There’s a New Sexuality in Town: “Super Straight”
It’s really just an excuse to be transphobic.
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If you’re not on the wonderful app of TikTok, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about, but if you are, you’ve probably heard about this whole “super straight” nonsense.
Basically, what happened is that cisgender, heterosexual conservatives on TikTok decided that they were going to invent a new sexuality that supposedly was just like being straight, but only being attracted to cis people of the opposite gender. They even made a flag and everything.
TikTok has been known to be a place for discriminatory conservatives to group up and start new trends, and this one is no exception. Their reasoning behind the trend was that they only wanted to date women who had been born women.
Transphobes were angry that they were being called transphobic, and so they then proceeded to be even more transphobic. What’s new.
But the not-so-surprising thing is how they managed to play off this transphobic action by seemingly creating a brand new sexuality.
This is just blatant transphobia.
Let’s turn to the facts to prove this one. The basic definition of transphobia, from Merriam-Webster, is an “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against transgender people”.
I’m not going to prove to you what discrimination is, but the fact still stands that it means any derogatory action towards or exclusion of a certain group of people. In this case, it means discrimination against trans people.
This new “sexuality” is basically saying that trans men are not real men, and trans women are not real women, and that’s why they don’t want to date them. These “super straights” are excluding trans people from their definitions of what each gender is and should be.
It’s been scientifically proven that biological sex, which is assigned at birth, and gender, which is a social construct relating to your own personal identity, are completely different things. Therefore, a trans woman is just as much a woman as a cisgender woman, no matter what she was born as. And a trans man is just as much a man as a cisgender man.
So excluding trans women and men from your definitions of each gender and creating a new sexuality to further alienate trans people is just downright transphobic.
There’s a difference between preference and sexuality.
There are some people out there who may prefer not to date trans people. And that is fine, in certain circumstances when the person is not doing it just to exclude trans people.
Some people have preferences for the hair color, age, or other physical characteristics of their partner. But that shouldn’t be the only reason why they engage in a relationship. It’s a preference. You aren’t solely attracted to those people.
Having a preference for cis people is not the same as creating a whole new sexuality in which you imply that trans women are not included in the same gender category as cis women. That’s excluding trans people, and that’s transphobic.
The whole sexuality is an excuse to be transphobic.
The creators and perpetrators of this trend did not create an entirely new sexuality just because they were only attracted to cis people and wanted a label for themselves. That statement on its own is problematic, but the fact of the matter is that the people who did this just wanted an excuse to discriminate against trans people.
Thankfully, in recent years, trans people have gained a lot more acceptance in society and have finally begun to gain some of the rights that they have been denied for so long. But for some reason, marginalized communities having equal rights is bothersome to some particularly privileged people.
Accepting all people in society is not a disgusting concept like many conservatives portray it to be, and a lot more people are starting to realize that. As such, those who are still contributing to hate and transphobia are receiving a lot of backlash.
But they couldn’t just stop being hateful. They couldn’t just accept people for who they are. No, they had to make up a whole new sexuality as an excuse to be transphobic.
