Is Homophobia a Thing of the Past?
I was heartened yesterday when someone told me in the discussion on the previous post they believed Canada had, for the most part, eradicated homophobia from schools. This would certainly be the model to look into because it’s still very much a thing in many parts of the world. Ethan Henderson in the picture above was relentlessly bullied after coming out. His school took a strict zero tolerance approach but his tormentors moved online. His mother says: “the local farm boys would say hateful things, they’d call him faggot, they’d stay away telling him he was gonna give them AIDS or die from it.”
I googled Canadian statistics in hopes of understanding more about the model. My first stop was Statistics Canada. According to them “59% LGB+ people in Canada had been physically or sexually assaulted at least once since age 15, a much larger proportion than the 37% heterosexual people who reported the same.” Second I visited Egale. They say “Since 2020, there has been a rise of 64% in hate crimes”. And how about in schools? Egale also reports based on a major survey (Every Class in Every School- University of Winnipeg), that for example, over 60% of respondents heard homophobic comments daily or weekly at school. So, I’m afraid the illusion I went to bed with last night didn’t last very long.
The Christian Right fought anti-bullying measures focused on sexual minorities often laying out the argument that people can be bullied for anything. Their weight, their family’s affluence or lack-there-of, their looks and so forth. The obvious answer to that is yes indeed. Anyone can be bullied for all those things – INCLUDING gay, lesbian and trans people. What we’re saying is there’s another massive target on our backs when we’re part of a sexual minority or even just perceived to be part of a sexual minority. That means we are, in simple maths, much more likely to be targeted both in person and online.
As the Trevor Project reports: LGBTQ+ young people are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020).
LGBTQ+ young people (ages 13-24) seriously consider suicide each year in the U.S. — and at least one attempts suicide every 45 seconds.
Among gay or lesbian youth, 37% seriously considered suicide and 19% attempted. And among straight youth, 14% seriously considered suicide and 6% attempted suicide.
And you can be an adult in a major metropolis like Paris in 2024, talking to your friends about a gay date, someone at the next table hears you and decides to insult and attack you. You can be a gay athlete playing in a game and a group in the crowd can decide it’s time for a little homophobic chanting. You can be in a progressive city like Bristol, but you had a pride flag in your hand so you get violently punched in the face. Or Nottingham. Or you can be murdered in Tampa while walking your dog. You can also be beaten to oblivion in Madrid. Or just insulted on a street in Calgary.
So, as much as things may have improved in the past few years, we’re very far from the problem being resolved.
My Mazamet 
And if you think of Canada as a modern progressive state, where people are allowed to live and let live, don’t look at the U.S. The political party of “small government,” arguing that government ought to stay out of people’s personal lives has decided that intruding deeply into people’s personal lives is fine, now. They want to ban crossdressers, especially drag queens. They want to ban abortions and even traveling to other state’s to acquire one, making it a felony in some states for anyone to drive their loved one to another state to do just that. Oh, this was the party of “individual responsibility,” meaning that government didn’t need so many rules and laws, people just needed to be responsible, individually.
The turnaround in positions is ironic and immense.
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Indeed. The Don’t Say Gay bills are cropping up in many red states. Alabama just expanded theirs. People in Louisiana and Ohio are trying to advance their own. North Carolina has one. Absolutely incredible.
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My own people embarrass me . . . <sigh>.
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Everything you have written is true. But it’s more than that, worse than that. The free-floating hostility and rage is appalling. Women in New York City are being randomly punched in the face by strangers, just walking down the street. I would think no, urban legend, but my source is the NY Times. Look at all the gun violence, not to mention the fight against any sort of gun safety law. A new thing is middle and high school boys making deepfake nude images of their female classmates. I could go on for pages about the random acts of evil that are everywhere but, I’m sad to say, especially in the States.
Each individual issue needs to be fought against. Guns, homophobia, misogyny, racism: it’s hard to know what to prioritize. But I would start by asking what is causing so much anger. It seems to have boiled over, so that folks aren’t even embarrassed about codifying that rage into law or, say, invading another country. The specific issue almost seems secondary. I don’t know what to make of it.
