Saturday 19 March 2011

Apologies for unchecked privilege

[trigger warning for ablist language]

As eateroftrees and others point out, using X-phobia to describe a type of discrimination is appropriative and disablist in its own right. Privilege and intentional hatred, not a disability, is the cause of the discrimination.

I apologise for not realising this far sooner. In retrospect, of course, it's incredibly obvious - just as racist behaviour is not "crazy" or "blackphobic", discrimination against LGB and/or trans people is heterosexist and/or cissexist, not "homophobic" or "transphobic".

I've removed the problematic labels from older posts and replaced them with the suggested alternatives, so new posts and the label list won't contain this language. (Older posts will still contain X-phobia constructions in the body: there doesn't appear to be a way to do a search and replace on every post - again, my apologies for it being there in the first place)