What Is “Super Straight” and Why It’s Harmful

If you’ve been on the internet recently, especially scrolling through TikTok or Twitter, chances are you’ve heard about “super straight”. This movement has gained a lot of support on social media, and the topic continues to be debated. In this article, I intend to shed light on what super straight is and why the argument and reasoning behind it are invalid. Not to mention how it’s harmful to people in the LGBTQ community, especially transgender people. If you are uncomfortable reading about topics like transphobia, then this is not the article for you. 

In order to understand what “super straight” is, we have to go back to where it started. This movement originated on TikTok after a video posted by Kyle Royce went viral. The original video garnered two million likes before being deleted. As the movement gained traction, it spread to 4chan, where it developed support from far-right groups. In the original video, the user claimed, “since straight people like myself get called transphobic because I wouldn’t date a trans woman…now I’m super straight, I only date the opposite gender, women, that are born women. So you can’t say I’m transphobic now because that’s my sexuality.” This means that people who identify as super straight only date people of the opposite gender that are cisgender, meaning their gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth. 

Now that we’re up to speed, we can assess the flaws in this argument. To be frank, this “sexuality” is just thinly veiled transphobia. By saying that he wouldn’t date someone that’s transgender because “that’s not a real woman to [him]”, he made it clear he is transphobic. This sexuality implies that trans men aren’t men and trans women aren’t women, which shows a blatant disregard for people’s identities just because they are trans. Besides, attraction is not based on whether you can tell if someone is cisgender or not, so the premise behind it makes no sense. 

People are obviously allowed to have a choice in who they date, but to make a sexuality that is based around the exclusion of trans people shows that this was never really about preference. No one is forcing straight people to date transgender people, or anyone for that matter. Who you choose to date is up to you. You can prefer to date cisgender people, but once you exclude an entire group, it’s no longer just a preference. A preference is when someone tends to date a certain type of person (i.e. a certain race) but wouldn’t mind dating outside of that type. Complete exclusion implies that you think something is implicitly wrong with a certain type of person and that is never okay. 

This is harmful because it provides an outlet for people to be outwardly transphobic without consequence and allows them to believe what they’re doing is okay. Additionally, super straight makes a mockery of the LGBTQ+ community by attempting to equate their “preference” with valid sexualities that generations of people had to fight for and are still fighting for to this day. 

So how do we move forward? The best advice I can give at this point is to understand how movements like these gain traction, listen to trans people and understand where they are coming from, and keep an open mind. We can start by amplifying transgender voices on this issue and calling out transphobia when we see it.  The only way to truly get past situations like this is to listen to the people that are affected rather than tuning them out. 

Whether this started out as a joke or not no longer matters considering that people are taking it very seriously and if we aren’t careful, this could add more fuel to an ever-blazing fire. 

Hopefully this article cleared some things up for you and added to your understanding.

• LGBTQ+
• sexuality
• super straight
• tiktok