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Looks like a return to tribalism…tribalism by identity….reinforcing the identity by attacking the ‘other’. Why and how? Poor education, nomatter how much you pay for it, and governments happy to see their citizens at each other’s throats while they rob the state for the benefit of those who put them in power.
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Yes, yes and yes.
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We have to fight for all of it. Starting with feminism because it’s the primordial prejudice. Women are the 51%. And yes, remember when that woman in Paris was punched last year for rejecting a rude comment?
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In a hundred years, when atheism is the dominant philosophy, people will taunt and bully the religious right. But, of course they won’t as atheists, above all things, are tolerant folk. This is of course an impossible dream. 1/2 the world’s population has an IQ < 100, the balance of which are religious zealots breeding more ID10Ts.
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Isn’t there a much higher birth rate for lower IQ? It’s like Darwin and imaginary god got together for a prank.
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It’s a subject worthy of a hundred comments passing by each other like comets in the night, but maybe there’s too much even-handed truth in what you write in the post to elicit the shower.
I’m not sure the disease is even correctly named: “ phobias” are real and specific maladies, but the religion-inspired hatred that accompanies violent animosity towards sexual minorities is more idiotic and bestial than a tic from a misperforming brain.
There has been progress on this from the humanist wing of the heterosexual majority, but humans do not possess the self-governing power to truly bury the nonsense in alleged adults, let alone in the panic-driven reptilian motivations of bullying cretins.
Violence and its horrific effects will always be a part of the dismal human enterprise. At least you’ve made it mainstream enough to have gay and lesbian couples at least in each other’s vicinity in TV advertisements – I don ‘t remember any of those when I was inventing binge-watching after school of “Gilligan’s Island.”
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The way you string words together is quite beautiful.
Yes, quite horrific. My partner and I have never dreamed of holding hands in public, or anything remotely along those lines. People of our generations had to prioritise safety. We’ll end our days this way because we feel we transgress enough already in being ourselves. That doesn’t mean the caution isn’t exhausting.
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I’m really dismayed to.hear that, as sensible as you and your life partner are being. What a brural ondemnarion of the enduring idiocy of human conduct – not letting other humans express the joys of physical affection in public.
Of course, no gay or lesbian couples are allowed to to -gasp- have a millimeter of connected physical contact on screen. Maybe hugs, I don’t know. Not even one kiss with your love, once, in a restaurant? Maybe in Provincetown, Mass? Not even there?
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I imagine it’s mostly safe in our small town, more so for people in a position of some affluence because that in itself creates a buffer – but I still wouldn’t risk it. Never a kiss in a restaurant, never holding hands anywhere – nothing public except in gay bars.
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Isn’t it sad how we have to prioritise our safety? People in our village know that my partner and I are a couple, but I feel that it’s better not to ‘rub their noses’ in it through displays of public affection. I’ve been very lucky not to have been the victim of physical violence, but …
Last week when I visited my home-town in Germany, I saw a young gay couple embracing in a very public spot. Something that would never have happened when I was their age. So there are changes for the better, but all it needs is one person to start the abuse.
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It is sad. I saw a young gay couple arm in arm in the park the other day and the first thing I did was look around to see the types of the other people who were there in case there might be danger. I think people who haven’t experienced that sort of hesitation and anxiety have no idea what it’s like.
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Egale depends on federal funds and they are famous for their law suits paid by the taxpayers to get the gravy train going. When one lumps anything less than full endorsement of all things trans as ‘hate’ of course you’re going to get these kinds of statistics. With a rise of gender identity, I don’t know what constitutes a gay or lesbian anymore. It’s all about identity and, when your social status is tied to victimhood, of course your going to get reports of all kinds of ‘phobic’ attacks. Consider the rise of those who call themselves a member of a victimized minority where I had one female student claiming to be ‘generally’ non binary but certainly gay and so a guy who expressed his interest in her (probably inappropriately) as a female was then reprimanded as sexually ‘assaulting’ them, which was listed as a anti-gay event.
Good grief. Once you implement whack-a-mole language games with gender-sex and identity-minority, all related stats basically become absolutely useless.
Most kids at the schools I was at prior to the Age of Stupid had no issue with anyone who was different… whether by sexual attraction, ethnicity, religion, whatever. Today, it’s all gone to shit and we are more divided because of this nonsense to the extent where Canadians don’t even like what their country has become.
