On Homophobia & Transphobia

What homophobia actually is

Homophobia is not an abstraction to us, and it isn't a debating point. It is a specific, documented system of harm with a long institutional history. For most of the 20th century, same-sex intimacy was a crime across much of the world — in the United States, sodomy laws survived in some states until Lawrence v. Texas struck them down in 2003. It was a psychiatric diagnosis: the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973 (and a residual category until 1987), and the World Health Organization didn't fully remove it until 1990. It was grounds for firing — the U.S. State Department purged thousands of gay employees in the 1950s "Lavender Scare," and the ban on gay federal employment formally ended only in 1975. And it was, and in many places remains, a license for violence: from police raids and street beatings to the murders that punctuate our community's memory. Today, same-sex relations are still criminalized in around sixty countries.

Homophobia also operated culturally: through silence (the Hays Code kept gay lives off American screens for decades), through euphemism ("confirmed bachelor," "roommate"), through conversion practices that promised to cure what was never a disease, and through the family rejection that still drives disproportionate rates of youth homelessness and suicidality among LGB kids.

We spell this out because everything else on this page sits on top of it. This community's founding generation lived that history under three names: lesbian, gay, bisexual. Respect for what those names survived is where we start.

"Isn't your position just internalized homophobia?"

This is the most common charge against people who decline the "queer" label, so let's take it seriously and take it apart.

Internalized homophobia is a real clinical concept — psychologists use it to describe what happens when a gay person absorbs society's stigma and turns it inward. Its recognized markers are things like shame about one's attractions, concealment, avoidance of other gay people, discomfort with being seen, and in serious cases self-harm. It is stigma pointed at the self.

Now look at what's actually being described here. We are people who say the words "gay," "lesbian," and "bisexual" out loud, in public, with pride — who build community around them, organize events under them, and defend them in writing. There is no shame in that posture, no concealment, no avoidance. Loving the word that generations fought to make speakable is not stigma turned inward; it's the endpoint the fight was for. If anything, demanding that gay people adopt a word many experienced as a slur — and pathologizing them when they decline — sits far closer to the dynamic the term "internalized homophobia" was coined to describe.

A diagnosis that can be applied to any gay person who disagrees with you isn't a diagnosis. It's a way of ending the conversation.

There's also a history to this rhetorical move. Since at least the 1970s, gay men and lesbians whose politics or lives didn't match the radical program of the moment have been accused of self-hatred — assimilationists by liberationists, married couples by anti-marriage radicals, and now "gay" people by "queer" people. The accusation is unfalsifiable: any disagreement becomes evidence of the pathology. We reject it on those grounds, not because internalized homophobia isn't real — it is — but because this isn't it, and misusing the concept cheapens it for the people it actually describes.

What transphobia actually is — and where we stand

Transphobia is prejudice, discrimination, or violence directed at transgender people because they are transgender. It is real, it is documented, and it is wrong. On that, this community does not equivocate: transgender people are entitled to dignity, safety, privacy, and equal protection under the law, and any member who uses this space to demean them will lose it.

What we maintain — and what we're routinely told is itself transphobic — is a distinction, not a hostility: sexual orientation and gender identity are different things. "Lesbian," "gay," and "bisexual" describe orientation. "Transgender" describes gender identity. A trans person can be gay, straight, or bisexual; a gay person can be cis or trans. These are two axes, not one. Institutions from major medical bodies to LGBT organizations themselves state this distinction plainly in their own materials.

Holding that distinction is not an attack on anyone. It's what makes clear thinking about either topic possible — including clear advocacy for trans people, which depends on being able to say precisely what gender identity is and how it differs from orientation. A community organized around the orientation axis — as lesbian and gay organizations were for decades before the acronym existed — is no more anti-trans than a trans organization is anti-gay. Coalitions are strongest when they're chosen, not conscripted; many of our members show up for trans rights as allies, freely, and that's worth more than compelled unanimity.

The contemporary stakes

We'd be lying if we pretended this debate happens in a vacuum. Hostility toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people is rising again in many countries — book bans, criminalization abroad, harassment campaigns at home. Some argue this means everyone must march under one word. We draw the opposite lesson: people defend a community most fiercely when it sees them accurately. Telling a gay man his word is obsolete, or a lesbian that her boundary is bigotry, doesn't build the coalition — it bleeds it. Precision and solidarity are not opposites. We intend to practice both.

Keep reading

How specific identities get blurred out of data and history: Gay & Lesbian Erasure. Why wanting an ordinary life isn't a betrayal: Just Like Everyone Else. And the deeper case for precise words: Why Language Matters.