My girlfriend Marna has been a queer activist since the late 80s. She’s told me about the incredible deliberation and debates LGBTQ+ activists had, in the late 90s and early 00s as the community began to see past the AIDS crisis and immediate goals of “surviving a plague” and “burying our dead.” There were a lot of things we wanted to achieve, but we had to decide how to allocate our scarce reserves of money, labour, publicity, and public goodwiil. Those were the discussions that decided the next big goals we’d pursue were same-sex marriage equality and legal recognition of medical gender transition.
From hearing her tell it, it seems like it was actually a wrenching decision, because it absolutely left a lot of people in the dust. A lot of people, her included, had broad agendas based on sexual freedom and the rights of people to do whatever they wanted with their bodies and consenting partners—and they agreed to put their broader concerns aside and drill down, very specifically, onto the rights of cis gays and lesbians to marry, and the ability to legally change your sex and gender.
As a political tactic it was terrifically effective. In less than two decades, public opinion in many countries has totally reversed on gay marriage, and we’ve won some truly enormous legal landmarks. Gender transition has entered public consciousness and the first landmark battles allowing people to define their own gender have been won. Marriage equality means that husbands and wives are protected from being banned from their dying spouse’s bedside, being forcibly separated from their children, or not being recognized as an important part of their spouse’s life.
The LGBTQ+ community knew they were taking a gamble, focusing so exclusively on marriage equality, and trans activists knew that they wouldn’t be able to achieve anything else until they’d gotten basic medical transition recognized. By and large, prioritizing things this way paid off. But they knew going in that there would be costs—and we’re reaping them.
Activists of 20 years ago chose to sideline and diminish efforts to blur and abolish the gender binary. Efforts to promote alternative family structures, including polyamorous families and non-sexual bonds between non-related adults. Efforts to fight the Christian cultural message that sex is dirty, sinful, bad, and in need of containment. Efforts to promote sexual pleasure as a positive good.
Those efforts have been going on for the last 20 years, but they’re marginalized—activists who had to decide where their finite time, money, publicity, and social capital went literally sat in committee meetings and said, “Marriage equality is our top priority. Legal gender transition is our top priority. Everything else will have to wait.”
This happened especially because sex education, sex positivity, and youth outreach were incredibly dangerous areas. Our enemies have been saying for years that all LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles, perverts, seeking to corrupt and recruit children to our cause; anyone trying to teach children basic facts about how to avoid disease, what’s happening to their own bodies, or what possibilities they have for identity and orientation, risks having their name, career, and life ruined. As a sex educator in the 90s, Marna had to tell teenagers, “I can’t answer your questions about safe sex now. Come back when you turn 18.”
So kids who grew up being told that girls and boys are different and ought to lead different lives, and sex is dangerous and sinful and gross, and you definitely shouldn’t want sex UNTIL you get married to your One True Love, only had that message tweaked a little bit. Now you can cross the floor from the Girl Side to the Boy Side or vice-versa. Now your One True Love doesn’t have to be a different gender from you. But those kids could survive with the rest of their worldview relatively intact. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in fandom, with an emphasis on “pure” OTP ships, on only including LGBT+ identities that use crisp, clear gender binaries and result in nuclear family life. The rest of those cultural messages about sex and love remain: men’s and women’s worlds are and should be different, “impure” sex degrades and defiles you, sexual urges that do not contribute to your One True Love and family life should be repressed, shamed, or destroyed, and sexual thoughts are every bit as bad as acting on them.
This isn’t because kids today are bad or stupid. It’s because as a community, we had to decide where our effort was going, and now we need to pay down the debt we’ve racked up over years of prioritizing marriage equality and legal trans recognition over sex positivity, sex education, and deconstructing gender.
TERFs, SWERFs, exclusionists, and transmedicalists have stolen a march over liberal queers because they’re doing the work to educate youth. While liberal queers have been staging protests and lobbying politicians, half a dozen of my undergraduate professors were radical feminists. Communities of exclusionists and anti-sex activists have honed their expertise at engaging teenagers with their ideas and theories. They’re the ones writing the FAQs, answering the asks, and doing the groundwork of saying, “Here is a basic framework of sexual ethics for you to follow.”
If we want to win back the culture wars, we have to step up our own efforts. Go back to the sex educators and gender activists whose good work has been ignored or underfunded for all this time and support them. Let major LGBTQ+ activist organizations know that their work so far is very nice, but it’s time to renew our focus on youth outreach and mentoring young activists. Brainstorm a way to help angry, isolated, disenfranchised young people form communities based around positive action and a sense of belonging. Get into mentorship or education yourself. Help us pivot as a community, to reach out to the kids who have obviously been underserved.
