Internalized Judeophobia: The Analogue of Internalized Homophobia

Internalized Judeophobia Part VII

“Internalized homophobia and transphobia refers to the involuntary belief in society’s negative perceptions of homosexuality, queerness, and the trans experience. This internal conflict can lead to feelings of shame, self-loathing, and a diminished sense of self-worth. It’s crucial to recognize that these feelings are a byproduct of societal prejudice and not a reflection of an individual’s worth or identity.” - The Trevor Project


Imagine, for a moment, that you’re back in high school. You have a friend, who we’ll call Joseph, who is hypermasculine.

Joseph is sixteen. Joseph is the kind of guy who thinks men should never wear pink. That’s “gay.” That’s a symbol of weakness. Joseph spends his free time working out. He plays football. Joseph bullies the nerds and the theatre kids. Joseph spits at effeminate guys. He calls them “faggots,” and he uses whatever tools he can to demonstrate just how manly he is.

You might think Joseph is just a homophobic kid. He’s a jerk. But why does he feel so strongly about masculinity? We know that bullies usually have a backstory. There is typically a reason why. This might be true for Joseph — he’s made up, after all. But maybe Joseph reminds you of someone you knew when you were sixteen.

This version of Joseph has a gay older brother. That older brother is estranged. Joseph had a front-row seat to the exiling of someone he loved because of an immutable part of their identity — homosexuality. Joseph learned this behaviour, his total disdain for homosexuality, effeminate men, and the colour pink, from his own personal experience. He has a clear model of what happens to gay men. They lose everything.

For Joseph, this experience functions as a potent warning: if you are gay, and people know it, there will be terrible consequences. Joseph loves his family. He loves his friends, and he loves playing on the football team. So he would absolutely want to distance himself from his older brother. He can only imagine the risk and threat to his world that would come from that association.

Joseph might have grown up going to church. He watched as his older brother — once a member of the church youth group — was cast out by the local minister. His church friends broke off communication. The clergy condemned him. His family was shamed and embarrassed. Joseph’s older brother is going to hell. There was something terribly wrong with him, and he is guilty. It’s no wonder that Joseph is homophobic. Perhaps this situation should have elicited more sympathy from Joseph. But he is the younger brother. He is learning this behaviour. We imagine Joseph, and we can see him, and his life and his behaviour make sense.

Now imagine that Joseph himself is in the closet.

Suddenly, all of his behaviours, all of his notions of what life is like for any gay man, take on a completely different meaning. His hateful behaviour and rhetoric are not just aggression — they are a defence mechanism.

Joseph is living in a context where he would lose everything that mattered to him if he was honest about who he really was. In fact, he is heavily incentivized to quash even the slightest hint of who the real Joseph is. He can never show weakness. If he is seen giving even an inch of sympathy to his brother, or to a trans kid in his school, that could be the string that unravels his entire facade. His life would be ruined. He can’t imagine anything else than the life he has — a life where he could self-actualize. Maybe his sexuality isn’t even that important to him. Lots of people don’t find love. That is saddening and angering, but Joseph can’t fathom that other reality, so he doubles and triples down. He can leave no doubt.

Joseph shows up to protests with his church against gay marriage. He repeats the rhetoric he heard from his parents, teachers, and friends. He actually sort of believes what he’s saying. Even though he knows it is rooted in lies, his homophobia is completely internalized. He believes that gay people are worth less than others. He has been beaten down by systemic homophobia from the society and circumstances around him. Joseph has a well-documented phenomenon called internalized homophobia.

That internalized prejudice has permeated his mind. It has trapped him in a self-destructive, self-loathing loop.

In other words, Joseph is a self-hating gay.

To be clear, Joseph does not necessarily hate himself. He likes himself — he just doesn’t like that part of his identity. He’d rather it not be there. He does hate anyone like him, though, because of what that piece of identity represents. It is a constant reminder that he is vulnerable, that he could lose his livelihood. The devastation that would arrive if he succumbed to his own nature is impossible to reckon with.

Joseph is a real person. He is many real people living throughout history. He is any number of American politicians who have voted against gay rights but were later found out to be gay, or caught with male escorts. He is the priest who came out at the age of 75 after a lifetime of denial. He is all the high school bullies who were afraid, and so lashed out as a self-defence mechanism.

