Wait, why is 'Dagestan' suddenly a homophobic slur?

QUEER WORD
DAGESTAN

What it means:

A coded slur that’s recently emerged on TikTok, usually left in the comments of videos featuring queer or effeminate men. On the surface, it’s just the name of a Russian republic in the North Caucasus. But underneath, it’s a dog-whistle - a not-so-subtle dig suggesting that whoever’s video the comment is posted on is too soft, too gay, and needs to be shipped off to Dagestan in order to be ‘toughened up’.

Let’s use it in a sentence:

Kyle posted Dagestan on a video of a man in eyeliner, then spent the rest of the evening googling ‘why won’t women respond to my DMs?’

A little bit of history

If there’s one thing you can rely on, it’s humanity’s knack for coming up with new ways to be cruel to one another. 

Guillotine outlawed? No worries! We’ll just invent solitary confinement.

Witch trials frowned upon? Fine! We’ll just dub those women ‘hysterical’ and lock them up in asylums.

Can’t brazenly fling queer slurs on social media anymore? Easy! Let’s just create coded language instead.

And, so, here we are - in an era where brand new coded slurs seem to be popping up daily. Realising that they risk being banned if they use established terms like the f-slur or d*ke, people have taken to inventing new, seemingly-innocuous-but-actually-pretty-sinister terms that evade the algorithmic tripwire whilst simultaneously signalling to those in the know that the target doesn’t sufficiently conform to the suffocating constraints of heteronormative expectations.

But why Dagestan, of all words?

If you’re weirdly good at geography you’ll already know that Dagestan is a Republic of Russia, right down at the bottom-left (-ish) next to Georgia and Azerbaijan.

It recently came to the internet’s attention thanks to a viral interview from July 2024, featuring American and Russian MMA fighters Daniel Cormier and Islam Makhachev. In it, Makhachev encourages Cormier to send his son to Dagestan if he wants him to become a better fighter.

The exchange goes:

And, honestly, the video is kind of funny, as Makhachev delivers his lines with such a dry, deadpan seriousness, leaning in to all the no-nonsense stereotypes about Russians.

But, this seemingly innocent exchange about athletic training taps into much deeper cultural anxieties about masculinity. Beneath the humour there’s an old, well-trodden implication: if you want to turn someone into a ‘real man,’ you need to put them through hell. Toughen them up. Break them down. Strip away softness until what’s left is a stoic, unfeeling unit who won’t embarrass you by crying, asking for help, or…. I don’t know… reading a book.

There doesn’t appear to be any intended homophobia in Makhachev’s statement - he was merely reinforcing the same tired myths about what makes a man.  

But, you know how it goes. Masculinity and homophobia have always been intimately tangled up, with some people still bafflingly clinging to the idea that maximum macho energy somehow guarantees peak heterosexuality.

Which, seemingly, is why the term took off. Commenting Dagestan on a video is a way of mocking a person’s perceived effeminacy — a not-so-subtle suggestion that what they really need is to be shipped off and ‘toughened up.’

But there's a darker layer that makes this 'joke' particularly sinister.

You might not have heard of Dagestan, but you’ve probably heard of Chechnya — a neighbouring republic in Russia that's made international headlines over the past decade for its horrific (yes, even by Russian standards) treatment of LGBTQ+ people.

Queer folks in the region have faced increased violence, unlawful detention, and have even been disappeared. The situation in Dagestan isn’t much better, with reports of routine harassment, intimidation, and institutionalised queerphobia that largely flys under the radar.

So when someone comments Dagestan under a queer creator’s video, it’s not just a throwaway dig about them being ‘too gay.’ It’s loaded. It’s a thinly veiled threat, suggesting that sending this person off to Dagestan will either whip them in to a frothing heterosexualist or make them disappear entirely. 

Which brings us to an important question…

What should social media platforms be doing about new slurs and coded insults?

I think this is a hard one to answer.

Obviously platforms should be doing something (unless, of course, you’re Meta, whose updated hate speech guidelines now conveniently allow users to accuse LGBTQ+ people of being mentally ill if it aligns with their “religious or political beliefs”. Ugh).

But, just going ahead and banning words as they emerge isn’t going to achieve all that much. Bigots adapt quickly — ban one slur and they'll coin another within the day.

There's also the thorny question of where to draw the line. Who decides when weird internet banter crosses over into abuse? How do you moderate a term that's literally just a place name? And how do we stay safe without turning the internet into a fully-moderated, 1984-style surveillance state?

That said, the current approach where queer creators are expected to just tolerate wave after wave of toxic behaviour is also completely unacceptable. No one should have to brace themself for a barrage of hostility just because they dared to post a cute selfie or exist online.

So, ugh, I don’t know. I don't want to let social media platforms off the hook, but I also see they’re in a weird, prickly mess of a position.

In the meantime, we're left with the deeply weird reality that, in the blink of an eye, literally any word can be appropriated and wielded as a bitterly cruel insult.