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Just because you didn’t personally see it, doesn’t mean it was happening. I can assure you kids experience homophobia regularly in much of the world. Is your claim that that’s not true despite world wide statistics which confirm it?
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My claim is that one must take such stats collected from and touted by the ‘words-are-violence’ crowd with a huge grain of salt.
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The Canadian homophobia statistics look very similar to those of other developed countries. It seems to me you’re trying to paint a picture where homophobia is imaginary and every example and reference I cited isn’t valid.
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I’m sure homophobia still exists in Canada and there will be examples of bullying of effeminate boys. What I doubt are the statistics of widespread discrimination and bullying gathered by captured institutions and organizations dedicated to representing and profiting from enlarging its ‘victim’ pool. When the law is shaped by privileging victim identity and focusing on (and believing that) ‘offensive’ language as some kind of violence, these statistics lose all connection with reality and present a narrative that is not true in daily lives. I have a very hard time believing many people discriminate against same sex attracted people because ‘they’ are everywhere and we meet and work and play and compete with ‘these’ people every day. Being gay or lesbian is normalized to the point where it has no additional currency. It’s like someone being blond or brunette; no one I’ve encountered holds that as some kind of meaningful characteristic, yet according to StatsCan using self-reporting, there is rampant bigotry all around us. Well, quite simply this isn’t true or we would see and hear it all around us all the time and this we do not.
So something is askew here.
What I do know is that criticism of certain unfair policies and practices that actively discriminate against the majority is treated by these institutions and organizations as ‘proof’ of bigotry. This I see all the time. And it is destroying the common fabric of the country, dismantling its history and replacing it with an ideological fantasies, criminalizing dissent, destroying trust in institutions, and dividing people into conflicted identity camps. And the reasoning often presented by those who think all of this is progressive and kind is that this hostile labeling of dissenters is necessary to be ‘on the right side of history’ to dismantle racism, bigotry, and colonialism. It falls under the words of tolerance and inclusion and equity but mean their opposite and is then justified because, hey, look at these numbers!
So we cannot trust these numbers to reflect what’s true in reality (nor can we trust our own eyes); they reflect what many believe is true that oh by the way, just so happens to align with their progressive ideology and tolerates no dissent or criticism of it. And for that I have lots of evidence that grows daily. But no one keeps track at StatsCan of how many women are attacked by men in women’s prisons once the policy is implemented to call all these men who self-identify as women women. Look at the numbers! Sexual assault by women is exponentially increasing in women’s prisons! It must be the fault of cisnormative white folk exercising bigotry in the eurocentric legal system! Oh, the genocides!
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Unfortunately your argument does not follow. There are gay people everywhere therefor homophobia doesn’t exist is the equivalent to there are women everywhere so male chauvinism doesn’t exist. In fact women are the 51% which I suppose means women have the uper hand. Reformulate your logic and we can go from there.
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Umm… you’re not following me, Pink, if your example indicates what you think I’m saying here. In short, I do not believe statistics gathered using a narrative to categorize them (rather than reality) reflects reality. I’m not trying to deny homophobia exists; I do not believe these statistics that categorize self-reported harm by those who benefit from identifying as victims reflect reality. They reflect the narrative used to create them.
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Let’s take one example I quoted, that over 50% of Canadian youth hear homophobic languagr at school on a daily or weekly basis. Would you dispute that part of the survey?
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I have no doubt the number of reported instances has skyrocketed, not because there has been an increase in homophobia but because what constitutes ‘homophobic speech’ has ballooned. For example, criticizing the new rainbow flag suddenly sprouting on public flagpoles everywhere – including in front of every public school – is considered ‘homophobic speech’. Or daring to question the appropriateness of libraries instituting Drag Queen Story Hours and advertising these as ‘family friendly’. Homophobia, donchaknow. Criticizing the spread of various supportive ‘trans days of recognition’ especially at schools that then ‘celebrate’ this expanding calendar – once upon a time a single day that then became a week that has now become literally months and months of every year – with all kinds of associated projects, presentations, and of course recommended dress is immediately labeled as ‘homophobic speech’. And this list of ‘bigotry’ grows and grows and grows, very often emerging from highly divisive issues about trans activism that is then immediately and reliably repackaged as ‘homophobia’. In other words, sure the stats are there. But they don’t mean what you assume they mean. This is a club used to bludgeon people into compliance or justify vilification of them. And those numbers, Pink, have equivalently skyrocketed with every captured institution. But those, of course, are considered ‘justified’ because, you see, they are ‘homophobic’ and so bad people deserve punishment.
