Super Straight: Reddit’s Latest Hate Group
A new hate movement is making its way around the Web called “Super Straight” and it’s found a home on Reddit. The Super Straight subreddit (group) on Reddit has grown to over 20,000 subscribers in the approximately two weeks this movement has been around.
Those numbers are likely inflated by bots and “sock puppet” accounts as the movement appears to follow the modus operandi of alt-right movements in the past like GamerGate which rely heavily on astroturfing support from politically motivated interests. The LGBT subreddit posted a PSA with more information on the movements alt-right ties and origins on TikTok and 4Chan before spreading across other platforms.
However, the social media activity does real damage and serves to radicalize average people in the process, a likely goal behind the movement. (For more detail on how the alt-right radicalizes, check out The Alt-Right Playbook, a series of YouTube videos by Innuendo Studios.)
The Super Straight movement is based around the idea of making straight males feel victimized by trans women. It has some ancillary components too such as “Super Gay” and “Super Lesbian” which people in this movement frame as sexual orientations. In doing this they hope to usurp the language of civil rights in order to obfuscate the meaning and shield their hate speech from criticism. However, none of these “Supers” are actual sexual orientations.
The premise put forth by proponents of this movement is that these pseudo-orientations exist to describe attraction to cis people (or more commonly the lack of attraction to trans people). Men who call themselves Super Straight would be saying that they are not attracted to trans women. The “Super” qualifier is to differentiate from typical straight males who would normally be attracted to trans women because being a straight male by definition refers to attraction to women. Super Straight men are likewise attracted to trans women, despite their protestations (assuming they are in fact straight men themselves and not lying about their sexual orientation).
This is not to say all straight men are attracted to every trans woman, which is often the debate people in this movement try to frame it as, creating a victimhood narrative. They claim the attacks on their transphobia is an attempt to “force” them to feel attraction to trans people. So the basic gimmick is to make the ignorant and incorrect claim that as a straight male they are not attracted to trans women. When they are called out for this, they cry oppression and demand civil rights for their so-called sexual orientation.
While there may be a myriad of reasons a particular person would not want to date or otherwise be in a relationship with a particular trans person, the idea that someone is unequivocally not attracted to any trans person is not only incorrect but also predicated on bigotry. They may mistakenly believe that all trans women look masculine, for example, which is not accurate. It also assumes that one is able to identify a person as trans, which is also not an accurate assumption.
Super Straights will also sometimes refer to “Genital Orientation” in order to frame the reasoning for their lack of attraction to trans people on the basis of incompatible genitalia. This mistakenly assumes all trans people have genitalia not typically associated with their gender, though.
The important thing to remember is that this is all unsolicited. Nobody asked if they’re attracted to trans people. This isn’t in the context of a trans person hitting on them. It’s all hypothetical and they feel a need to announce to the world, without reason, that they are personally not attracted to trans people. The reason for this is to spread transphobic dog whistles, as mentioned. They imply or sometimes flat out say that a trans person is a gender they are not or they suggest there is something physically wrong or lacking among all trans people of a particular gender.
But the real goal behind this movement is radicalization. Not everyone who falls into the Super Straight movement and buys into its talking points is themselves transphobic. Instead they may simply be ignorant of transexuality, and since it’s uncommon and something that is only being talked about more openly lately, that’s completely understandable. The Super Straight movement plays on this ignorance by putting fears into straight people’s minds (and to some extent those of gay and bi folks as well) that a trans person is out to deceive them. It turns the targets against the trans community, but also makes them close down to civil rights advocates by making attempts to educate them on trans issues appear as “forcing them” to be attracted to trans people and enter into sexual relationships against their will. This is all nonsense, but the trope of people being tricked, particularly by trans women, is often played up in the media, even recently.
At the end of the day, the people behind this movement likely don’t care about harming trans people. They are simply collateral damage in a culture war, using a vulnerable population to create fear and panic that drives people away from civil rights and human decency into a pipeline of alt-right radicalization. And platforms like Twitter and Reddit are part of that pipeline.
Reddit has long had problems with moderating hate speech off its platform. It typically takes them years before they’ll finally do something about a community on Reddit purely built around hate, which is simply not acceptable because so much harm is done in the meantime. Social media platforms have a responsibility to protect their users and keep their communities from being used as tools to spread hate, but with no profit-incentive to protect their users it’s unlikely to ever happen.
Update: The subreddit was banned around 10:00 PM EST on March 9th. The message from Reddit states that the community moved away from its “original satirical intent”, though satire was always meant as a defensive cover for open transphobia. Despite the subreddit being removed, the group is still spreading their hateful messages around Reddit and other social media platforms. Users should stay aware and be vigilant until interest in pushing this hate movement dies down.
