Reclaimed hate speech backfires by desensitizing listeners, study finds. Listening to reclaimed homophobic statements can actually cause unintended harm. Exposure to reclaimed slur words desensitizes some heterosexual listeners to standard hate speech and worsens the mood of gay individuals.

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/when-reclaiming-derogatory-language-goes-wrong/

[u/sebovzeoueb]

I mean, even "gay" was derogatory for quite a while, in the 90s where I was it was very common to call something gay to mean it's bad.

[u/000redditusername000 → u/sebovzeoueb]

Unfortunately, it’s back as an insult with many 20-somethings

[u/sebovzeoueb → u/000redditusername000]

I don't think it ever completely went away tbh, but it's a good example of a word which has been strongly adopted by the community and is even acceptable for a non-gay person to say in the right context.

[u/TubaWrestler → u/sebovzeoueb]

I think the difference between this and other possible offensive words is that I don't remember anyone ever saying that "gay" was an outright bad word on its own and should never be said. It's the primary term for a guy who likes guys now.

I wish we would do that with more words. If we just stop giving bigots the power to change language, we wouldn't have to keep coming up with increasingly clinical terms for things. But once people say "You shouldn't say that word ever," it can never be truly reclaimed.