New trend supposedly pans notion that not wanting to date a transgender person is ‘transphobic’
It seems there’s a new phenomenon on social media — people declaring themselves “super straight” which supposedly means they “naturally” or “inherently” have no attraction to transgender individuals.
According to a recent paper published in the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, the term “super straight” was coined by a “white and Asian heterosexual” TikTok user to push back at the notion that not wanting to date transgender people is “transphobic.”
“I only date the opposite gender—women that are born women,” this user once said according to the paper. “So, you can’t say I’m transphobic now because that’s just my sexuality.”
Paper author Brandon Robinson (pictured), chair of UC Riverside’s Gender & Sexuality Studies Department, looked at “dozens” of discussions on Reddit regarding the “super straight” concept and found “some” participants omitted “social and cultural factors” in conversations regarding biological sex.
According to Robinson, this and other actions “construct heterosexuality as superior,” UC Riverside News reports.
Regarding one Reddit user who said he has as much right not to be attracted to a transgender person as “a gay man has a right not to be attracted to a woman” (“I cant force myself to be attracted to a biological man with a female brain,” he wrote in part), Robinson said the sentiment is based on the 1800s’ study of “scalp morphology” and “eugenic sciences.”
Robinson notes in the paper that given the contemporary “historical moment” of increased “visibility and support for trans people,” straight folk no longer can “easily rely on explicit homophobia and heteronormative assumptions that everyone is heterosexual in order to assert their straightness.”
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Robinson alleges that before the “coining” of heterosexuality, European “colonizers and imperialists justified violence, genocide, and colonization on Indigenous communities and people in the Global South because the colonizers saw people of color as having expansive expressions of gender and sexuality.”
Through the transatlantic slave trade, the Eurocentric gender binary also gets constructed in and through whiteness, whereby Black people became ungendered — seen as not having a gender but only seen as a slave — and whereby only white people were seen as being a man or a woman.”
In the 19th and 20th centuries, heterosexuality become classified as an identity and cultural ideal alongside white supremacist sciences, such as craniometry or measurement of the cranium, and eugenics, a set of beliefs and practices undertaken to “improve” the human genetic makeup.
White colonizers, Robinson said, defined what and who was attractive, sexually desirable, and civilized. They also ignored social, cultural, and environmental factors that inadvertently shape a person.
“It is no coincidence that heterosexuality and homosexuality get invented at the same time as the end of slavery and the beginning of Jim Crow,” Robinson said.
According to Robinson’s faculty page, their (Robinson uses “they/them” pronouns) upcoming work titled “Pleasurable Possibilities: Gender Liberation and Other Trans Desires” looks at the “dating, hookup, and sex lives” of transgender individuals “in order to theorize about trans joy, pleasure, and desire as ways to disrupt and dismantle the settler colonial institution of compulsory heterosexuality and the Eurocentric gender binary.”
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IMAGE: UC Riverside
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