Phobia vs. -phobia; Homophobia, Transphobia, Denial, Repression, and Uncertainty

Phobia vs. -phobia;

Homophobia, Transphobia,
Denial, Repression, and Uncertainty,

by Liviana (Giovanna L.)

Lately, the author has noticed a reply to charges of homophobia (and/or transphobia) having seemingly become popular among those who are, in fact, homophobic (and/or transphobic) to a greater or lesser degree, and the reply in question is an attempt to attack the very designation "homophobia" (or "transphobia") on the grounds that a phobia is a fear and they are not afraid of Gay people (or Trans people) so they can't be homophobic (or transphobic).  The author is inclined to suspect that this rhetoric is derived from a common source, as she has noticed it more and more, and only of late.  The source, however, is irrelevant for the purposes of the present discussion, which will focus on the actual semantics of the terminology, rather than its source, and will go on to provide references defining and explaining homophobia and transphobia, as well as references which suggest another sort of explanation (not of meanings, but of causes).

The rhetoric in question ignores both common usage found in descriptive vocabularies as well as technical usage found in psychological, psychiatric, and sociological sources (and even sources concerned with more "physical" medicine), in which the suffix "-phobia" is not restricted to a meaning of "fear" only, much less only "irrational fear."

Witness common usage of the word defined:
Merriam-Webster

and medical usage of both the word and the suffix defined:
Merriam-Webster

The reader will note that, even in the first link, which describes common usage, the definition plainly states:

an extremely strong dislike or fear of someone or something

(Emphasis added.)

In the second link, the medical definition of the suffix is given as:

-phobia
noun combining form  -pho·bia  \ˈfō-bē-ə\
Medical Definition of -phobia
1
:  abnormal fear of <acrophobia>
2
:  intolerance or aversion for <photophobia>

For those who are unaware, photophobia is a medical (physical) condition (or symptom of some other [physical] condition):

Photophobia is eye discomfort in bright light.

--  Medline Plus Medical Encyclopedia | U.S. National Library of Medicine | National Institutes of Health

Gay Pride Flag

More specifically, here are definitions and explanations of "homophobia" and "transphobia":

Definition of homophobia
:  irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals

--  Merriam-Webster

Lesbian Pride Flag

Definition of homophobia in English:
noun
Dislike of or prejudice against homosexual people.

--  Oxford Dictionaries

Bisexual Moon Symbol

The Oxford Online Dictionaries also give:

Definition of transphobia in English:
noun
Intense dislike of or prejudice against transsexual or transgender people:
'more than 120 complaints concerning transphobia in the media were made'

--  Oxford Dictionaries

Transgender Pride Flag by Jennifer Pellinen

What is Homophobia

Understanding Homophobia/Heterosexism

Transphobia - RationalWiki

Transphobia has been defined by the Crown Prosecution Service as “the fear of or a dislike directed towards trans people, or a fear of or dislike directed towards their perceived lifestyle, culture or characteristics, whether or not any specific trans person has that lifestyle or characteristic. The dislike does not have to be so severe as hatred. It is enough that people do something or abstain from doing something because they do not like trans people.”

--  Tackling transphobia | CUSU LGBT+

To use an analogy, instead of everyone being evenly distributed in a sea, they are randomly swept up onto two separate islands, and there’s no swimming allowed in between! Each island has its own rules, or gender stereotypes, which set out how men or women should look, act or behave. The idea that boys should like blue and enjoy aggressive, competitive activities, whilst girls should be passive and nurturing, are two examples of gender stereotypes. There is strong pressure to conform to these gender rules. Society often penalises anyone who breaks the rules and the penalty is even worse particularly for those who try to leave the island which they found themselves on at birth – this is called transphobia and transphobia is the sharp end of sexism.
So, transphobia is intolerance of gender diversity. It is based around the idea that there are only two sexes – male or female, which you stay in from birth. And furthermore, that people who fit gender stereotypes (by sounding, looking or behaving like men and women are ‘supposed to’) are somehow better than those who don’t.
Trans people, gender queer people and people with a transsexual history can also experience homophobia, because the abuser often neither knows nor cares how a person identifies, just that they are different in some way.

--  What Is Transphobia? | Galop

Jennifer Pellinen's Transgender Pride Flag

Tran[s]phobia is an irrational fear of, and/or hostility towards, people who are transgender or who otherwise transgress traditional gender norms.

-- Transphobia - Definition and Examples


Interestingly, a number of studies have demonstrated a positive correlation between homophobia and repressed Homosexuality, which is to say, many homophobes are themselves Homosexuals in denial.  A brief sample of the literature follows, with quotes from some of the examples.

Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? | National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Parental autonomy support and discrepancies between implicit and explicit sexual identities: Dynamics of self-acceptance and defense. | American Psychological Association

Is Homophobia Associated with an Implicit Same-Sex Attraction? (Cara C. MacInnis & Gordon Hodson) - The Journal of Sex Research - 18 Sep 2012

Is Homophobia Associated With Homosexual Arousal? (Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright, Jr., and Bethany A. Lohr;  University of Georgia) - Journal of Abnormal Psychology - 1996, Vol. 105, No. 3 (.pdf file)

Homophobes Likely To Be Closet Gays, Study Finds | International Business Times

Is some homophobia self-phobia? -- ScienceDaily

Are Homophobes Really Gay? | Psychology Today

Study: Homophobes May Be Hidden Homosexuals | Homophobia & Anti-Gay Sentiment | LiveScience

The Roots Of Homophobia - Putting Freud To The Test | Assault On Gay America | FRONTLINE | PBS

Homophobic?  Maybe You're Gay - The New York Times

Homophobes Might Be Hidden Homosexuals - Scientific American

Homophobic Attitudes Likely To Be Stronger Among Those Who Have Repressed Same-Sex Attraction: Report

Are Homophobes Secretly Attracted to Gay People? | Psychology Today

Are Homophobic People Really Gay and Not Accepting It? | Psychology Today

Homophobia linked to lack of awareness of one's sexual orientation and authoritarian parenting, study shows

Homophobes Are Gay - Study (The Young Turks) (video)

Transgender Pride Flag by Monica Helms

More recently (since "transphobia" is itself a more recent term than "homophobia" -- as noted in the Oxford Dictionaries, "homophobia" dates from the 1960s, while "transphobia" dates from the 1990s), some thinkers have begun to suggest that transphobia may also have a positive correlation with a fragile gender identity, that transphobes may themselves be still "struggling with their own gender identity."  A couple of such discussions are linked below, with some quotations.

The cause of transphobia is still a subject of research and debate, but it likely reflects the fragile nature of gender identity. Men's and women's lives, genes, and bodies are not terribly different; the fact that someone can convincingly identify as a member of the opposite sex calls the very concept of gender into question. People who are quietly struggling with their own gender identity, and people for whom gender identity is especially important, might be frightened--even angry--when confronted with the fragility of gender.

-- Transphobia - Definition and Examples

Are our own gender identities so fragile that we must stigmatise a first-grader for using the girls' room?
...
Discrimination against transgender people is real, pervasive and often legal. And it often builds from ignorance and bias – things that start young.
...
While transgender people do face widespread mistreatment, the discrimination doesn't make much sense. Who, exactly, gets hurt if folks match their physical appearance to their gender identity? Why is it such a problem for a six-year-old girl to use the girls' bathroom?
Everyone has a gender identity. You do, and so do I. Just as the gay rights movement has made us collectively realize that we all have a sexual orientation – whether it be straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual or something else – advocates for transgender rights try to impart the lesson that each person has an internal sense of being male or female (or, for some folks, neither, or something in between). As Silverman says:
"We all have a gender identity. We just never have to think about if it we're not transgender because no one questions it."

-- From school to society, the intolerance transgender people face | The Guardian

In closing, the author will, again, quote a man whom she has quoted before in this blog -- a flawed man, yes, but a visionary man nevertheless (for each person, in spite of her or his best efforts, is imperfect, yet he or she can still do good despite her or his imperfections):

If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear.

-- Gene Roddenberry

Not something to fear, and, the author would add, not something to hate.

Va'Vuhnaya s'Va'Terishlar (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations)

Peace and long life.

Live long and prosper.

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Giving Tuesday

Leonard Nimoy, 1931-2015

Today is "Giving Tuesday," a global day dedicated to giving back.  For those who can and would like to give to a charity on this Giving Tuesday, many worthy causes exist.  I would like to recommend the following:

The COPD Foundation
in memory of Leonard Nimoy

The National Partnership for Women and Families

The Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund

Autism Speaks

Planned Parenthood

Donations to any of the charities above are tax-deductible, to the extent permitted by law.

If you are able and willing to make a donation which is not  tax-deductible, but nevertheless for a good cause, please consider giving to NARAL Pro-Choice America.






Thanks for giving, you who are willing and able to do so.

If you are not able to give, that's alright, too.  I've been there myself, and I understand.

Fads in Mental Diagnoses Revisited

In an earlier post, I made some observations about what I called "fads in mental diagnoses," and the epidemic of over-diagnoses of certain conditions.  New evidence has now been published, which may put this phenomenon in a new light.

From Salon:

There has been a lot of public agonizing lately about the steep rise in diagnoses of ADHD over the last two decades. There is growing, and justifiable, worry that a lot of kids are being put on stimulant medications who don’t need them.

