Ask Lemmy

You’re trying to take a prescriptivist position on the meaning of the word “homophobia”, defining it as meaning “fear of homosexuality or homosexuals”.

But English doesn’t work that way. English words are defined descriptively not prescriptively. The definition of a word is changed to match how people use the word. When a word is commonly used with a new meaning the people who make dictionaries will change the definition to match how the word is used.

Homophobia can describe a fear or homosexuality, but it’s more commonly used to describe hostility or discrimination against homosexuals.

And as a result the Oxford English Dictionary now defines homophobia as “Hostility towards, prejudice against, or (less commonly) fear of homosexual people or homosexuality.”

Most words that end in -phobia do generally just describe a fear. But when we’re talking about a class of people, words ending in -phobia (e.g transphobia, Islamophobia, etc) we tend to use the hate, prejudice, and hostility meaning instead.

It doesn’t matter that “phobias” were at one time exclusively just irrational fears. If the majority of English speakers use the word to describe hate, that’s its meaning.

If anything, we now need a new word to describe “fear of homosexuality without prejudice towards homosexuals”. Because homophobia already means, to use your words, “a hatred of gay people”.

Xenophobia and racism are not related. Xenophobia is about foreigners regardless of race, and racism is about race regardless of nationality. The two get mixed in the head of people from the USA because a lot of guys claim they're Irish or Italian without ever having set foot in any of those countries. If you dislike your [insert ethnicity] neighbour who was born and grew up in the same place as you did, you're being racist. If you dislike your [insert nationality] neighbour who's the same ethnicity as you, you're being xenophobic.

-phobia means an irrational intolerance, for a lot of things we express intolerance by showing fear, but to others we show aggressiveness. It depends more on the person than the subject matter, some homophobics are actually afraid of gays, thinking they'll corrupt the children or whatever stupid fearmongering propaganda they're up to these days, meanwhile some arachnofobics will kill every spider they see. And their line of thought is often quite similar, e.g. I don't hate [gays/spiders], I just don't want to see them.

Is there a word that means “a hatred of gay people”, rather than “a fear of or aversion to gay people”?

No, because that's just semantic wiggle room to give bigots a way of excusing their bigotry.

For example. "I don't hate gay people, and I'm not afraid of them, so I'm not homophobic. I just don't want to see them, and they shouldn't be able to get married". It's a statement that is clearly biased against queer folk, and that's the issue that needs to be addressed. But discussions like the one you're suggesting just lead to irrelevant arguments over exactly what type of bigotry is being displayed, rather than telling the bigot to get bent, which suits the needs of the bigots fine.

Yeah. There is a word for it. It's called homophobia.

I have no idea why so many people seem to believe that the word is defined as a fear of gay people. No one is running from us like a mouse, dude.

It's worth mentioning that, while "phobia" can mean "an irrational fear of," it also often means "an irrational intolerance of," such as in the case of homophobia. It's not a fear, it's an intolerance.

It doesn't actually mean fear in those contexts. Etymologically yes, it comes from the Ancient Greek for fear. For all other purposes, that doesn't really matter. If you're anti-gay then you are a homophobe - case closed, just another English term with slightly odd etymology that is irrelevant to how it's actually used by literally everyone. There are thousands of those.

People starting in on "well, achkchually that means FEAR" just want to either nitpick irrelevant trivia, or hide behind a difference that doesn't really exist. It's like pretending the term "hydrophobic" is wrong "because water can't feel emotions": incorrect, irrelevant, just... a weird argument, and if someone brings it up all the time, you sort of have to wonder what their deal is.

The hypothetical "unwilling bigots", the ones genuinely afraid through no fault of their own, causing no harm and carrying no ill will... I'll empathize with them when I get a reason to believe they exist.

What an absurd (and arguably harmful) distinction to make. Nobody is "afraid of homosexuality" for reasons unrelated to homophobia.

I've seen the word homomisia and the general suffix -misia used to reflect that a lot of "phobias" really mean hatred and not fear.

The suffix -misia meana hatred. Both -misia and -phobia come from Greek.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/-misia

homosexism

I don’t have an answer, I just wanted to say it blew my mind that I never thought about this

for people who might genuinely be afraid of the idea of homosexuality, maybe even struggling with their own sexuality

seems like autohomophobia would be the right word.

Heterosexist.

See also heteronormativity. The latter is a major cause of the former.

Fear leads to panic, panic leads to pain, pain leads to anger, anger leads to hate.

fuckerism — prejudice against people on the basis of who they fuck (or would like to fuck).

In general, morphology doesn't dictate meaning; the fact that "homophobia" and "arachnophobia" are similarly constructed words doesn't mean they have to have analogous meanings.

Pornography is not played on a pornograph turntable.

Racism is not the same sort of thing as communism, cubism, masochism, autism, or Buddhism. The fact that those words all end in "-ism" doesn't mean they are close analogies to one another. The words "sexism", "ageism" and "ableism", though, were coined as deliberate analogies to "racism".

My aunt is afraid of spiders but my uncle he hates people

Sexism.