The difference is being labeled “abnormal” by a person you know vs. by society. As a society, we used to beat children who used their left hand to write until they started acting “normal”.
The thought itself that left-handedness and right-handedness are different is not harmful. However, when you start labeling one as ‘normal’ and the other as a ‘generic abnormality’, you start shifting people’s perspectives and suddenly we get a situation where we call left-handed people “Sinister”. (The word literally means left-handed. We added the evil connotations afterwards because of the prejudice against left-handed people. We also did the same in reverse for “dexterity”.)
You might not see the harm immediately in the small scale, but it’s absolutely intended to be a step towards dehumanizing queer people. As others have said as well, homosexuality is incredibly common in nature. Most giraffe sex is gay sex. It’s just not taught in school because… say it with me… “It’s abnormal.”
It’s really not though. It’s just different, and different doesn’t mean bad.
I think we’re on the same page then, we just have different taste when it comes to using certain words. I can certainly appreciate your slippery slope point where anbnormalities can be twisted by society into being negative. That’s a very real thing and you have some good examples. I suppose I’m just disappointed that we as a society are choosing to step around words and not confront the elephant in the room that abnormal things happen all the time and they aren’t bad.
I wish we lived in a society where people aren’t always looking to paint people in a bad light, where we could speak factually and not take offense to everything. At the end of the day the more I try to explain myself in these comments it appears to be the definition of normal that I’m getting hung up on. When I think “normal” I’m thinking statistically average, this is a fairly probably outcome. Others are thinking of “normal” as in socially accepted, not a big deal.
I think homosexuality in humans is abnormal (statistically) and normal (socially). I’d never heard that most giraffe sex was gay though, so that’s interesting. Time to get lost in Wikipedia.
The difference is being labeled “abnormal” by a person you know vs. by society. As a society, we used to beat children who used their left hand to write until they started acting “normal”.
The thought itself that left-handedness and right-handedness are different is not harmful. However, when you start labeling one as ‘normal’ and the other as a ‘generic abnormality’, you start shifting people’s perspectives and suddenly we get a situation where we call left-handed people “Sinister”. (The word literally means left-handed. We added the evil connotations afterwards because of the prejudice against left-handed people. We also did the same in reverse for “dexterity”.)
You might not see the harm immediately in the small scale, but it’s absolutely intended to be a step towards dehumanizing queer people. As others have said as well, homosexuality is incredibly common in nature. Most giraffe sex is gay sex. It’s just not taught in school because… say it with me… “It’s abnormal.”
It’s really not though. It’s just different, and different doesn’t mean bad.
I think we’re on the same page then, we just have different taste when it comes to using certain words. I can certainly appreciate your slippery slope point where anbnormalities can be twisted by society into being negative. That’s a very real thing and you have some good examples. I suppose I’m just disappointed that we as a society are choosing to step around words and not confront the elephant in the room that abnormal things happen all the time and they aren’t bad.
I wish we lived in a society where people aren’t always looking to paint people in a bad light, where we could speak factually and not take offense to everything. At the end of the day the more I try to explain myself in these comments it appears to be the definition of normal that I’m getting hung up on. When I think “normal” I’m thinking statistically average, this is a fairly probably outcome. Others are thinking of “normal” as in socially accepted, not a big deal.
I think homosexuality in humans is abnormal (statistically) and normal (socially). I’d never heard that most giraffe sex was gay though, so that’s interesting. Time to get lost in Wikipedia.