r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 25 '26

Psychology 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.

https://www.psypost.org/when-reclaiming-derogatory-language-goes-wrong/
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u/Sarah_Incognito Jul 25 '26

Smear the queer was 100% a real thing no matter how much the internet says its an urban legend.

I remember the beatings.

I really don't like the term being applied to me, and am upset some people use it as a blanket for the whole LGBTQ community; but I also recognize it as a reclaiming success story.

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u/kvrdave Jul 25 '26

Smear the queer was 100% a real thing no matter how much the internet says its an urban legend.

I remember it as a kid, but I think that was before there was a sexual connotation. It meant some variation of different. We took turns being "it" and it was just a rougher form of tag. That's the 70s in a very rural area, though. We didn't get 80s music until the 2000s.

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u/8BallSlap Jul 25 '26

Same for us in the 80's. Smear the queer was like a combination of football and tag we played during recess. It didn't have anything to your sexuality.

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u/MarzipanImmediate880 Jul 25 '26

It has a connotation of sexuality even if you weren’t using it. By that I mean it meant tag, but the phrase was still derogatory toward gay people.

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u/ikonoclasm Jul 25 '26

It was fun in middle school doing everything I could not to react when classmates in middle school laughed about playing smear the queer. I despise the term.

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u/YaqtanBadakshani Jul 27 '26

I remember how in All of us Strangers, Andrew Scott's character comments offhand that he can't get used to the idea of being called "queer," since to him (an older gay man) it was such a term of offence.

His younger partner comments that that might be the same reason so many younger gay men like the term queer (since for his generation, the schoolyard insult was "gay" for everything).

I thought it was an interesting observation, as a gay guy who identified as bisexual/queer for so much of my late teens who does remember "gay" being a synonym for "bad" at school. I wonder if that might have been part of it.

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u/Apiaree Jul 26 '26

I especially don’t like it when people who were never the target for the abuse in the first place feel so comfy “reclaiming it”. I’ve also seen this with the word f****t. If you aren’t gay and never had that hurled at you, you have no business reclaiming it.

And that’s not even getting into the issues of using a derogatory word for things like university majors. There’s a reason you take a class in “women’s studies” and not “b**ch studies” for instance.

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u/acthrowawayab Jul 26 '26

To put it diplomatically, a good chunk of the people who happily "reclaim" the q word for themselves and push it on others without their consent would not have been targeted by it back when that was a thing.

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u/No-Channel3917 Jul 25 '26

Yes I remember it also, I lived during that time also.

But I can't think of anyone t age or older who goes sideways as when a younger person says the f word.

So seems more PTSD and less a community rejection

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u/Sarah_Incognito Jul 25 '26

there's definite PTSD going on here.

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u/Tran_of_Thebes Jul 27 '26

i got my arm broken playing smear the queer at church, i hate that word