Internalized Homophobia and Gay Shame

Young gays and lesbians can’t help but feel ashamed of being different, and a major part of their journey into adulthood and self-acceptance involves coming to terms with that difference.

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For my entire career, I’ve chosen not to write for academic journals because I can’t bring myself to adopt the “scientific” writing style and terminology expected of contributors. Take internalized homophobia, for example. We hear and read this expression every day without quite acknowledging what it’s supposed to describe: intensely painful feelings of shame and self-loathing. But internalized homophobia is what journal editors expect to read when you submit an article for consideration.

I find it frustrating that publications in a discipline focused on the human experience so often come across as void of feeling. For that reason, I’ve written books for popular audiences instead of my colleagues because I’d rather connect with readers through evocative language than adopt a style that feels unnatural to me. I prefer words most of us would use in everyday life, or descriptions I might use if I were writing fiction.

By contrast, internalized homophobia implies that a pervasive societal attitude called “homophobia” (a misleading word itself because no irrational fear is involved) gets absorbed and adopted within the individual psyche. You can even diagram it! External attitude → internal self-concept. By using this expression, we’ve completely stripped away the quality of the emotional experience with denatured, supposedly more scientific language.

What does internalized homophobia mean for the person who experiences it? What words might he or she use?

There’s something wrong with me because I’m different from everyone I know.

I’d give almost anything to be somebody else, somebody normal.

I feel like I’m so screwed up that sometimes I’d like to die.

Or disappear.

The sound of my voice and the way I walk fill me with self-loathing.

I’m a freak and I don’t fit in.

I hate myself.

I could go on, but these are some of the immediate emotional experiences of gays and lesbians afflicted by so-called internalized homophobia.

Even young gays and lesbians who are more gender conforming, those kids who aren’t bullied because of their obvious difference, will inevitably feel shame about their sexual orientation, and it doesn’t necessarily depend upon absorbing an external negative evaluation. Gay kids brought up in the most accepting environments can’t help but feel a sense of shame, at least in the beginning, because being homosexual makes them different from the majority; it singles them out in an unfavorable way.

Shame emotions arise for varying reasons and in different situations, as I explain in my book on shame. I refer to one of those situations as Exclusion—feeling yourself to be on the outside of a group to which you’d like to belong. Another one I call Unwanted Exposure, which needs no explanation. The fact of the matter is—most human beings are both heterosexual and gender-typical; especially in conformist middle and high school, we’d rather be like everyone else so we can fit in, so finding that we’re different makes us feel ashamed. Inevitably. If our mannerisms and body movements cause us to stand out, Unwanted Exposure may inspire excruciating shame and self-loathing.

In other words, gay shame is unavoidable, even if one conforms to gender norms and has avoided the bullies. Young gays and lesbians can’t help but feel ashamed of being different, at least at first, even in a relatively tolerant society, and a major part of their journey into adulthood and self-acceptance involves coming to terms with that difference, celebrating the peculiar advantages of being outside the norm without making light of the downsides, and building pride in ourselves without reference to our sexual orientation.

But do not get me wrong—widespread homophobia in society is still with us.

Since the advent of legalized gay marriage as well as the commonplace depiction of gay characters and relationships in media, many liberal-minded people have the mistaken impression that societal acceptance is the norm and it’s easy to “come out” as gay these days. Wrong. A troubling number of men and women, even psychotherapists working with gender-confused children, have a visceral disgust at the thought of same sex relationships; many if not most gender non-conforming kids are bullied in middle and high school, just as they’ve always been.

At least until they “come out” as trans.

We know from Hannah Barnes’ book and the Cass Review that up to 80 percent of the kids treated at the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) were same sex attracted. Genderists might argue that … well, of course they are because they’re trapped in the wrong body. According to this view, some people who happened to have been “assigned” female at birth may have a male gender identity and be attracted to women; after undergoing medicalized transition to align body and gender identity, he will be heterosexual and therefore “normal.”

As many have noted before me, gender identity ideology is deeply homophobic at heart.

