Special Report on Sexuality and Gender by New Atlantis

[emjay]

...it's perfectly reasonable to be suspicious when a known homophobe brings something as innocuous looking as this to the table.

One of the most interesting parts of the report is the discussion in Part One of the lack of a consistent nomenclature across studies. There seems to be no true consensus in the scientific literature about the meaning of terms like sexual orientation, heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexuality, gender, and sexual identity. If we assume that the various researchers took great pains to define their terms but came to widely divergent meanings, then it is safe to assume that derivative terms, like homophobe, suffer from the same ambiguities.

For example, does the term homophobe apply equally to person A who finds affection between two men so repugnant that it justifies physical violence and person B who feels no such aversion but does not believe homosexuality should serve as the basis for creating a legally protected class? Is this a difference of purely degree or purely in kind. On the one hand they differ by degree of affect, from disgust to indifference. On the other hand, their motivations differ by kind. Person A is motivated emotionally by his/her anger whereas, person B has a political opinion based on abstract considerations. The imprecision of the pejorative renders it virtually meaningless and makes it useful only as a rhetorical device to invalidate the opinions of others.

It seems to me that the report points to a dilemma faced by scientific researchers caused by trying to adapt nomenclature from both popular culture and critical theory (as seen in Part Three) into useful study categories. This is what I meant earlier by the appeal to essentialism. In some sense, science wants to know what the nature of things are whether it is an electron or a giraffe. It is in some sense relies on the idea that things have a essential nature that defines what things are and how they behave. It means something to be an electron. It means something to be a giraffe. In contrast to this many of the terms, like gender, adopted by the researchers originate in postmodern literary theories. Critical theory takes an existential approach that focuses on things like narratives and power structures.

Fair enough; I agree that homophobia is another hard one to define and one that has or is used for different meanings in different contexts, when it probably shouldn't be. In this - the religious - context I take it to mean anyone so anti-gay that they wish we'd either change to tow the line or fuck off and die, then burn in hell to put it bluntly. But if I had to settle on a single definition I'd always prefer a psychological one... after all that's what a phobia is... psychological; a strong, emotionally driven hatred/aversion/fear of something than leads to behaviours of avoidance, stereotyping, and wilful ignorance... in the same way as it would with a phobia of spiders; fear of the stereotype without even attempting to identify or learn more about a specific instance... just essentially hands in the air 'keep it away from me!' (or 'kill it quick'). So your person A more than person B. But there is an arguably a case for person B also being included in the sense that a disproportionate interest in fighting that cause over any other (ie all the other sins in the Bible a Christian could rage against) does potentially betray an emotional investment and motive, bringing it back into the realms of an emotionally driven hatred. Granted though from what you've said in the past, about the gay people you know and/or employ (I can't remember), that psychological definition doesn't really sound much like you at all, though even as a person B, as I said I can't rule out the possibility of it being emotionally driven rather than intellectually driven. But the fact that you're willing to explore it doesn't really suggest a phobic response - compared to my dad for instance who is definitely a person A (except without the violence... just the avoidance and the 'keep it away from me' part)... I sometimes wish he was more like you, then we could at least discuss it. So I guess I was probably wrong to call you a homophobe, and I apologise for that. I just used the simplest term to get across my meaning of being suspicious of an ulterior motive, and imo it is still reasonable to expect that, whatever your motives are for your consistent anti-gay stance. But I shouldn't have used such an emotive word with so much baggage so I apologise for that.