Discipline, Desire, and Power: How Homophobia and Transphobia Reinforce White Supremacy

Written By BlackGirlInTheLoop

There’s a pattern I keep noticing whenever conversations about queerness, gender identity, or “traditional values” pop up online. People swear it’s about morality, religion, or “protecting the culture.” But if you actually trace the history instead of stopping at slogans, the picture gets a lot uglier and a lot more political. Because at its core, this has never really been just about sexuality. It’s about power, who gets to define what’s normal, who gets punished for stepping outside of it, and who benefits when everybody stays in line.

Homophobia and transphobia are usually framed like they’re just personal beliefs people happen to hold. But historically, they’ve functioned as enforcement tools tied directly to colonialism, patriarchy, and the creation of white supremacist social order. Once you understand that, a lot of modern conversations start making way more sense.

The key thing people miss is that heteronormativity is not just “most people are straight.” It’s a system, a structure, a framework for organizing society into rigid categories that support hierarchy. Men are expected to be dominant, masculine, emotionally controlled, and authoritative while women are expected to be submissive, feminine, reproductive, and nurturing. Relationships are centered around reproduction, inheritance, and maintaining social order. People act like that’s just “human nature,” but historically these roles were enforced because they stabilized patriarchal systems. They created predictability and made power easier to distribute and maintain. Anything that disrupted those roles became threatening, and that’s where homophobia and transphobia come in.

They operate like policing mechanisms that reinforce the borders of acceptable behavior and punish deviation. That punishment can look like violence, exclusion, legal discrimination, religious condemnation, or social humiliation, but the purpose stays consistent: maintain the hierarchy.

What’s interesting is how deeply this connects to colonialism. When European empires colonized Africa and other parts of the world, they did not just take resources and labor. They imposed an entire worldview that included religion, legal systems, racial hierarchy, and rigid ideas about gender and sexuality. European colonial powers brought binary gender frameworks and strict Christian sexual norms with them, and those norms were treated as markers of civilization. Anything outside of them was labeled primitive, immoral, or savage.

Scholars like Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí have written extensively about how some African societies prior to colonialism did not organize social life primarily around rigid male and female categories in the same way Europe did. Identity and social responsibility could be shaped more by lineage, age, kinship, or social role than by strict gender binaries. Colonialism disrupted that flexibility. European systems reframed gender and sexuality through the lens of control and hierarchy, and to be “civilized” increasingly meant aligning with European heteronormative standards.

One of the clearest examples of this tension shows up in early Portuguese accounts of West and Central Africa. When Portuguese explorers and traders arrived on African coasts during the 15th and 16th centuries, they were not neutral observers. These were Catholic men coming from societies where same sex relations were criminalized and often punished severely under religious law. So when they encountered African societies with gender roles or sexual practices outside their framework, they interpreted them through fear, disgust, and moral condemnation.

In the Kingdom of Kongo, accounts recorded by Duarte Lopes described individuals assigned male at birth living socially as women and forming relationships with men. But instead of trying to understand these identities within their cultural context, Portuguese writers framed them as unnatural and immoral. That reaction reveals something deeper than culture shock because the Portuguese were not simply observing difference. They were defending a system where masculinity was tied to authority, heterosexuality reinforced inheritance and patriarchal order, and binary gender roles supported social control.

So when they encountered societies that complicated those assumptions, the response was not curiosity. It was classification, condemnation, and eventually suppression. Difference became deviance, deviance became evidence of inferiority, and inferiority became justification for domination. That is one of the oldest colonial playbooks in existence.

This is where people often misunderstand white supremacy. White supremacy is not just interpersonal racism or individual prejudice. It is a global hierarchy that positions European norms as the default standard of legitimacy, and gender and sexuality became part of that hierarchy. Homophobia and transphobia helped reinforce patriarchal authority by protecting rigid gender roles. If masculinity stops being tied to dominance, control, and hierarchy, patriarchal systems start losing stability. Queerness and gender variance disrupt the idea that men must dominate and women must submit, and they challenge assumptions about authority itself. That disruption threatens systems built on rigid power structures.

These ideologies also discipline bodies and behavior in ways that make populations easier to govern. Colonial systems have always depended on regulating not just land, but people’s identities, relationships, and self expression. When societies aggressively punish gender or sexual “deviance,” they send a message about obedience and conformity. Stay inside the assigned role or face consequences. Even after formal colonialism ended, many of these structures remained embedded inside legal systems, religious institutions, education, and cultural expectations.

One of the most effective things colonialism ever did was convince people to defend colonial structures as authentic tradition. That’s why so many people passionately defend rigid heteronormativity as if it is ancient and untouched by outside influence, when in many cases the current framework was heavily shaped by colonial law and Christian European morality. Colonial norms became internalized and then rebranded as indigenous, so defending them feels like defending culture even when those norms were historically tied to colonial restructuring in the first place.

Before colonial intervention, many societies around the world had more fluid understandings of social roles and gender expression. There were people who moved between gendered spaces, held spiritual or ceremonial roles outside binary expectations, or occupied social positions that complicated rigid categories. These experiences were not always understood through modern Western LGBTQ labels, but they still represented forms of complexity that colonial systems struggled to control because rigid hierarchy depends on rigid classification. The more flexible identity becomes, the harder it is to maintain systems that rely on strict categories of dominance and submission.

That’s why this conversation is ultimately bigger than sexuality alone. Homophobia and transphobia function as gatekeeping systems that help determine who is considered legitimate, respectable, authoritative, or “normal.” They shape ideas about who counts as a real man, who counts as a real woman, who belongs, and who deserves power. Historically, those standards have aligned closely with patriarchal European ideals tied to colonial rule and white supremacist hierarchy.

That does not mean every individual person expressing homophobia or transphobia is consciously trying to uphold white supremacy. History is more complicated than that because systems survive precisely by being absorbed as common sense, morality, religion, or tradition. But the historical roots still matter because once you start tracing where these structures came from and who benefited from them, it becomes harder to pretend they emerged naturally or neutrally.

Homophobia and transphobia do not exist in isolation. They are connected to broader systems that enforce rigid gender roles, maintain patriarchal authority, and preserve hierarchies shaped by colonial history. Heteronormativity is not just about love or attraction. It is about social order, and throughout history controlling identity has always been one of the fastest ways to control people.