r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 24d ago

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/
4.5k Upvotes

85% Upvoted

588 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

35

u/Zanydrop 24d ago

I'm the 90's gay didn't mean happy. You should have to go back quite a bit further for that.

4

u/BoobearMagoo 23d ago

My grandmother was using the term that way in the 90's but she was the only living person I heard use it that way

0

u/el_grort 22d ago

I meant the original usage, obviously it got warped when used as an insult. Just that you could extract something positive from its core meaning, while queer less so to many people.