Been reading Who's Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler, and she proposes that the main way that homophobes remain genderphobic by constantly refusing to understand "gender". Since it is not particularly dificult to understand and the repeated invocation of it in their rhetoric brings them into contact with it, they must constantly work to affirm how little they could possibly relate to it, and therefore prevent contamination with the idea.
If this sounds like gibberish, yeah. Butler is a total nerd, and constantly speaks philosopher jargon, which valid, but also not great for most. Something that helped me and might help some yall is connecting it to how I felt about furries; I believe the psychological dynamics are pretty much the same. For a while I hovered at a vauge distaste intellectually and overt disgust emotionally, feeling and somewhat thinking that there was some sort of deep mystery to the whole thing but refusing to do any investigation or talking with a real furry, out of fear of being found out with any sort of intrest in the subject beyond denial, and I think Butler thinks that similar dynamics charecterize homophobes, and if true, feeling out these feelings might be a way for me and some yall to empathise with them in a know thy enemy sort of way.
Yeah so if it wasnt wildly obvious like 6 months or so after I wrote this I got around to reading the Beastars manga and I am 10 toes down on this whole furry thing now. which really just proves me right here. Sorry if this is how one yall has to find out but I am aiming to bump up the furry content on the rest of the site soon so hopefully not. I just have to begin creating furry content-- not an easy task when my main artistic skill is shredding jackets.