👶 was anyone ever actually offended by the term 'breeder'? 👶

QUEER WORD
BREEDER

What It Means:

an old fashioned tongue-in-cheek slang term used by queer people to describe heterosexuals, especially those who have children or seem obsessed with heteronormative, ‘traditional’ family structures and procreation.

Let’s Use It In A Sentence:

My breeder friends keep asking when I'm going to go ahead and 'settle down', because apparently my decade-long relationship doesn't count until we create our own tiny humans.

Was anyone ever ACTUALLY offended by the term ‘breeder’?

In 50 years time people are going to look back on our everyday words and say the modern equivalent of ‘aww, how quaint! Weren’t they so simple back then?’

Words like Totes. Adorbs. Amazeballs.

(Actually, come to think of it, those words already sound ridiculous).

But, anyway, I mention this because that’s exactly how I feel about the word breeder.

As slurs go, it's just so deliciously silly and campy that I can't imagine anyone being genuinely offended by it.

And, so, as I wasn’t around when the term was first coined I went looking to see if I could find any evidence of straight people genuinely being upset when the word was used to describe them. 

But, before we get in to what I found let’s look at the history of this term.

The birth (get it?) of ‘Breeder’

The word first emerged in this meaning during the 1970s in American gay subculture.

And I think it’s important to emphasise the context here. This was during the post-Stonewall backlash era. Anita Bryant’s 1977 ‘Save Our Children’ crusade framed gay people as dangerous ‘recruiters,’ ‘molesters,’ and ‘groomers’ (hmm… why is all of this sounding really familiar?). That toxic rhetoric fuelled fights like California's 1978 Briggs Initiative, which aimed to ban gay teachers from public schools.

In that stifling climate, when the community felt particularly isolated and under siege, the emergence of a barbed in-group label for straights kind of makes sense. I view it as a way to maintain your sense of humour when the world was demonising you.

Because this was in a pre-internet era, it took a number of years for the term to migrate across the continent and eventually to other English-speaking countries, with experts disagreeing on whether its peak use was in the 80s or the 90s.

Perhaps the most notable example of it (semi) slipping into the mainstream was when The Breeders burst onto the scene in 1990 with their debut single ‘Cannonball’ (which, if you haven’t heard already, you MUST go and listen to - video below!). Lead singer Kim Deal later revealed to Melody Maker that she'd named the band after the slur, gleefully explaining: ‘It's like 'yeucch! they're breeders!' - like a ripe, stinky thing.’

Anyway, back to the question at hand - was anyone actually offended by it?

Honestly, it’s hard to say.

I couldn't find much evidence of genuine offence. All I really managed to uncover were examples of people weaponising manufactured outrage for political points. Clutching their pearls and sneering ‘how dare these gay people get a little too comfortable!’.

Like this article from 2006, which talks about tensions in gay holiday town Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA, where straight people claimed they were being harassed by disgruntled gays (my favourite line from the article is: ‘One woman who signed a petition against gay marriage says she was berated as a bigot by a gay man.’)

This, of course, doesn't prove that no straight person has ever been genuinely hurt by being called a breeder, but it does suggest that widespread offence was never really a thing.

So, why is that?

Well, there’s a number of factors at play. Firstly, the term lived mostly within queer communities for decades, which were far less visible or accessible for those on the outside. Most straight people probably never even knew the term existed, let alone that it was being used to describe them. In fact, the early 2000s US remake of ‘Queer as Folk’ has been credited with properly introducing breeder to mainstream audiences, long after the term had peaked in popularity.

When straight people did encounter it, they were probably more puzzled than insulted. After all, many heterosexuals do breed. In fact, it's literally what they've been told they're supposed to do their whole lives. Being called a breeder is hardly the devastating insult some might imagine.

And, for me, there's also the broader question of power dynamics here. Can a marginalised group's throwaway nickname for the majority really carry the same sting as slurs that punch down? Is heterophobia actually a thing?

So why does the term ‘breeder’ sound so ridiculous?

I guess it's because the term has simply outlived its usefulness.

Breeder was coined at a time when starting a family as a queer person was almost impossible. If you wanted to do it you had to navigate a whole heap of legal barriers, social ostracism, and limited options. Adoption agencies wouldn’t talk to you, surrogacy was legally murky (and expensive), and even if you had a kid, your basic parental rights were precarious at best.

Back then, there really was little ambiguity - breeders were the straight folks who could accidentally make babies when there was nothing on the telly that night, while queer people were virtually excluded.

But as marriage equality spread, adoption laws changed, and reproductive technology advanced, more and more queer people began having kids. And, here we are, in a world where we're all potential breeders. And, just like that, the term doesn’t have the same wittiness or sting.

Which, again, gets me thinking about how quickly our current vocabulary will sound absurd to future generations.

How ridiculous will ‘working from home’ sound when we're all unemployed thanks to AI overlords?

How quaint will ‘climate change’ sound to the people living on an uninhabitable planet?

And how antiquated will 'fighting for equal rights' sound when we're all equally screwed?

Hmmm…

But enough of my bleak predictions for the future!

I'd love to hear from you. Do you think straight people were ever actually offended by being called breeders?

Hit reply and let me know your history with the word (or just answer the poll below!)