(Note: If you have not read the Terminology section yet, please do so! It will make reading these posts much easier.)
Last year, in 2018, President Donald Trump alluded to a possible anti-transgender military ban on the social media website Twitter. This proposal is now being debated in the judicial system. A serial killer recently confessed to the murder of eight gay men in Canada, which law enforcement confirmed was motivated by their sexuality. A gay couple in Wisconsin could lose their home because they displayed a rainbow flag in front of their apartment. What do all of these things have in common? The same driving force which makes them the most likely to be targeted in a hate crime, above other historically oppressed groups such as Jews, black people, or other religious/ethnic minorities. The same impetus can also be seen in online interactions, such as when Kevin Hart infamous tweets came to light, with the telling quote “if I can prevent my son from being gay, I will.” Every day, something new appears in the news, underscoring the difficulties LGBTQ+ individuals face.
The "problem" for LGBTQ+ individuals is not that they are LGBTQ+, but that they live in a world where having an LGBTQ+ orientation is stigmatized. Stigma (for our purposes) is summed up by the following quote from sociologist Erving Goffman (1963, pg. 3): “While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of his possessing an attribute that makes him different from others in the category of persons available for him to be, and of a less desirable kind- in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one."
Note the fact that Goffman uses the phrase “our minds”. Stigma is not necessarily an attribute that makes someone bad, dangerous, or weak, but rather one which society associates with negative stereotypes (which may or may not be true for each unique individual). Examples of stigmatized identities include being a racial minority, being Jewish, being a drug user, being disabled, or being homeless. We tend to dehumanize stigmatized groups (pg. 4). Stigmas can be both visible (such as with a disabled individual’s wheelchair) and invisible (such as being LGBTQ+). People with stigmas that aren’t immediately apparent to the naked eye must carefully decide when, to whom, and how they disclose information about their identity (if at all). It may seem that having an “invisible” stigma would be easier, but in another blog post I will explore research which explains why this may not be the case. Goffman also mentions that both stigmatized individuals and “normals” feel uncomfortable interacting with one another. Stigmatized individuals experience anxiety and discomfort over the possible reactions the “normal” may have to their stigma, and the “normal” feels uncomfortable because the social scripts they are used to using with non-stigmatized individuals seem not to apply.
The other blog posts in this category titled “The Problem” will be exploring research which explains how this general stigma towards LGBTQ+ individuals manifests in the form of prejudice and discrimination. Most of the research will be focusing on this topic from the Western perspective of the “normals”, who tend to be white, young, college educated, straight/heterosexual, cisgender, and middle to upper class. This type of research sample is used abundantly in psychology, which tends to draw from whatever student population is available on college campuses. This is not coincidental, and it is important to remember as we move forward, that certain samples used in these studies may be biased on variables like race and gender. Psychology samples tend to have larger numbers of women because there are a larger proportion of female psychology students than male. Most of these samples will be looking at heterosexual/cisgender individuals’ responses, but divisions do exist within the LGBTQ+ community, with bisexuals and trans individuals often being excluded from gay or lesbian communities.
コメント