Heterophobia? No
I feel like a lot of the “heterophobia is real” people (I know not all of them) have that opinion partly because they’ve never been part of an outsider group they’ve always (or mostly) been the default:
Cisgender and heterosexual. They have always lived under the an identity that people assume you’d fall under. Trans/gay/trans people have always been labeled. There was a point in time where cishets decided they were “normal” and we weren’t.
I think a lot of the people who think heterophobia is real have never had their identities discussed before. You always considered yourself “normal” and never thought otherwise. And now they have to address themselves as heterosexual and cisgender and think about what that means. Now minorities knows what that feels like. I’ve been labeled as a “Jew” “pansexual” “trans” (and god knows I’m not the most outsider/oppressed/labeled person in the queer community) for most of my life (except it took me longer to figure out I was trans) I’ve always known that I was considered “outsider” “abnormal” by society, so labels don’t really scare me. For cishets now their identities are being publicly analyzed and that can make people uncomfortable. Especially if it’s the first time that’s ever happened.
And we’ve had this conversation before about basically every minority. A minority complains about the oppressor and the oppressor/oppressing class(or group) takes it as an attack on them and not their behavior. For example that quote from Samuels Memory (about the trail of tears): (idk why but this is the first one that comes to mind)
“I know what it is to hate. I hate those white soldiers who took us from our home. I hate the soldiers who make us keep walking through the snow and ice toward this new home that none of us ever wanted. I hate the people who killed my father and mother.
I hate the white people who lined the road in their woolen clothes that kept them warm, watching us pass. None of those white people are here to say they are sorry that I am alone. None of them care about my people or me. All they ever saw was the color of our skin. All I see is the color of theirs and I hate them.”
Now I can take that as “oh so you hate all white people rEvErSe RaCiSm” OR I can hear what hes actually trying to say “I hate what you did to me”.
It’s the same thing with words like straggot. If you happen to look up the definition of straggot on urban dictionary you’d find “ A straight person who does or is one or more of the following: rape jokes, says the n word, sexualizes everything”
It’s never been about hating all straight people. It’s a criticism of behavior. And if you ask a person who uses the word that’s typically what they’d say.
It gets to a point where I feel like a lot of the people who complain about heterophobia (the leaders of these conversations/big Internet personalities/ politicak personalities) are purposefully ignoring everything that shows it doesn’t exist. Latching onto words like “straggot” without looking into them. And I find that interesting because
You wonder what the purpose of that is....To distract from the actual people facing oppression? A purposeful misdirection to doge criticism or talk about this instead of queer oppression?
I just find it interesting.
If you can in the comments leave an example of queerphobic violence or oppression you’ve faced. I think it might convince some people who are still undecided on this issue
TLDR: heterophobia doesn’t exist and frankly I’m tired of talking about it
(Thank you if you read all of this)