These numbers are a reflection of a captured language and not, as you presume, an indication of homophobia in action in reality.
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I presume we have different ideas of homophobic comments. To a gay person a homophobic comment is one that derides being gay or equates it to something negative. As I mentioned before the use of words like fag, fairy, fruit, sissy – and even the use of the word gay itself to denote something bad, is still very common. I imagine 10 times more common than any kid arguing about any flag. That is in fact, homophobia in action.
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Right. We are in agreement about what real homophobia looks and sounds like. That’s what I’m not seeing, and certainly nothing comparable to what the statistics are trying to indicate reflects reality. They simply don’t. And as far as actual homophobia you’ve described, I would go so far as to say it’s actually quite rare now that same sex attraction is considered quite normal because it’s widely accepted to be biological and not socially constructed. Most folk – if they are ‘cisnormative’ to use the artificial lingo – generally do not discriminate on the basis of any inherited traits. But they do complain about having some foreign and divisive ideology rammed down their collective throats… hence the statistical numbers that have been shoved into the bag called ‘homophobia’. And this is exactly why the transactivists absolutely insist that they are just as ‘gay’ so to speak as any other same sex attracted person. This is why there is SO much effort to try to convince others that – well, now approaching one in five children – are born ‘trans’. Activists for gender queer theory are trying desperately and, unfortunately, with much success to slip trans under the LGB tent to steal cover and protection from being held to account. Anyone who tries to do so is immediately painted as a bigot and a homophobe not because they are but because this tactic works. We are to believe – without any compelling evidence from reality – that there really is something called ‘gender’ that really can be and often is inherited biologically! And the widespread belief needed to produce this mass delusion is vital to artificially create the ‘trans’ child. People actually believe there IS such a biological inheritance. (Because if they don’t….)
Except that gender is a social construct based not on biology but FEELINGS versus comparisons to social stereotypes! (This is what other commentators have said about their own childhood and comparisons to these masculine and feminine stereotypes… and they do so because they understand gender is all about these comparisons!)
This is why I say the trans community and their supporters can’t have it both ways (biological AND social), yet that is EXACTLY what transactivists and their supporters have accomplished by using the LGB cover. The trans community’s stand-alone reasons for infusing so much belief into ‘gender’ falls apart with internal inconsistencies and incoherence if this cover is removed. That’s why any criticism of anything trans immediately becomes another example of ‘homophobia’. It’s bullshit. It’s not, using our shared understanding of what homophobia really is.
So numbers that indicate a rise and common occurrence of ‘homophobia’ must be understood as coming primarily from how the definition of homophobia has been captured and used for enabling the trans community who have worked tirelessly to make sure those in positions of public authority are scared to death to disagree with the belief or face the mob-level mentality behind social consequences produced by those who see themselves as ‘championing’ victims of bigotry.
But I am seeing kids trying on various genders and names and pronouns like clothing and taking them out for social spin… often to gain a reaction that can then be used as ‘evidence’ of victimization and being targeted for ‘genocide’ when the outward response doesn’t match with the interior fantasyland/imagined lived experience/artificial identity/receiving some kind of ‘phobic’ response used to add social status.
This use of enlightenment language, this war against the very terms understood to mean one thing in a liberal society, to mean the opposite is very intentional. The term ‘homophobia’ is just one example. It is a captured term and then altered to serve the need not of what’s true in reality but to fool people into supporting stuff they would not otherwise support and then rewarding them with increased social status for going along to get along.
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Fascinating! So because you don’t personally see homophobia, you think it doesn’t exist? What percentage of teens, say, in a developed country like Switzerland do you think admits to using openly homophobic language on a regular basis?
