#internalised queerphobia

It’s interesting you describe that as internalised homophobia because the idea of ‘wanting to make yourself straight over getting rid of queerphobia’ isn’t always that.

I don’t want to speak for your experience and it was internalised homophobia in your situation if you conceptualise it as that. But I feel like knowing you can ‘convince’ yourself you’re straight though the power of immense guilt/shame feels much easier than solving systemic discrimination - it’s not a good thing, but like on a level of ‘which one do I think I can accomplish’ it feels much easier (and probably is). I don’t think acknowledging that in itself is internalised homophobia (like knowing I have the capacity to majorly mess my life up in extremely negative ways doesn’t make me want to do that).

Hopefully that’s okay to send as an ask

I totally get where you're coming from, but... it's not about what's accomplishable, it's about desire. the example I used in the post was about getting handed a button that either erased your own queerness or erased queerphobia. for a long time, I would have taken the button that made me cishet.

I had no desire to rid the world of queerphobia, because I thought that the queerphobes were right. I thought that to be queer was to be disgusting, and that I needed to rid myself of this horrible affliction I'd been cursed with. I watched video upon video of conversion therapy messaging, even though I knew it wouldn't work. despite now being in a situation where 0% of my friends are cishet, I still have thoughts like that sometimes. I still lie awake at night praying that I'll wake up and become "normal". that's definitely internalised homophobia at work.

learned more about the LGBT community that that stuff went away. How do I know if I'm dealing with internalized homophobia or if I'm just not into girls that way? And if I am dealing with internalized homophobia, then how do I get rid of it? (2/2)            

To be honest, it totally sounds like you’ve got some internalised queerphobia going on which is no surprise consirdering the upbringing you described and our society generally being pretty heteronormative and queerphobic.

I’ve made this post about getting rid of internalised biphobia and most of those tips also go for other forms of internalised queerphobia.

Something that is especially troublesome for wlw/sapphic women is that there is as good as no accurate representation of wlw relationships/love/sex/affection. We get hypersexualised by straight cis men so much that “lesbian” is a porn category solely for the straight male gaze and it has no correlation to how sex between two women actually is. So tbh it’s no wonder you may a) be getting grossed out by “lesbian porn” and that sorta “representation” and b) don’t know how to think of girls sexually in a comfortable way because you’ve never learned that it’s okay to desire women.

Of course, there’s also still the chance that you’re just romantically attracted to women. I’m not saying you should go out and have sex with a woman now that it makes you uncomfortable but I think you should try and cut yourself some slack. Unlearning internalised queerphobia and learning to accept yourself with all your needs, desires, wishes, dreams is a very very tough task but you’ll get there and it’ll take time.

And if you need any more help or advice, let us know!

Our society is so cisheteronormative and queerphobic that even queer people can internalise those hateful, negative or plain wrong opinions and misconseptions about queer people and the queer community. If you’re socialised to believe that being straight is the default and that queer people are “unnatural” then it can be hard to shake those ideas and it can lead to self-hate and depression and it’s honestly something that makes me extremely sad and only further proves that we need diverse sex ed in schools so that kids of queerphobic parents have other ressources to learn that it’s okay not to be cishet.