stop fucking calling all lesbians dykes (ex. “an older dyke”, “many of the awesome dykes”), especially if you’re not a lesbian. “lesbian” is a label that exists and it’s rude and disrespectful to use a slur to refer to a broad group of people who you don’t personally know. that should honestly be obvious.
When I say ‘dykes’, I mean ‘dykes’. As in: people who identify as dykes.
In the post you’re refering to I made it quite clear that I was writing about dykes I know and when I speak of these dykes I won’t erase or sanitize their identities by using a mainstream, tame, deradicalized word that denies the words they specifically chose for themselves to emphasize their identities and their struggles as queer marganilized working class proudly-perverted revolutionary DYKES.
Keep your fucking respectability politics to yourself.
Hmmm. Interesting post!
Anyway, I’ve seen some of my followers reblog from this freak, and I think it’s worth stating that you should probably unfollow me if you agree with them.
did he really just say “proudly-perverted”
Yeah, that makes no sense at all.
(to any people unfollowing me: please block me at the same time so I never have to deal with you again. bye and good riddance)
When did @comcastkills decide to become hot garbage to THIS degree like, damn.
I forget the age range on this site runs only a little past the teens most of the time because nothing said here is in any way outside of LGBTQ history.
But, you know, thats reactionary bullshit for you. Are discoursers all younger than 21 or something? Would that explain this nonsense?
The first person who welcomes me into the community as a sort of mentor proudly ID’d as a Dyke would insist that be used over lesbian or homosexual.
Comcastkills showing the same regard for people as the average school bully, I see.
It’s wild and depressing and wildly depressing for me to see this kind of stuff, because when I was a kid, any of us babygays would have literally killed to have an older queer mentor of any kind. Shockingly, there were few around, because, you know, AIDS. But now, the next generation, finally having what we lost, an older generation to teach them about their cultural history n shit… Just. Actively hates and in some cases even tries to kill them (I’ve seen kids on this hellsite try to cost grown-ass adults, sometimes parents, their jobs, kids, and lives).
Like, I feel so old to be like “back in my day” or “when I was your age” but seriously. I always thought the younger generations would be better off for having what we lost. Instead: this.
And we gotta call it by its name:
It’s not a generation gap. It’s not just ignorance (though that plays a part). It’s not just TERF manipulation against the word queer (though that plays a part).
We’re seeing a young generation of LGBT conservatism: kids who want their civil rights but who don’t want all the mess and scandalousness of actual liberation. Kids who want to hold on to what has been won for white middle class binary identified LG kids and don’t want to thing about what’s happening on the margins on the LGBT movement. Kids who want glamorous LGBT celebrities on tv, not homeless LGBT youth in their spaces. We have kids into gay nationalism. We have lesbians longing for the time when we didn’t include bisexuals and trans women in our communities. We have LGBT youth voting for Tories.
These kids aren’t shitting on their queer elders out of just ignorance, they actively reject our struggle against all oppression.
I’ve been thinking about this lately too.
The thing I created this blog to oppose is, ultimately, a right-wing reactionary movement, and if you scratch even a little bit at the veneer of leftism, you find bootstrap logic, xenophobia, militarism, anti-intellectualism, the veneration of retributive justice, disrespect for bodily autonomy, and other characteristics of right-wing politics underneath.
Let’s start calling it what it is.
I thought for the longest while that I was off-the-mark in mentally categorizing Tumblr Anti-X (anti ace/aro, anti kink, anti gender-fluidity/gender-spectrum, anti-labels-actual-queer-people-use, anti certain-kinds-of-fiction, etc) Discoursers as the social conservativesof the future, but the above lines up incredibly well with my own observations.
Years ago, someone asked me to do a portrait of the social conservatism of decades to a century in the future and at the time I predicted highly limited andconditional acceptance of white, able-bodied, very gender-conforming, white-picket-fence, cis gay men and lesbians, who vote conservative. Maaaaaaybe also a limited acceptance of transgender people who medicalize and pathologize themselves out the wazoo, performing a constant show of ‘I’m just a good person who seeks the appropriate treatment for my medically-acknowledged condition, won’t you accept me, I promise not to rock the boat?’ and whose gender-presentation after transition is also very high in conformity to what the conservative mind thinks of as acceptable + again, support for conservative politics.
Imagine how depressed I was when a large assortment of discoursers, transmedicalists and others along these lines basically confirmed a good deal of the above, here on Tumblr, decades before I thought it would ever become a thing! I started getting alarm bells in my head when I saw the vicious responses toward the concept of gender as a spectrum (and thus toward the existence of genderqueer / nonbinary, agender, genderfluid/genderfuck people), because after years of monitoring and seeking to understand social conservative communities, I knew that they consistently felt a deep, existential sense of threat from anything that challenged their rigid, binary views of gender. And here, on Tumblr, I was seeing young, so-called ‘progressives’ reacting in the same manner, as if threatened, by the concept that gender as a binary is a small and very reductive lens through which one can see the human experience. Whoever coined the phrase ‘conservatism with a gay hat’ couldn’t have been more apt.
And the thing is, this isn’t exactly something new for the community, the only thing that’s truly different is that an entire generation is now in the thrall of reactionary politics. Seeing sneers at queer people daring to (gasp!) describe ourselves as ‘proudly perverted’, as highly sexual beings, as kinky and unapologetic, reminds me what a massive impact radfems have had in shaping the Tumblr social environment and what a net contributor they’ve been to the aforementioned reactionary politics. Whenever I look at the notes of popular radfem posts, it’s always the same exceedingly telling image: usernames along the lines of ‘empress-vulvalini’ or ‘uter-person’ routinely interspersed with ‘tradcatholicnationalist’ or ‘jesus-is-my-savior’ (looking at the latter kind of blogs reveals that they’re Fundamentalist Christians to a one and I say this as a progressive Christian, lest someone accuse me of bigotry. It’s not the Christianity that’s my issue here, it’s the fundamentalism and the deep conservatism that comes with it). In the most darkly hilarious situations, I’ve found posts made by actual religious fundies (’sexual promiscuity and behavior characterized as ‘kink’ damages the inherent dignity of the person’, for one example) with the notes filled with radfems liking, reblogging and lauding the content.
It’s been noted ad-nauseam that radfems and conservative politicians have been good allies on several fronts, starting with the 1970s, but even something as simple as a Tumblr post can show how radfems share idea-space with fundamentalists. Radfems, in this case, have been the social-vector through which LGBT teens on Tumblr have been introduced to and influenced by fundamentalist thought, giving us the incredibly baffling sight of queer youngsters reacting with knee-jerky viciousness to non-normative sexual practices that hardly warranted the batting of an eye-lash in queer-dominated spaces, ten years ago.
Good additions – and, kind of off topic, but I actually teared up a little when I saw your URL in my notes, and got a case of happycry sniffles writing this, I’m just so glad you’re back. You always post with such depth of perspective and moral clarity and insight; a heartening light in the fog.
just because someone calls themselves progressive doesn’t mean they are.
yea sometimes “progressive” just means they think their politics are the exact right amount of forward thinking that people should be allowed to be. See also the weirdness of “liberal democrat” politicians
just moving along like everyone else 