What there hasn’t been is a plausible theory about what’s driving this explosion of diagnoses — 40 percent over the last decade and more than 50 percent over 25 years. The CDC now estimates that 12 percent of school age kids, and as many as 20 percent of teenage boys have been diagnosed with ADHD.

Blame has been directed at parents, for being so poor at discipline that they reach for a pill to make unruly kids settle down. Teachers are blamed for being so inept at maintaining order that they want students medicated into submission. Psychiatrists are blamed for being the pawns of drug companies peddling ADHD meds. But blaming doesn’t explain it. ...

Now comes a book that, finally, offers a data-based analysis that could begin to account for an increase on this scale. “The ADHD Explosion,“ by Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, considers all kinds of factors that may contribute to the surge, from diagnosis by undertrained and harried pediatricians to pharmaceutical advertising. But the eye-opening insight from Hinshaw, a clinical psychologist, and Schleffler, a health economist, who are colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, is the correlation between educational policies and the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses.

Using Centers for Disease Control surveys, Hinshaw and Sheffler found that when rates of ADHD diagnoses are broken down by state, it turns out that there are dramatic discrepancies. ...

What the team found was that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated closely with state laws that penalize schools when students fail. Nationally, this approach to education was enacted into law in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, which makes funding contingent on the number of students who pass standardized tests.

Read more:
The truth about ADHD: Over-diagnosis linked to cause championed by Michelle Rhee

SuccubaSuprema writes:
Many worthy criticisms of "No Child Left Behind" have been provided since 2001, but this newly published data may finally help to successfully euthanize the inane law.  Why would the Federal Government throw more money at schools which need it less in the first place?  It seems counterintuitive.

Sotomayor Temporarily Blocks Obamacare "Forcing" Some Religious Groups to Provide Birth Control Coverage

From The New York Times:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Obama administration from forcing some religious-affiliated groups to provide health insurance coverage of birth control or face penalties as part of the Affordable Care Act.

Acting at the request of an order of nuns in Colorado, Justice Sotomayor issued the stay just hours before the requirement was to go into effect on New Year’s Day. She gave the Obama administration until Friday to respond to the Supreme Court.

... Religious opponents of abortion have objected especially strongly to the requirement to provide emergency contraception pills, like Plan B, although most studies show that the drug works by preventing fertilization, not by inducing abortion. ...

 The Obama administration has repeatedly defended the birth control requirement. “The president believes that no one, including the government or for-profit corporations, should be able to dictate those decisions to women,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said last month.

Read more:
Justice Blocks Contraception Mandate on Insurance in Suit by Nuns


SuccubaSuprema writes:
Jehovah's Witnesses oppose blood transfusions.  Scientologists oppose psychiatric treatment.  Will businesses affiliated with these religious groups also be given exemptions for those specifics?  If an exception is made for religions with a large following like the Roman Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention, but not for religions with a smaller following such as the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Church of Scientology, would that not be a clear case of the government giving preferential treatment to specific religious groups while denying such privileges to other religious groups, and thus a rather blatant violation of not only the letter, but also the spirit, of the First Amendment's non-establishment clause?  Upon what basis is an employer entitled to make health decisions for his/her employees?  If a person believes that abortion or contraception is morally wrong, that person is free to refrain from having an abortion or using contraceptives, but that person has no authority or right to impose such beliefs -- or the practical application of those beliefs -- on anyone else.

More to the point, why does any employer have a right to know the medical history of any employee?  Is it not the usual operating procedure for any insurance provider to accumulate a resource pool from which to cover the medical expenses of any given subscriber, whether or not that subscriber or any other subscriber ever makes use of specific coverage?  And do insurance companies have any requirement to tell every subscriber the medical history of every other subscriber?  Is this not really about the typical capitalist desire to maximize the intake of wealth while decreasing any expenditures, rather than any sort of religious conviction?  If not, then is this not simply a case of religious imperialism?

Prohibited Research?

From Scientific American:

Imagine being an astronomer in a world where the telescope was banned. This effectively happened in the 1600s when, for over 100 years, the Catholic Church prohibited access to knowledge of the heavens in a vain attempt to stop scientists proving that the earth was not the center of the universe.  ‘Surely similar censorship could never happen today,’ I hear you say—but it does in relation to the use of drugs to study the brain.  Scientists and doctors are banned from studying many hundreds of drugs because of outdated United Nations charters dating back to the 1960s and 1970s.

