LGTBIQA+phobia

LGTBIQA+phobia

In the previous unit, we saw that LGTBIQA+phobia is the fear or rejection of people who belong to this group and that, on many occasions, lead to situations of discrimination, oppression and violence.

LGTBIQAphobia is a form of discrimination based on the privilege of the cisheteronorm since anything that deviates from this is susceptible to being violated.

Let’s get closer to some terms that are important to name and make visible the discrimination suffered by some specific groups within the LGTBIQA + community. According to. Ibero-American LGTBI Education Network, in its guide “Adding Freedoms”, we find the following definitions:

• Lesbophobia: lesbian women suffer a specific form of discrimination due to their double subordinate status. They are women and homosexuals in sexist and heterosexist societies. For example, lesbian women can suffer, unlike heterosexual women, forms of violence such as rape or school sexual harassment known as “corrective” in nature.
• Biphobia : in a binary society it is easier to accept that a person likes people of the opposite sex or their sex than the fact that they are attracted to someone of any sex. As a result of this pigeonholing of people into two exclusive extremes (heterosexual or homosexual), bisexual people are especially invisible and suffer specific difficulties due to their orientation, for example, they have more problems establishing relationships than heterosexual people or gays and lesbians.
• Transphobia: it is the specific discrimination that trans people suffer since they challenge the gender identity assigned at birth, which threatens the binary of the sex/gender system. Trans people are exposed to a greater risk of exclusion, rejection and violence than lesbian, gay and bisexual people .
• Intolerance against non-normative gender expressions: it is also known as plumophobia (in Spain). It occurs against those people whose gender expression is not consistent with the roles and expectations assigned to their biological sex. Thus, men who are not perceived as sufficiently masculine will suffer the homophobic insult, whether they are homosexual or not, and women who do not follow the mandates of femininity will be labelled as lesbians, regardless of their sexual orientation.

LGTBIQA+phobia and bullying

If we land all this violence in the school context, we find ourselves facing an even greater violation of the people who suffer it, since these are stages in which the development of self-esteem is greatly influenced by the relationship with the peer group. And if the peer group is the one who carries out the violence, the psychological effects can be very negative.

The suffering can become unsustainable and devastating, leading to the risk of suicide. Furthermore, bullying influences the present moment of the girls, boys, and adolescents who suffer from it, but it can also deeply mark the rest of their lives.

Finally, bullying destroys trust and empathy, generating attitudes contrary to prosocial ones , which are empathetic behaviors in the group. Of equals, so it ends up affecting the entire educational community.