When is a man not a man? The tragedy of two Scotts, a killer and his victim

The declare this week by Scott Johnson’s killer, Scott Phillip White, that he was himself homosexual and grew up in a “household that hated gays” is just not stunning, nevertheless it does add a further, extremely unhappy, aspect to an already tragic story.

It ought to function a yet one more reminder concerning the insidious nature of homophobia and its penalties for people, group, policymakers and political leaders.

Sitting inside homophobia’s rotten core is an outdated perception of who and what a person is, and what a person is just not.

It’s straight associated to the gender-based violence that’s inflicted on girls by males who act from a spot of archetypal masculinity. Inflated and poisonous, it’s a hyper-realised perception of “manhood”, and it may be as dangerous to those that imagine it, and reside inside it, as to those that they select to direct it.

In some ways it’s overt – it’s “boys don’t cry”, “man-up”, “battle like a lady”, “little wimp”, “boys will likely be boys” – however in different methods it’s extra sinister. Its roots lie in, amongst different issues, energy – a need to slot in with highly effective males, a world the place there isn’t a room for vulnerability. It’s unrealistic, harmful and filled with false expectations.

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It’s a self-belief, infused by our experiences of older generations of males who we grew up round – and it impacts us all to various levels, regardless of our sexuality or gender. It fails us all.

Homophobia, inside and exterior, is one final result, and the consequence of that may be as tragic because the crime inflicted on Scott Johnson, whose physique was discovered on the base of a 60-metre cliff at Sydney’s North Head. However different penalties may also embrace self-hatred, suicide, excessive social withdrawal, household isolation, bullying and harassment, poorer instructional outcomes, and work productiveness points.

And let’s not child ourselves that this sort of poisonous masculinity, and the violence and cruelty it invokes, is restricted to assaults on homosexuality. Its resultant anger and worry can also be directed in direction of girls (cis and trans), in addition to many others who don’t seem sexually or gender-aligned to those males’s beliefs.