Daily Dose of Homophobia

Natalidita Ningthoukhongjam *

"There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person."
E M Forster, Maurice

It is just another busy day at the bank. The manager has asked the windows to be divided between male and female clients in order to avoid congestion, but the clients line up in front of the same window anyway, jostling and urging the official to hurry up. The person at the next window remarks with a smirk, "Soon, we'll need a separate queue for homos too." One or two of his colleagues titter at his apparently refreshing observation, and everybody moves on with life.

My work is done. I walk out of the floor, thinking back to another time when a teacher casually jokes about how homos cannot have a Type-A personality – an entire group of humanity, therefore, cannot be proactive, sensitive, or ambitious. Most of the students laugh at this, no doubt agreeing it is funny, and a few of them will go on to pipe up in another class, this time, a lecture on genetics: how are sex chromosomes configured in homos?

These are throwaway comments – the people who pass them, when confronted with a person they identify as a "homo", might treat him politely. But these are jibes founded on discrimination, made at the expense of those who are not present to defend themselves or retort. What is discrimination, anyway? A product of many factors, including fear, ignorance, a sense of superiority and an absolute lack of empathy. The man at the bank probably feels privileged at being a straight person who has no issues with his gender identity. He is a member of the majority, the largely accepted norm. In other words, he is safe. He doesn't have to face the ogling and the malicious taunts that a "homo" has to suffer when they walk on the street.

And how is discrimination produced by ignorance? This man from the bank, the teacher, the students in the genetics class, none of them truly understand what the term "homo" means. It is a shortened form of "homosexuality", which implies romantic or sexual attraction towards members of the same sex or gender – sex and gender being two completely different things. The word "homo" in our cultural context is, however, a blanket term for transgender and transsexual males. A transgender person is one who does not rigidly identify his/her gender with the sex he/she is born with; a transgender person may even be genderless. A transsexual individual is one who feels that the sex he/she is born with is wrong; such an individual may opt to undergo sex change operation to match their sex with their gender.

The usage of the term "homo" is problematic for four reasons. Firstly, it excludes homosexual persons who are cisgender – the gender they identify with is aligned with the sex they were assigned at birth, but they are attracted towards people of the same gender or sex. In short, it disregards gay men and women who aren't transgender or transsexual. Secondly, it assumes that all transgender and transsexual men are homosexual, when this doesn't have to be the case. Thirdly, it confuses the existence of transgender and transsexual females; "tomboys" are dismissed as "lesbians", when a transgender or transsexual female can identify as a heterosexual.

Correct usage of the term is not the main issue here, though. One may throw "homo" as an insult at the right party, but the fact that it is an insult still remains. This is the final problem, the part where lack of empathy comes in. Let us reiterate the definition of a homosexual for the sake of analysis: it is a sexual orientation, nothing more, nothing less. A homosexual female feels attraction towards another female, just as a heterosexual male is romantically and sexually inclined towards a female.

Homosexuality, like heterosexuality, is harmless and normal as long as the parties involved are consenting adults. Isn't the purpose of love and romance to solve the crisis of loneliness? Plato would say we're all halves of a single entity, searching for the other half so we could be whole again. Sometimes, those halves are male and female, and sometimes, both male, or female.

But it is unnatural!

That is the most popular complaint against homosexuality. Love should only be shared between a man and a woman because ... because, why? To reproduce? If the final goal of love was to contribute to an increase in population, why marry for love? Why marry, at all? Surrogacy is a thing now. No woman or man should have to burden themselves with an unwanted "life partner"; they can just hire someone to give them a child. Besides, there are couples who are childless, and couples who prefer to be childless. There are couples who think marriage isn't necessary. There are single men and women who adopt children because they want to raise a human being. Should they be written off as unnatural? What about gay couples who adopt children?

Yet the complaints are endless; if you cut one off, two more will rise to take its place like a hydra. If not reproduction, then something else. Homosexuality is a disease, for example. But it isn't caused by any known microorganism, nor is it brought about by dietary deficiency. No such thing as "gay genes" exists. It is not a dangerous sickness of the mind because it harms no one. It isn't something that can be cured. Neither is it a moral wrong – that would imply a gay person is sinning by virtue of love. It cannot even be a product of modernisation. Its history traces back to ancient Greece.

The entire discussion of homosexuality boils down to one thing: basic human rights. Live and let live; love and let love. A simple thing to say, a complicated concept to understand. Heteronormativity has planted its roots in the human psyche for far too long and far too deep, continuously sanctioned by religious conservatism and tradition. Perhaps, a day will come when the other type of romantic inclination ceases to be funny and/or repulsive. Until then, jokes full of hatred will continue to be made, and gay people will continue to fight for the freedom to be openly themselves, a freedom that many of those already blessed with it fail to appreciate.