Verified by 
Personal Perspectives
Dehumanizing Language Is a Threat to Safety
Personal Perspective: On creating community and finding safety.
Posted April 25, 2024 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” The saying takes me back to the playgrounds of my childhood where I heard it chanted countless times. It leaves me wondering, did we really believe it? Or were we trying to convince ourselves of it, to prevent the hurtful words from lodging too deeply into our fragile psyches?
The truth we’ve all grown to know is that sticks and stones can break our bones and words, to our childlike dismay, can both heal and hurt us. Language, in spoken or written form, can be a powerful tool, for good or ill. Language can create safety or encourage violence. Dangerous rhetoric has fueled violence against the LGBTQ+ community. We need to stop dismissing the power of words and begin to use them with intention grounded in unity and kindness.
Toni Morrison stated, "Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge." With this in mind, we have the opportunity to broaden our understanding that hateful and oppressive language does not just enable violence but is violence itself.
There are many ways violence can manifest in the human body and current statistics show how my community is at an even larger threat to negative outcomes when at baseline we are already experiencing high levels of mental health implications.
Current statistics
LGBTQ+ youth are six times more likely to experience symptoms of depression than non-LGBTQ+ identifying teens. LGBTQ+ youth are more than twice as likely to feel suicidal and over four times as likely to attempt suicide compared to heterosexual youth. In 2022, permanent losses include over 40 LGBTQ+ lives, not including lives lost to suicide.
The leading cause of violent crime? Dehumanizing rhetoric. It becomes the spark to ignite extreme prejudice. We see it over and over: Hate crimes are motivated by fear, ignorance, and anger. And LGBTQ+ people are nearly four times more likely than non-LGBTQ+ people to be victims of violent crime, which can lead to the onset of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide, and more.
Efforts to increase homophobia
Christina Pushaw, former press secretary for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and now his rapid response director, used her social media platform to label anyone against Florida’s "Don’t Say Gay" legislation—which prohibits instruction about sexual identity and gender orientation for certain grades in Florida schools—as a probable groomer, a tactic designed to increase homophobia.
Talk show host Candace Owens has attacked LGBTQ+ teachers and challenged the inclusion of non-heteronormative relationships or identity in the classroom, as well as calling members of the LGBTQ+ community predators. On April 5, 2022, The Daily Wire aired a video of Owens discussing the word "gay" and how over time it has carried different meanings. In reference to its offensiveness to the LGBTQ+ community, she said, “…it was cool, hip slang until…we learned that it was hurtful...even though we were never aiming the word at them." To her, every word is fair game as long as we aren’t "aiming it" at someone.
Media strategies such as this, created to promote homophobia, will undoubtedly increase as election efforts become more publicized this year.
Rhetoric can be a powerful tool to create safety or to destroy it.
Youth across the country are using their social-media platforms to express their feelings of being unsure if they can show up authentically as themselves at school and still be safe. Teachers have been bullied. Families are unsure how they will be impacted over time. Further legislation, specifically, in the state of Florida under HB1403, would give medical providers the ability to turn away medical care from people in the LGBTQ+ community if they have “conscience-based objections" to treating them.
Lived experience in the LGBTQ+ community
Determining safety is nothing new to members of the LGBTQ+ community. What would be new is not expending emotional and mental energy trying to identify where it is safe to exist. When you don’t feel safe, it erodes overall health and wellness with distressing outcomes.
Solutions to this are not prescriptive. One solution is to use data to educate yourself instead of scripted tactics founded only on subjective opinion. The Trevor Project in 2022 utilized a survey to capture the experiences of close to 34,000 LGBTQ+ youth between the ages of 13-24 across the United States with anecdotal evidence that points to how we can increase feelings of connectedness, acceptance, and respect that becomes the antithesis to hate, discrimination and violence.
Respondents in the survey indicated that nearly two in five youth lived in an environment that was somewhat or very unaccepting of LGBTQ+ people and that those who lived in an accepting community reported significantly lower rates of attempted suicide.
I know firsthand how heavy the tears fall, how hard it is to find your breath, and how deep the wounds can go when hateful words are screamed at you, written to you, and used to manipulate you.
However, we do have a right to celebrate. There have been recent wins, such as the Respect for Marriage Act, which federally protects the legality of same-sex marriage—a win I chose to publicly celebrate by marrying my wife in a predominantly conservative state.
Today, in the wake of multiple violent incidents resulting in injury and loss of life, and as we begin to enter into an election year, the answer to the question, "Is it safe or not?" becomes "It depends." To determine your relative safety, we’ve learned it’s crucial to find answers to other questions, like: Where am I geographically and what is the majority representation? Am I surrounded by people who are angry and fearful of my existence or kind and curious?
May our children understand how powerful their words are and how to speak their minds with grace and conviction and with respect for all living beings.
“Sticks and stones can break my bones, their words will not destroy me.”
If you or someone you love is contemplating suicide, seek help immediately. For help 24/7 dial 988 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or reach out to the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
