homophobia Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Why Do We Call Certain Prejudices “Phobias”?

The English language has many words that describe different kinds of prejudices. Some names for specific prejudices end in the suffix -phobia, such as: xenophobia (hatred or prejudice against foreigners), Islamophobia (hatred or prejudice against Muslims), homophobia (hatred or prejudice against gay and bisexual people), lesbophobia (hatred or prejudice against lesbians specifically), biphobia (hatred or prejudice against bisexual people specifically), and transphobia (hatred or prejudice against transgender people).

The suffix -phobia comes from a Greek root meaning “fear” and, in English, it is most commonly used in words that describe extreme, irrational, abnormal, or obsessive fears. As a result of this, often, when one person accuses another person of having a -phobia prejudice, the accused person will object to the term by making some variant of the assertion: “I can’t be [insert -phobia prejudice word here] because I’m not afraid of foreigners/Muslims/gay people/lesbians/bi people/trans people.”

This objection is, of course, invariably either extremely ignorant or disingenuous; words like xenophobia, et alii refer primarily to prejudices or hatreds and do not primarily indicate literal fears. This, however, raises the interesting question: Why does our language have so many words for prejudices that end in -phobia? To answer this question, I will explore the history of how the suffix -phobia entered into the English language and how the words with this suffix we know today arose. Surprisingly, the earliest attested English word with this suffix did not indicate a literal fear, but rather an aversion to water in patients with rabies.

In Ancient Greece, Children Wearing Drag Was a Religious Obligation!

As I discuss in great detail in this recent post I wrote about the ongoing right-wing attack on LGBTQ+ people in the United States, in the past month, right-wingers have been having a full-on moral panic about the existence of child-friendly drag performances. These rightists perceive drag itself as inherently sexual and therefore inherently inappropriate for children. Many of them are claiming that allowing a child to view any form of drag is somehow “child abuse” or “grooming.” In the heat of this moral panic, neo-fascists have disrupted and even planned violent attacks on drag performances that are billed as child-friendly and Republican lawmakers in multiple red states have proposed bills that would make it a crime to allow any person under the age of eighteen to view any kind of performance involving drag.

As I have already explained at greater length in my previous post, drag is just a variety of costume; it’s a person dressing up as a different gender. There is nothing inherently sexual about it. Although many drag performances for adult audiences do make use of sexual humor and innuendo and are therefore inappropriate for young children, such innuendo is not integral to drag itself and some drag performances can be genuinely child-friendly. Moreover, laws banning drag performances in the presence of children, if they are vaguely worded enough, could be used to criminally prosecute trans and gender-nonconforming people for wearing clothes associated with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth in any public place where children could conceivably be present.

In this post, I thought I would mention, from an ancient historical angle, that the ancient Greeks would be absolutely baffled by twenty-first-century U.S. right-wingers’ paroxysms over child-friendly drag. All the female roles in Greek drama were originally portrayed by men in drag at religious festivals where at least older children were present, it was a religious custom for men to dress in drag for certain religious festivals and occasions where children could be present, and the ancient Athenians even had a festival at which two adolescent boys were religiously mandated to dress in drag themselves.

The Right Wing’s Ongoing Attack on LGBTQ+ People

This post is going to be a bit of a departure from my usual ancient history content. As some of my readers already know, I am a transgender woman. I am also bi/pansexual. Unfortunately, for roughly the past year and a half, but especially the past month, the political right wing in the United States has been increasingly making queer people, especially transgender people, into a primary target for vilification and attack. I can’t possibly cover everything the right has been doing in the past year and a half to attack us, but I feel it necessary to make my readers aware of just a tiny bit of some of what they have been doing and saying.

In the past month, Republican lawmakers have continued to push increasingly restrictive legislation and policies to take away or drastically curtail the existing rights of queer people, especially transgender people. Right-wing pundits have dedicated much time and attention to propagating a false, bigoted, and dangerous narrative that LGBTQ+ people are “grooming” children for sexual molestation. Meanwhile, neo-fascist and right-wing extremist groups have relentlessly targeted, harassed, and even tried to violently attack events associated with Pride and the LGBTQ+ community all across the United States. Sadly, all signs strongly indicate that things are only going to get much, much worse from here over the next few years, especially for those living in Republican-controlled states.

This post will be a very long one and it will discuss many deeply depressing topics. Nonetheless, I urge you, if you are a straight, cisgender person who genuinely cares about the wellbeing of any queer person, please read this post to the very end, since it will cover some very important information about the ongoing evisceration of queer rights in the U.S.

How Misogyny, Homophobia, and Antisemitism Influence Transphobia

I have developed a very unhealthy habit of deliberately seeking out bigoted and hateful content on the internet and studying it intensely in a mostly vain attempt to understand and analyze it. I really shouldn’t do this, because studying the deplorable things people have written online only intensifies my constant and overwhelming anxiety and makes me lose all faith in humanity. I have, however, learned some things from reading bigotry online about the ways bigoted people think.

Transphobia is a bigotry that has existed for a very long time. It is arguably already present in nascent form in the ancient Greek sources from the third century BCE that talk about the Galli, a group of ancient priests who, as I discuss in this article I published in August 2020, deliberately castrated themselves, wore their hair in feminine styles, dressed in traditionally feminine clothing, and worshipped the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele. Nonetheless, transphobia has only recently begun to develop its own discourse. In this article, I am going to use an example to analyze how contemporary transphobic discourse draws heavily on the older, more established discourses of misogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism.

Readers should be forewarned that this article discusses a wide range of the most unpleasant and depressing subjects imaginable, including sexual assault, transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, child molestation, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, Nazis, the Holocaust, ritual cannibalism, drug addiction, murder, pogroms, and mass genocide. There will also be some quotes with a lot of profanity, slurs, and extreme insults, which I have partly censored. This is not a piece that I enjoyed writing in the slightest, but I feel that the points I am about to make need to be made.