What Do You Do When Your LGBTQ Friend is Transphobic/Homophobic?
A Prism & Pen writers prompt
It’s (way past) time for a new Prism & Pen writing prompt, and P&P editor Sieran Lane has a particular request. I join him, and I’ll explain why in a moment. First, check out Sieran’s prompt idea:
How do we navigate friendships within the queer and trans community? You know I had a terrible friendship breakup with a nonbinary friend just before Dec 24th: Still reeling from that. So that could also involve issues of communication, boundary setting, standing up for ourselves/ self-esteem building, handling strong emotions, potentially grieving…
Long story short, Sieran learned quite unexpectedly that his nonbinary friend harbors some quite aggressive anti-trans ideas and couldn’t let the issue go even after Sieran requested a change of subject.
As that was going down, I was dealing with a crowd of aggressive anti-trans gay people on Twitter, who had (bizarrely!) attacked my promo tweet about a brutalized gay youth — in order to denounce transgender people.
Also, I’m thinking about a very disturbing time in P&P history when a regular Christian contributor posted a story in support of gay Christians who teach that gay Christians should not have sex. That writer went so far as to promote his story on Facebook by writing, “If you’re a gay man, Jesus might be calling you to celibacy.”
That gay writer and I had been slowly building a friendship, to the point of having spoken on the phone a couple times. To say I was shocked to learn that he’s a homophobic bigot is perhaps the understatement of the century.
I reacted swiftly, removing all of his stories from P&P, letting several people know about his anti-gay religious beliefs, and personally blocking him on all social media platforms including Medium. (I also had a few choice words for him about what part of his anatomy he could shove his homophobic version of Jesus into, lol!)
So, that’s what I chose to do. What would you do?
What Do You Do When Your LGBTQ Friend is Transphobic/Homophobic?
That’s our new Prism & Pen writing prompt for the next couple weeks at least! Where do you draw the line between discourse and enabling bigotry? What do you do when your LGBTQ friend turns out to be trans-exclusionary, homophobic, or otherwise supportive of anti-LGBTQ ideology?
Normally, at this point in the prompt, I ask cis-straight friends, family, and allies to feel free to participate too. I don’t know how much that can apply to this prompt, but I’ll put it out there just in case. If you’re not a queer person but you have an LGBTQ friend who seems to have a homophobia or transphobia problem, what would you do? I’m thinking of people (like Jack Herlocker) who have been in long-term relationships with LGBTQ people and might have encountered something like this.
It’s time to write!
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