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Pink, I never said homophobia doesn’t exist. Quite the opposite. But I keep reiterating that the volume supposedly revealed by Canadian statistics doesn’t make sense except in light of altering the meaning of the term.
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Wasn’t there a spike in hate crimes post Trump? I think Evangelicals jumped on the bandwagon a restarted many of their anti gay campaigns. There will certainly be an explanation for it.
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Also, when victimhood is needed for status and one’s funding depends on being regarded as representing victims, one should hold statistical claims with a higher degree of skepticism.
Haven’t you noticed that almost every LGB group has ‘transitioned’ into becoming a ‘champion’ for trans issues? Egale, for example, thinks and legally pursues the rights of children to self diagnose their ‘gender’ issues, implement alterations, and socially transition at school aided and abetted by teachers and administrators but keeping all of this secret from parents. Doin otherwise is considered ‘outing’ a student and the law should support this. remember, without these law suits about trans issues, Egale has no business left to justify their existence and paychecks from the taxpayer.
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Most gay groups have taken to the defence of trans people because they’re the ones under attack at the moment. I find this assertion that gay groups no longer need to exist or need funding borders on the ridiculous – especially after I’ve listed a number of hate crimes/incidents which occurred just in the past few months.
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Under attack? There’s the narrative. You’ve assumed the conclusion.
To use just one example out of many, when we have an entire medical system currently conducting a live interventionist experiment on children with no good evidence of efficacy and a growing evidence base of massive harm (that’s not my opinion but the conclusions of every major medical review carried out by many countries and states), it’s revealing that criticism of this practice (for cause) is widely painted and just as widely accepted as ‘attacking trans people’. In a nutshell, you have demonstrated the problem of using statistics based on similar narrative assumptions as deeply problematic if you think they honestly represent what’s true in reality. To then use these narrative-approved statistics to legitimize more and more practices and policies to counter these ‘attacks’, we find ourselves collectively in a social hole we keep on digging. This cannot end well.
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Trans people represent 0.4% of the population. We’ve had statistics discussions before and I still find it amusing how you’re prepared to use some to bolster your arguments while being perfectly prepared to dismiss any number that contradicts your position. That’s not how math or studies work.
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If you look at recent data on gender identification, how surprised are you to find the young adult cohort identifies around 30% not ‘cisnormative’ and (IIRC) something like just under 20% as trans. If the .4% has any meaning relative to reality, then surely you must question why the sudden and rapid onset of gender dysphoria in our young and how has this come to be. In other words, you can’t have your gender cake and eat it, too. As I previously stated (relative to the supposedly high percentage of homophobia events), something here is askew. You are interpreting this observation I am making as using numbers when it’s convenient and dismissing them when they’re not. Your interpretation is incorrect.
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For what it’s worth from my little hetero corner of the world, I don’t know a single person, friend or family who has an iota of homophobia nor would tolerate it x
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That’s fantastic. I think Scotland, like Catalonia, has been really great making progress on these things.
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I live in a neighborhood of Chicago with a large gay population and even here, I’ve heard and seen gay people attacked verbally for being gay. A guy who owns a framing shop here for pictures was recently thinking he was going to have to leave the area because he was being harassed daily with anti gay slurs from idiots who hang out on the corner by his shop. Luckily that didn’t happen and those bums have left the area but it happens here all too often.
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Exactly. That’s why when people say homophobia no longer exists, they’re not entirely aware of the reality many of us face on a daily basis. I mean, if 85% of Swiss teens admit to using homophobic language regularly, a red flag goes up.
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I wrote a post today which marginally touches into this subject. We must stop this judging, marginalizing, separating any one from the other. We are All One. And that is the down to the bone truth. The hatred of me is a hatred of yourself. Be done with it.
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Indeed. We can say that because we see each other very easily. We can and do relate; from Rockford to Hawaii to the mountainside. My worry is for the not seen.
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I totally understand. But if we collectively don’t wake the fuck up and soon, I’m afraid our species is headed toward extinction. There is only love, in the end. No matter the myth of separation the lost ones keep perpetrating. Bless this poor boy, who could be my son. Any woman’s son. We need to stop modeling hatred and division and start teaching one another the value of all life.
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