Homophobia

Are you a homophobe? I hope you are not. Homophobia is a really common, and in my opinion awful, social phenomena popular in our actual society. The oxford dictionary defines homophobia as an irrational aversion to homosexuality and homosexual people (“Homophobia”). Homophobia, then, is basically a dislike, disgust or hatred towards gay, lesbian and bisexual people. It almost always is accompanied with discrimination against these people which very commonly results in verbal or physical aggressions as felt by them. This is a very usual issue in our everyday world that generally goes unnoticed or ignored. It affects a very large group of people and can still hurt you even if you are completely heterosexual, for what it is necessary that we stop being homophobic and learn to respect homosexual and bisexual people. We need to stop judging people based solely on their sexual orientation; we need to stop discriminating! Homophobia in our actual society is wrong and immoral because of the immense damage it has upon a vast number of individuals among us for why we should work on eradicating it in our daily lives.

Homophobic people, as I already mentioned, typically discriminate gay, lesbian and bisexual people by means of physical and verbal offenses; but what exactly are these offenses? In our heterosexist society, it is common for people to discriminate homosexual and bisexual individuals verbally in nonviolent, commonplace ways. These commonplace ways include telling jokes, name-calling, publicly insulting gay, lesbian or bisexual people only because of their sexuallity or using words like “gay” to insult someone. Of all words used to insult someone that can be heard in a school environment, the word “gay” takes up to 83% of them as d...

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...nd offer help if they suffer from bullying or other people are causing them harm as well. If we see someone being bullied because of their sexual orientation, we must speak up to the aggressor and solve this problem, so that the bully stops being so homophobic and therefore stops abusing the gay, lesbian or bisexual person he was being unfair to. We can always protest in pacific ways, such as writing a persuasive essay as I did, publishing messages that remark what homophobia is and how we can (and should) stop it, or just by simpling talking to a homophobic person you know and getting them to stop being that way. We can really contribute to the decrease of homophobia and heterosexism in our society if we work on eradicating it in ourselves and other close people we know by ceasing our prejudices and discriminatory expressions against homosexual and bisexual people.