat people with other phobias! We don't say, "Oooh, he's an evil claustrophobe: force him out of his job at Mozilla!" No, we offer the person sympathy for the psychological difficulty from which they suffer. We might, regretfully, decide that we can't hire an acrophobe to lead our mountain climbing expeditions, but that would not be because we hated him for his acrophobia, but because his acrophobia would render him unable to perform the job. Still, we'd say, "Great guy in all other respects, but we just can't put him up high on a mountain leading a tour group!"
"Homophobia" is an attempt to have it both ways: on the one hand, any actual arguments a person might present contra, say, gay marriage can be dismissed without consideration as stemming from their "phobia." But, at the same time, that very same person can be denounced as evil, as though they were making free choices, and not in the grip of an actual phobia.
The word 'homophobia' originated as a supposedly scientific description of a psychological malady. As such, it belongs in the same category as agoraphobia, claustrophobia, arachnophobia, hemophobia, and so on.
But its main usage, today, is as a way of denouncing someone as evil and worthy of being, say, fired from a job, denied the right to give a speech, rejected as a sponsor of a product, and so on.
But that's not the way we treat people with other phobias! We don't say, "Oooh, he's an evil claustrophobe: force him out of his job at Mozilla!" No, we offer the person sympathy for the psychological difficulty from which they suffer. We might, regretfully, decide that we can't hire an acrophobe to lead our mountain climbing expeditions, but that would not be because we hated him for his acrophobia, but because his acrophobia would render him unable to perform the job. Still, we'd say, "Great guy in all other respects, but we just can't put him up high on a mountain leading a tour group!"
"Homophobia" is an attempt to have it both ways: on the one hand, any actual arguments a person might present contra, say, gay marriage can be dismissed without consideration as stemming from their "phobia." But, at the same time, that very same person can be denounced as evil, as though they were making free choices, and not in the grip of an actual phobia.
Gene, this is what I think happened. Regardless of the actual origin of the term, people started viewing the term homophobia as analogous to the term xenophobia. Xenophobia too no doubt originated as a term for an actual phobia like acrophobia, but it acquired the meaning of "bigotry against foreigners". Similarly people think of homophobia as bigotry against gays, not as some psychological condition.
ReplyDeleteThat is what is going on with the coining of terms like transphobia and Islamophobia, they're all being coined in analogy with xenophobia, not in analogy with claustrophobia. If today people had to make up terms from scratch for what they actually want to describe, they'd probably make terms analogous to the word "racism", like maybe "homism" or "heteroism" or "orientationism".
Blatant logicophobia on your part!
ReplyDelete