Being 'phobic'?

[HarrietSmith]

This is seen as 'bad' thing and/or a sign of weakness. I'm thinking of terms like 'homophobic'. And 'transphobic.' It equates fear with ignorance at best, hatred and prejudice at worst.

Yet surely our experience as women teaches us that fear is sometimes a rational, legitamate response to real danger.

Any thoughts?

Good point. I've thought this for a long time. Why should someone be shamed for being afraid? Isn't this a form of reverse bulling? Its passive aggressive. And I agree fear can be rational.

Do you really think homophobic people are scared of gay people?

I never understood why the term was '...phobia' because the definition isn't anything to do with fear, it's just 'hatred of' or 'prejudice against' the group.

The transphobia thing is weird, because the arguments on here suggest that people are scared of the potential threat from trans people (or particularly self-ID) but most people are very clear that they don't see themselves as transphobic.

You're looking at the actual make-up of the words, but forgetting that that isn't how society uses/understands them.

Homophobia is not rational, and it's not 'reverse bullying' to call it out.

The point is I am raising is that if someone says:-

'You're claustrophobic' or 'You are agarophobic' there is no level of moral judgement involved.

If a person says, 'You're homophobic' or 'You're transphobic' there most definitely is.

So I am wondering when/why/how the use of 'phobic' shifted in this way, and welcome people's thoughts.

Well, maybe because agoraphobia or arachnophobia primarily impacts the individual (and maybe the spiders they kill) but homophobia/transphobia impacts other, usually innocent, people.

It is used to harm others, it takes away their rights and freedoms, and often their lives.

If someone is homophobic and just keeps it to themselves there won't be any moral judgement because people won't know, when a person decides to be outwardly homophobic then people are entitled to call it out and to judge that person for their horrible beliefs.

It's more like racism than claustrophobia.

I don't know why the word chosen was phobia, I've never really understood that.

I think homophobic people are not scared of gay people, but scared of how seeing out happy gay people might make them feel about their own desires that they have squashed down.

We are all taught that certain things "should" be repressed. Those things will depend on the culture and family we grew up in, I'm not talking specifically about homosexuality.

Seeing someone breaking those rules and it being ok causes cognitive dissonance in the person seeing it. And on way to deal with cognitive dissonance is rage. I believe that's what homophobia is (and also a lot of misogyny, misogynoir and racism).

I think all the "phobias" we are talking about do exist. But I also think external people ascribe things to a phobia, when they aren't phobic.

E.g. there are definitely transphobes out there. Some people will react very badly to seeing what they perceive as a "man in a dress" or a "woman pretending she's a man" because it goes against their internal rules of how men and women should behave. That is transphobia, homophobia and sexism all rolled into one.

But saying a vagina is female isn't transphobic, it's a fact. External people trying to suggest transphobia are just talking nonsense.

I would guess the original meaning was more along the lines of "aversion to" rather than "fear of".

It's a lazy term designed to shut down discussion because the TRA agenda doesn't hold up to scrutiny. I'm not afraid of trans people (I worked in international human rights law for years and campaigned for the right of trans people to marry). I am afraid of being forced to surrender our hard won women's rights, of having my experience as a biological woman appropriated and of being relegated to 'second-class woman' by TIMs. 3 billion biological women in the world able to give a first-hand account of the experience of being a biological woman and yet increasingly it's becoming the norm for TIMs to speak for us and tell us where we've been going wrong

I think, the "-phobia" suffix indicating fear in the term "homophobia" was primarily suggesting fear of one's own sexuality, [That the guy who went gay-bashing was carrying such anger and hatred because he was afraid of his own, unacknowledged, homosexual desires] as much as it was about fearing being raped by 'The Gays' (as claimed when using "Gay Panic" as legal defence).

Even when transactivists use the word to mean someone who genuinely hates trans people (rather than meaning someone who knows male humans cannot become female humans,or that women don't have dicks) I'm not convinced that the hate is based on being scared of trans or of own closet-trans tendencies. But who knows.

Being lesbian, I'm uncomfortable about the Transgenderist movement appropriating the use of "-phobia' to mean 'hate' because it feels like a lazy and deliberate attempt by them to conflate gay and trans issues in people's minds; to convince people that Transgenderist "rights" are as unintrusive to their lives as Lesbian and Gay rights- Which are basically wanting to be allowed to live our own lives in peace ie. Not that "You must call us straight". or "You must sleep with us or you're a hetero bigot" etc

I don't think the "phobia" bit means the same thing in arachnophobia as it does in homophobia. Both words have the same Greek (?) root, phobos=fear, but that doesn't mean they mean the same thing today. There are other example like bibliophile being someone who loves books. I love children but I'm not a paedophile. I think it's l like that isn't it?

I'm not afraid of transpeople; I dislike transideology.

Transphobia has an unlimited array of definitions;

Children should not be medicated with untested for purpose drugs to change sex
The penis is not a female organ
Women have a right to privacy and safety
A transgender woman is a transgender woman etc etc

All considered to be transphobic, literal violence and hate speech on planet delusion

It really is bandied around isn't it! I think if you need to join like a million dots in order to explain it it's not transphobia.

Do you really think homophobic people are scared of gay people?

As PP have pointed out, homophobia was first coined by psychiatrists in reference to someone's fear of their own internal homosexuality.

In the past it would have been legitimately terrifying to be gay, because it was not socially accepted, you had to keep it secret, you would have let your parents down by denying them grandchildren, etc.
(They may have even acted out negatively towards people they were sexually attracted to).

Social progress lead to homosexuality being more accepted. Job well done.

The trans cult has appropriated the word as it appropriates every fucking thing it gets near. No one has any time to even understand WTF it means because saying "transwomen are different to women" is transphobic. It's rammed down your throat for saying "women give birth" even before you've ever heard of a trans person.

I think it is legitimate to be fearful of a movement to erase women and women's rights and erase the language we need to describe ourselves to suit their own agenda. It is legitimate to be fearful of a movement that uses bullying, silencing and violent methods to further it's agenda.

It's not a phobia.