Read more:
The Potential of LSD, Heroin, Marijuana and Other Controlled Substances in Brain Research

SuccubaSuprema writes:


The "guardians" of society (sometimes self-appointed, seldom qualified) have not uncommonly been biased by personal dogmatic beliefs, whether those beliefs were religious, political, economic, or something else.  In the case of seventeenth-century astronomy, the bias of the "guardians" was religious, a biblical literalism which, however, was not consistent with the Tradition of the Church -- but then again, that Tradition itself is hardly self-referentially consistent, contradicting itself on any number of points.  Indeed, as I have mentioned in previous posts here, a worldview colors one's perception of everything, and thus can result in distorted perceptions.  In the case of substance research, several different beliefs have resulted in such skewed perspectives.  In some cases, the culprit is a political viewpoint, in particular as relates to Philosophy of Law ("crime and punishment" and "protection of society" from perceived threats), without much regard for, or consideration of, the contentions of the medical community that addiction and dependence are medical situations, rather than (inherently) criminal.  In other cases, a political viewpoint is again involved, but in a sort of "us versus them" mentality, such that the "guardians" arrive at their conclusions based on opposition to an alternate political viewpoint.  In still other cases, economic viewpoints are involved, sometimes with vested interests (since Cannabis, for example, is an herb which can be grown almost anywhere, in widely varying conditions, its manufacture, distribution, and use cannot be effectively controlled -- and it cannot be patented, and thus, profits from Cannabis cannot be reliably restricted to the pharmaceutical industry, which has numerous less effective and potentially more harmful substances from which it wishes to continue to profit, regardless of the consequences for patients).  In yet other cases, the bias is again due to a religious viewpoint, whether that be the anti-intellectualism and epistemophobia (fear of knowledge) which is so typical of religious fundamentalists, or a belief that the distribution and use of such substances are somehow contrary to the will of the divine and thus must be prohibited (disregarding any lack of justification for such prohibition on the basis of separation of church and state, ignoring the failures of past efforts at prohibition, and, in the specific case of Christianity, blatantly defying teachings of the religion itself, in particular as regards such teachings as are found in the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of the gospel of Matthew and the fourteenth chapter of the epistle to the Romans).

In still yet other cases, addiction and/or dependence, or even a perspective based on an idealized understanding of the psychedelic movement (which may itself have religious dimensions, as suggested by, for example, the writings of Carlos Castaneda, and/or claims made by Dr. Timothy Leary), must be acknowledged as capable of biasing conclusions, with those who wish to have license to use such substances themselves basing their conclusions on that wish.

In spite of the latter possibility, the potential for increased knowledge (both neuroscientific/psychiatric and otherwise medical) from research into these substances is far more relevant and important than the fears of those who have embraced ignorance, superstition, irrationality, and prejudice.

Archaeology and Alcohol

Yes, once again, or rather, twice again, our friends in the discipline of Archaeology have made discoveries connected with alcohol.  Both of the following articles are from PastHorizons.

Archaeologists have unearthed what is claimed to be the oldest wine cellar in the Ancient Near East.  The sunken room contains forty ceramic jars that were capable of each holding 50 litres of wine. ...

Andrew Koh, assistant professor of classical studies at Brandeis University, ... an associate director ... analysed the storage vessel fragments using organic residue analysis and ... also discovered compounds that suggest the ingredients that were used to enhance the flavours in ancient wine-making, including honey, mint, cinnamon bark, juniper berries and resins.

The recipe is similar to medicinal wines used in ancient Egypt for two thousand years.

Read more:
Canaanite cellar provides a taste of 3700 year old wine

Spanish excavations in Can Sadurní cave (Begues, Barcelona) have discovered four human skeletons dated to about 6,400 years ago. The skeletal remains of the individuals are particularly important as they are in a very good state of preservation.

An archaeological campaign carried out previously identified other individuals which were not so well preserved but belong to the same stratigraphic layer.

Archaeologists excavating  in 1999, also discovered within the cave, evidence for the earliest European beer, which may have been included as part of  the death ritual.

Read more:
Neolithic death ritual includes earliest evidence for European beer

An Assessment of the US House of Representatives' Current Climate

From Jim Hightower's Commentaries:

Whacking yourself on the head with a ballpeen hammer would be stupid. But doing it again and again – that's insane.

Welcome to your US House of Representatives, presently led by a pack of tea party Republicans. They are so crazed by Obamacare that they repeatedly hammer themselves over the head with it, having voted 46 times (so far) to dismantle, defund, delay, deny, and otherwise destroy this landmark health care bill – all to not avail. ...

... Even the Senator from Oz, Ted Cruz, understood that the program had to be aborted before it was born. It will be so loved, Cruz candidly conceded (as he desperately tried to suffocate Obamacare with a painfully-long filibuster), that the public will be "hooked" on it for the long haul. ...

Read more:
GOP unhinged by Obamacare

Migraines Are Different in Men and Women

From Scientific American:

Researchers at Harvard University, however, have come at least one step closer to figuring out why women are twice as likely to suffer from chronic migraines as men. The brain of a female migraineur looks so unlike the brain of a male migraineur, asserts Harvard scientist Nasim Maleki, that we should think of migraines in men and women as “different diseases altogether.”

Read more:
Sex Matters in Migraines