How a TikToker can influence discrimination against trans people
| “Super straight” is a new term, coined by a TikTok user in 2021, that asserts one is “naturally” and “inherently” not attracted to transgender people. This new sexual identity attempts to distance super straights from being seen as transphobic while still enacting transphobia, or discrimination or violence against trans people. In a paper published in the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, UC Riverside’s Brandon Andrew Robinson, chair and associate professor of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, analyzes dozens of Reddit discussions documenting how, in this moment of trans visibility, some people are ignoring social and cultural factors when talking about biological sex, “born this way” ideologies of sexual identity, and personal preference discourses to construct heterosexuality as superior. But gender, sex, and sexuality are not simple definitions nor identities. They have deep, complex, socially constructed roots. Robinson’s research situates these “super straight” discourses and strategies within white supremacist history. Robinson analyzed over 200 online discussion threads on Reddit — the seventh most visited site in the United States and the 19th most visited site in the world. Robinson discusses this “Western invention” of sexual identities demonstrates the repercussions still seen today. “Before heterosexuality gets coined, white colonizers and imperialists justified violence, genocide, and colonization on Indigenous communities and people in the Global South because the colonizers saw people of color as having expansive expressions of gender and sexuality that went against the Eurocentric gender binary and the man-woman-reproduction nuclear family norm,” Robinson states in the paper. “Through the transatlantic slave trade, the Eurocentric gender binary also gets constructed in and through whiteness, whereby Black people became ungendered — seen as not having a gender but only seen as a slave — and whereby only white people were seen as being a man or a woman.” Read the full news release: news.ucr.edu. |
| About UC Riverside The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California’s diverse culture, UCR’s enrollment is more than 26,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual impact of more than $2.7 billion on the U.S. economy. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu. |