Posted on March 28, 2026.
In terms of visibility, queerness, a trait that has constantly stuck out of gendered expectations, has differed sharply from femaleness over time. This visibility corresponds to the awareness that these traits exist and their representation in society. Women have been recognized as inferior to men, and queer people, imagined as the mistakes of nature at best, as an impossibility. In this space of thought, female oppression has been more apparent than queer oppression.
It was likely the vocal resistance of women against misogyny that would pave the way for the awareness of homophobia and transphobia today. When misogyny began to slightly shatter and queer people became the new subjects of resistance, homophobia and transphobia flared up from the traces of misogyny that still persists. In other words, this speculative sequence of events would pose no coincidence once we posit that homophobia and transphobia have their roots in misogyny.
The very existence of queer people challenges gender essentialism, the view that women and men have distinct roles that are naturally defined and unchangeable. Gender norms and roles that are attributed to men and women play a primary role in constituting the oppression of women. In other words, people associate traits of dominance and aggression with male nature and those of subordination and softness with female nature. Transgender people's existence reveals that these roles of men and women are in fact not products of human nature, as their gender identity does not match their assigned gender at birth. Hence, transphobia is a response to sustain misogynistic gender roles.
Heterosexuality represents the clash between the two roles that are defined in opposites, and it is a part of gender norms itself: that men must be attracted to women and women must be attracted to men. The existence of any non-straight orientation reveals that this prescriptive norm is not necessarily true. Along with transphobia, homophobia is a response to sustain misogynistic gender roles.
When we apply gender norms on non-heterosexual and transgender people, we see that queer oppression continues:
Gender norms create one frame. Inside this frame, there is a hierarchy of men over women, leading to misogyny. Outside, there is a hierarchy of cisgender, heterosexual, conformant people over queer people. It is misogyny that is rooted inside the frame that tempts both kinds of hierarchies because this frame is active in society, where every person is assigned a gender. Until we are completely free of gender norms, neither women nor queer people are liberated, and the fight for both is necessarily united, like the agony of both has been.
Of course, one must note that individual oppression appears under a totality of class, gender, and race, all of which demand abolition for liberation. While this analysis applies, it lacks the real depth of all experiences. In the meanwhile, it provides nuances to the non-cisgender and non-heterosexual positioning under patriarchy.
One motivation behind this essay was misunderstandings that arose with the increased consciousness of gendered dynamics and misogyny. Considering this consciousness, no conclusions were likely made in bad faith, but they would benefit from a more structural outlook. One such doxa is that homophobes are gay people, secretly.
The argument relies on a psychological account informed by the individual mechanisms of projection and repression. Accordingly, when a homophobe notices an openly gay person, this triggers the homophobe's unconscious homosexual desires that they have been repressing. Either (1) they project their own self-hatred, caused by homophobia, on the gay person, or (2) unable to come to terms with their own sexuality, they manifest a jealousy-driven anger towards the gay person because of their confidence. In both cases, ultimately, the homophobic person is secretly gay.
However, this explanation ignores the structural origins of homophobia. Socialization in a patriarchal society establishes the two abstractions of male and female and defines them in opposing characteristics. With the norm of heterosexuality, these two figures actively unite to produce the clash between them, leading to the oppression of women who bear the inferior traits. Deviating from this internalized norm, homosexuality is met with offence from the socialized individual.
For most homophobic people, it is unlikely that they repress any homosexual attraction at all. We know that most transphobes are not secretly transgender, most racists are not secretly black, nor are most misogynists secretly women. These bigoted views spring from a social domain behind them.
The curious thirst for knowing the causes, while appreciable, stops too early at the doxa: if there is such a repression of homosexual desires, then what external condition causes it? With the individualization, it feeds the narrative that homophobia is actually an infighting among gay people themselves and moves the focus off the oppressors. At best, what is repressed is one's desire not to be obliged into fitting the broader set of social norms that constrain their self-expression. If only gay people could express themselves fully, too.
This doxa shares a fondness with another frequent belief: that many straight men are secretly gay for their dislike of women. However, misogyny is an expected attitude that men display as a consequence of their socialization under patriarchy. A man's sexual attraction towards women does not negate his objectification of them. On the flip side, many gay men have been supporters of women's liberation historically.
Another discourse of today revolves around the relationship between feminist concerns and the socialist movement. In response, this section works as a rather brief reflection on how capitalism and patriarchy go hand in hand.
Capitalism yields the profit motive that furthers the durability of gender norms. With socialization, gender becomes an object of a person's identity, hence the assignment of a gender to a commodity increases its consumer appeal. The attractive force of gendered commodities not only boosts profits but also reinforces gender norms. For example, when beauty products are more often marketed towards women, women who do not conform to these commercial standards are targeted, either internally or externally, on the basis of their female identity.
Largely embodied in commodities, the gender of individuals opens doors to consumerism, money validates identity, and the ideal images of maleness and femaleness derive from the men and women of the ruling class. Hence, women under poverty, queer women, and Indigenous women are targeted for "not being female enough" and deviating from the Eurocentric frame of gender norms. In other words, the class conflict reproduces itself in the frame of gender norms, where ruling-class women are seen more female than working-class women.
During socialization, the perception of gender flows from one object to another in vague associations, like how we can intuitively assign genders to names that we have not heard before. For example, a shampoo bottle's exterior design that associates femaleness with softness and beauty strengthens other norms that associate women with being more skilled in nurturing. Each new gender norm that one learns prepares the ground for the acceptance of other gender norms even though these norms might not be directly relevant to each other.
On this foundation, gender assignment to commodities reinforces the entirety of gender norms. Recalling commodity fetishism, gender labels push for the concealment of the labor relations behind commodities by representing the sacred norms of maleness and femaleness on the surface. Aren't people themselves and even their professions assigned genders at the same time, like commodities are? Seemingly an intrinsic, neutral part of one's identity, gender marks a position in the gendered division of labor and occupational segregation, where women's labor is either unpaid (i.e. reproductive labor, serving wage laborers to prepare them for their next day of exploitation and creating the next generation of such) or disproportionately low-paid. Disguising these relations of production as an essential, self-contained trait of individuals, gender assignment is analogous to commodity fetishism.
Finally, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are reactions that sustain the existence of gender, intertwined with capitalism. When queer people expose the essentialism that justifies the existence of gender, it is no wonder that they appear at the site of exclusion from employment and housing. Pushed into sex work for a bare amount of income, queer people as a whole are stigmatized under judgements of immorality. Under patriarchy, sexual activity where the woman is the subject of desire is immoral, most sex workers are women, and by association, queer people are also abominable. In some regions, rainbow capitalism works to blur this reality of oppression that the average queer person still faces against gender norms and poverty.
This essay was a comprehensive attempt to cover female oppression as intertwined with capitalism and queer oppression. We demonstrated how queer oppression derives from mechanisms of deviance from the gender hierarchy and reflected on socialization under patriarchy within current discourse. We then pointed at the links between patriarchy and capitalism.
Lastly, patriarchy reproduces the ideology of bigotry for the continuance of capitalist exploitation at the cost of the solidarity of oppressed groups. Assigned immediately at birth within a binary, gender is almost a precondition for being a human. Misogyny and its artifacts, homophobia and transphobia, stand on no separate shelf from capitalism, nor does the concept of gender.