All of these examples are easily recognized, and each of these people is both a victim and a villain. They are victims because of what society informed them about themselves. They are villains because they did not have the strength to overcome that. They allowed systemic homophobia to take over, and they acted accordingly.

To explain this behaviour, we can break the motivations down into three primary emotions — fear, shame, and guilt — each of which fits within an umbrella of a fourth trait: insecurity.

Fear is a chief motivator — fear of what might happen if a person is outed. Often, like in Joseph’s case, this fear is entirely justified.

Then there is the immense shame that comes from coming to terms with one’s own identity. This is the cycle: you hold a negative preconception of who a person or a subset of people are, and then you realize you’re part of that subset. There is nothing more shameful than understanding your own contribution to some greater evil. You are ashamed of spiting your God or your community.

Finally, there is tremendous guilt, especially after turning against a fellow homosexual within the community. Self-preservation sometimes requires sacrifice. Guilt comes after someone with internalized homophobia lashes out at another — they join the angry mob to hide and blend in with the majority. This leads to profound guilt.

Each of these is wrapped in insecurity. Fear, shame, and guilt all share one fundamental quality: they are antithetical to the safety almost all humans seek. When cognitive dissonance runs that deep, we can pity and sympathize with these people. We can also admit that their behaviour is a problem, harmful to the gay community. At some point, they can no longer excuse themselves and play the victim. Eventually, they need to be accountable for their actions.

This gay man is insecure about his identity, and has become self-hating.

This phenomenon is well documented. It is talked about. There are ample resources online. There are organizations like the Trevor Project and the Rainbow Project. There are guides, resources, and support groups, all readily available to those reckoning with this brand of self-loathing.

This condition translates easily onto other identities within the LGBTQ+ community. The mechanism and behaviour are essentially the same for many lesbians and trans people. We can see it translated into internalized racism — the same trajectory, but for people of colour, those who either can or cannot hide their ethnicities, heritages, or phenotypes. Victims of sexual assault feel these same feelings and exhibit these same behaviours. It is all well documented, a fundamental part of equity initiatives.

Perhaps most tragically, there is clear data showing that people with these internalized prejudices tend to live with elevated rates of mental health problems, anxiety, and depression. Those mental health issues only exacerbate the problem further — leading to downward spirals, and self-reinforcement.

We know there is systemic homophobia. It is taken for granted in western society. We know that solving it is a fundamental tenet of coalitions on the left. We know that perpetuating it is explicit among certain religious coalitions on the right.

We also know that, similar to systemic homophobia, systemic Judeophobia exists. In Parts 2 and 3 of this series, we demonstrated strong, irrefutable evidence of systemic prejudice against Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Israelis, both historically and in the modern context.

So we can take Joseph, the gay man who hates gay people for legitimate reasons — all baked in fear, shame, guilt, and insecurity — and graft that onto the Jewish experience, especially around Israel.

In the exact same way that the homosexual living with internalized homophobia picked up emotional baggage through childhood, through peer groups, through social and community groups, through religion — we can find Jews who feel the exact same way our poor high school bully felt.

For one of many potential reasons, these Jews have absorbed and internalized systemic Judeophobia. They have become “self-hating.”

In the next parts of this series, we will examine the mechanisms of insertion. Through real-life scenarios and anecdotes, we will see how internalized Judeophobia enters a person’s mind and becomes part of their identity.

Broadly, these experiences can be broken down into two categories: pushes and pulls.

Pushes are incentive structures that push people away from their Jewish identity — situations, emotions, and circumstances that they are leaving, running from, or trying to dissociate from. Any of them can lead to the internalization of prejudice.

Pulls, on the other hand, are the incentive structures that actively attract a Jew toward another identity. The pulls leave the Jewish person with fool’s gold — choices that, as we demonstrated in Parts 4, 5, and 6, are part of the asymptote of assimilation.

In other words, there are carrots and sticks.

It is vital to examine these insertion mechanisms — to understand the logical pathways, to witness the scenarios by which Jews end up imbibing self-destructive thinking and behaviour into their psyche.

Each individual’s case is different, but just as Jewish identity can be pinned down, there are archetypes. There are familiar beats that graft onto friends, children, celebrities, political figures, and others. These are real people you know. How they arrived at internalized Judeophobia will be explored in the parts that follow.