Outraged fans have taken to twitter following the Teen Choice Awards nominee announcement today.
The ‘Best Chemistry’ category has no LGBTI nominations despite multiple online polls putting same-sex onscreen couples in the lead.
Using #TeenChoiceSoStraight, fans have slammed the exclusion of LGBTI couplings in favour of platonic, heterosexual pairings who spent limited on screen time together.
Online polls including E! and People’s Choice received millions of viewer votes and the results placed same-sex couplings Clarke and Lexa from show The 100 and Magnus and Alec of Shadowhunters in the top two positions, leading fans to believe the Teen Choice nominations are disingenuous.
One Twitter user highlighted the bias, saying, "#TeenChoiceSoStraight just IGNORE canon f/f couples over non-canon m/f couples. Disgusting."
The male-female pairing that secured the nomination spot for The 100 are reportedly physically and verbally abusive to each other during their interactions on the show.
The announcement comes during LGBTI Pride Month in America, which aims to celebrate the progress made towards the equal treatment of LGBTI Americans.
President Obama hosted a reception at the White House yesterday in support of pride month.
“When you talk to the younger generation they instinctively know that people are people…discrimination is for last century,” he said.
Obama's statement supports a study by J.Walter Thompson Innovation Group, which found that today’s teenagers wanted to reject the gender binary as much as possible.
The study found 81 per cent of respondents aged between 13 and 20 agreed that gender didn’t define a person as much as it used to, and 56 per cent said they knew someone who went by gender neutral pronouns such as ‘they’ and ‘them’.
RELATED READING
Labor pledges $1.4m for LGBTI champion
