Heterophobia

Heterophobia is an irrational fear of, aversion toward, or discrimination against heterosexual people and institutions. Coined as a direct analogy to homophobia, "heterophobia" is used by some opponents to various legal and civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.

History of the term
The term heterophobia was included in the Dictionary of Sexuality published in 1995 by American sexologist Robert T. Francoeur, where it was defined as fear of heterosexuals. However in 1998 it didn't appear outside specialist literature, though it was already a searchable term on the World Wide Web.

Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary includes the term homophobia, which it traces back to 1958, but the book doesn't include heterophobia, which Raymond J. Noonan considers to be traceable to the early 1980s.

The 1990 book Kinsey, Sex and Fraud by Judith A. Reisman, Edward W. Eichel, J. Gordon Muir, and J. H. Court included a whole chapter on heterophobia, describing it as a new concept and defining it similarly to Francoeur's definition. The term appeared again in 1996 in Raymond J. Noonan's book Does Anyone Still Remember When Sex Was Fun? where it was equated with the general sex negativity of the American society and defined a new concept called internalized heterophobia. Noonan in a later book made the claim that homophobia itself was partially empowered by heterophobia and promoted the adoption of a systems approach by the sexology community in studying the determinants of sexual attitudes.

In 1998 the book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism by Daphne Patai offered the first comprehensive study of heterophobia outside the sexology community. Patai claimed that heterophobia was linked to what she called the Sexual Harassment Industry (SHI) which she described as the attempt to keep women and men separated for selfish and political purposes. Dr Noonan on the 6th of November, 1999, organized a workshop on heterophobia during the joint annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) and the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT) in St. Louis, Missouri, United States.

SUNY lecturer Dr. Ray Noonan, in his 1999 presentation to The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) and the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT) Conference said,

The term heterophobia is confusing for some people for several reasons. On the one hand, some look at it as just another of the many me-too social constructions that have arisen in the pseudoscience of victimology in recent decades. (Many of us recall John Money’s 1995 criticism of the ascendancy of victimology and its negative impact on sexual science.) Others look at the parallelism between heterophobia and homophobia, and suggest that the former trivializes the latter. Yet heterophobia may be one of the root contributors in the etiology of homophobia, as Noonan argued in 1998. For others, it is merely a curiosity or parallel-construction word game. But for others still, it is part of both the recognition and politicization of heterosexuals' cultural interests in contrast to those of gays—particularly where those interests are perceived to clash.

Other uses
The term is used by Pierre-André Taguieff in his 1987 book The Force of Prejudice to signify "fear of the different".

The term is used as the title of a poetry anthology by US slam poet, Ragan Fox.(heterophobia 2005)