By positing queerphobia as simply bigotry against a specific attraction, pro-“SGA” discoursers are at best shortsighted and at worst highly disingenuous.

Patriarchy requires a binary, so that it may categorize women as objects for sexual and labor use and men as the users of those objects. Patriarchy thus requires heteronormativity: no median category can exist outside those roles, and no one assigned to one of these roles is allowed to act other than in accordance with that role, because if that were seen to be possible, the rest of the structure would be seen as mutable.

(For the purposes of this post, since we are talking about what occurs within the framework of the binary-requiring patriarchy, “men” refers to those assigned the gender “male,” and “woman” those asigned female. Note that assigned gender under the patriarchy is simultaneously fixed and conditional. Patriarchy dictates that one cannot really change one’s own gender, despite one’s best attempts, but its the worst punishment for acting as if one is trying to do so is to declare the criminal unworthy of a gender, or at least the protections earned by conforming to it.)

Societally accepted exceptions to these strict roles can be boiled down to two main scenarios: where women’s lack of social and legal agency has led to a conflation of femininity with immaturity and legal minority (and in some patriarchal societies, the status of slavery or property), or where some further status as Other marks a sub-class of men and/or women as othered from the normal gender roles, so long as they still adhere to the new parameter of being subservient to the non-othered men and women. I speak, of course, of pederastic cultures/pedophilia, and intersectional (sexual) oppression.

In this larger context, homophobia per se is only a subroutine of the larger algorithm of societal control used to maintain the structure of the patriarchy. And, further, homophobia exists because gay attraction is outside the roles of what a man or woman under patriarchy should do–not because it is “unnatural” or “ungodly,” those are simply justifications; the “non-procreative” argument (remember that patriarchy requires a binary) is closer to the heart of it.

Men as a category are not allowed to have sex with men (barring the exceptions in paragraph 4) nor to refuse sex with women because this is alien to their role as users of women and, more importantly (expecially where male gayness is seen through an active/passive binary), simply not being women; obviously assuming the visible markers of being a woman is right out.

Women are not allowed to have any sexual agency at all, really, and both voluntary sex with another woman (except for the pleasure of a man) and refusing sex to a man while unclaimed by another man are exercises of sexual agency. Attempting to switch roles and be a man is also condemned, but since a patriarchal society is replete with the message that male = best and female = [any number of adjectives akin to bad/insufficient], woman => man is less condemned and less harshly punished (even sometimes thought of as a form of self-improvement!) than the reverse.

Obviously this is a simplification to a macro-societal level, and if one were to zoom in there would of course be any number of highly visible exceptions not mentioned above, but we are talking about the structure of the patriarchy here, not the color of the paint on its girders.

In short, positing queerphobia as based on attraction falls short of the root cause–patriarchal control of gender for its own ends. The attraction is condemned because it threatens to destabilize patriarchal roles and thus male supremacy. The criterion for queer identity and experiencing queerphobic oppression should not be “basically gay”; it should start with transmisogyny and otherness to heteronormativity and work from there.

There is a new strong female character with short hair and a sword. She is straight “to break stereotypes.” There are dozens of strong female characters with short hair and swords, and they are all straight “to break stereotypes.” There has never been a strong female character with short hair and a sword who was gay or bisexual at all. All new such characters must be straight “to break stereotypes.”