We’ve all read about the dark jokes at GIDS, that soon there would be no gays left—hence the expression transing away the gay. In recent testimony before a committee of the Scottish government, Hillary Cass spoke of her surprise at finding “how much phobia there still is.” She went on to give the example of a young biological male who had begun transition early on: “She’s doing well, she had puberty blockers at the earliest stage, she had feminising hormones at the earliest stage and she passes very well as a woman, but with hindsight she knows she was a boy with intense internalised homophobia and was gay.” Dr. Cass adds: “But at this point in her life she's clearly not going to de-transition.” How could she?

In my psychotherapy practice, I work with several such men:

• One of them swallowed the lies told to him by gender clinicians, that he could become an actual woman via sex reassignment surgery, and as a result chose to go under the knife. He knows now he’s a gay man, but he no longer has a penis. As a result of his surgery, anal intercourse is always painful.

• Another was sent by his Christian parents for conversion therapy when he came out as gay; after it failed to convert him, he underwent surgery to transform himself, he believed, into a “normal” heterosexual woman. He’s truly lost in transition now and can’t ever go back. How could he function as a homosexual when he no longer has the required equipment?

• A third avoided surgery but suffers from a long list of medical complications following years on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. As a young gender non-conforming boy, he suffered such intense bullying and ostracism that he took flight from his homosexuality. Now as a young adult, he has no sexual function to speak of.

In previous essays, I’ve written about the other men in my practice—the straight ones who struggle with autogynephilia, as well as largely heterosexual boys who are on the spectrum or otherwise neurodivergent. While I feel angry on behalf of all my clients for the lies they were told by the genderists, I can become incandescent with rage when I think about the gay men in my practice encouraged to reject themselves as homosexual, forever deprived of a healthy sex life. It also hits very close to home. Given how much I loathed myself for desiring other boys when I was in high school, I fear I would have suffered the same fate had transition been on offer back then.

Why don’t most gay men recognize that the genderists are deeply homophobic? In his excellent new book Gay Shame, Gareth Roberts tries to account for the surprising support gays have shown for gender identity ideology, as individuals and through their dominant support organizations: “I think it’s a combination of social contagion—it’s low-status and gauche to object—and a deep-seated clinging to … cultural stereotyping.” He describes it as a “dissociation from the reality of homosexuality. That we aren’t ‘really’ men; that there’s something wrong that needs correcting” (p. 127). That sounds a lot like shame to me … or internalized homophobia if you prefer.

I used to serve as an officer and board director of my local LGB(TQ+) center in California. Years ago, when I began to work with detransitioners and dysphoric teens in my practice, I wrote my first paper about the role of shame in driving the wish to transition. I showed it to both the board chair and the CEO, two men I considered my friends, and offered to step down from my dual role because I knew my “transphobic” views would incense young activist employees at the Center. They readily accepted my resignation and have since persistently ignored my emails, almost as if I no longer exist. Within minutes I lost an entire friend group.

Since then, in conversation with other gay friends, I try appealing to their concern for the kids caught up in this homophobic social contagion. “Remember how much you didn’t want to be gay when you were a teenager? Don’t you think you would’ve jumped at the chance to become a ‘normal’ woman instead?” Over time, I’ve managed to “peak” a few of them. I’ve written to several female friends about the well-known phenomenon of “disappearing lesbians” (middle-aged butch women who decide to go on testosterone late in life) but they won’t acknowledge that internalized homophobia is what drives it. No one will speak out because they’re afraid of being cancelled like me, or perhaps because they’re true believers.  

Meanwhile, much of the good will and social acceptance we earned and which culminated in Obergefell has begun to erode.

I believe it’s more than a fear of appearing gauche that drives support for this homophobic ideology, at least in the United States; it’s partisan politics and a self-righteous conviction that they’re the good guys, and on the right side of history. If red states are passing laws that ban affirmative care for minors, then blue states must adopt the opposite position. Red = bad, blue = good.

In the future, when they can no longer avoid acknowledging the greatest medical scandal of our generation, most of the gay men who supported the genderists will find it hard to acknowledge they were wrong.

“We didn’t know,” they’ll say (if they bother to say anything).

Who wants to admit he behaved in a cowardly way and just “went along to get along” … despite many warnings from a knowledgeable friend?

To my mind, gays and lesbians who support the genderists should feel ashamed of being cowardly conformists, and I hope that one day they will. Some forms of shame are deserved and have nothing to do with internalized homophobia.

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