This is a delightful post and I’m delighted you linked it over on Dreamwidth, which is where I saw it. I’m sitting here and chewing it over and integrating it into my personal experience of being, y’know, a twenty-eight-year old who reaped many of both the victories–Coffee wouldn’t be right here, living with me, without DOMA going down; wouldn’t have health insurance without Obergefell; wouldn’t feel safe if anything happened to me without legal recognition of our relationship–and also someone who came from a really different microculture.
God, I feel like the “HI I AM BRINGING THE ACE PERSPECTIVE TO BROADER HISTORY” person these days, but here’s a thing that strikes me: my communities, growing up, were also out there having sidestepped the marriage discussion and instead having chosen to focus on youth outreach, education, and engagement. I mean, for a decade the central ace-spec community out there was AVEN, which literally chose to call itself the Asexual Visibility and Education Network.
And the thing is, the same community was also quietly but heavily influenced by a lot of those ideas about blurred gender binaries and new family structures. There have always been quiet but powerful sex-positive currents in ace communities, to the point that in 2011 there were quite a lot of us going “Hang on, hang on, why the hell are we the standard-bearers of how great sex is?” in frustration. Ace communities are such a haven for nonbinary folks that in 2011 fully 40% of the surveyed community for one widely published study found that people ticked their gender identity as something other than “male” or “female.” (This is counting folks who put down identifications along the lines of “male-ish” or “female-ish”, which was a viable option.) And anyone who has looked at an ace community for five minutes or listened to ace folks talk about fantasies of family has seen how much focus these communities place on alternative family styles.
A lot of that sort of burst back all over mainstream queer communities again circa 2010-2012ish, as AVEN shattered and ace communities sprang up without necessarily referencing it. But those discussions and those currents and those feelings go right back to the roots of what AVEN was, and more to the point they go back to the roots of those older activism strains that were deliberately unfed by many “mainstream” queer activists: for example, asexual folks probably didn’t come up with romantic orientation wholesale–I ran into it described as “affectional” orientation often enough in ~2005ish that I’m pretty sure it was picked up from bisexual communities and dialogues. But it was indisputably asexual culture that burst out around 2011 and repopularized the concept within younger queer communities, to the point that I’ve run into a lot of allo folks asking if it’s appropriation to pick up the concept and borrow it for themselves.
Or–I’d ask @coffee-mage-sans-caffeine for more input than me on early nonbinary/genderqueer communities, because they know more about those spaces than me by a country mile, or maybe @xenoqueer has thoughts. But for a while there, when I met any given person who didn’t identify as male or female I could often work out whether they were coming from an ace-influenced or a non-ace-influenced background just by seeing if they used the word “nonbinary” or “genderqueer.” I’m pretty sure I wrote something about it at the time, but I haven’t got the time to go digging right now.
So I’m sitting here tilting my head and wondering: because while mainstream LGBTQ activists, for lack of a better turn, might have given this fight up wholesale while putting their muscle and their blood and sweat and tears into marriage equality, I don’t think TERFs et al. were the only pockets of queer community who were going out and focusing very specifically on youth engagement. I actually think that ace communities–and maybe the non-ace nonbinary communities of trans folks–might have been picking up and incubating many of these ideals and engaging in outreach all on their own.
It’s an interesting thought, thinking about AVEN as the vanguard of all of these older, tactically silenced priorities for queer liberation. And it makes a certain amount of sense in the context of the inclusionist/exclusionist wars c. 2003-2004 within ace communities outside of AVEN, too.
Fact: bisexuals make up a majority of the LGBT population.
Fact: the majority of bisexuals are closeted.
Theory: If all bisexual people came out, straight people would no longer be the majority.
Do we really make up a majority? Cause the way we’re erased i had no idea. Like really. I thought we were in minority…
The Human Rights Commission of San Francisco released a groundbreaking report on Bisexual Invisibility in 2010 which revealed that, even though only 28% of bisexuals are out (compared to 71% of lesbians and 77% of gay men.) bisexuals out-number gays and lesbians combined, Many studies have followed which verify this data.
Bisexual Invisibility more like Bisexual Invincibility
reblogging for the last comment
I’ve had a lot of bi people tell me “I thought bisexuality was almost nonexistent?” when I brought this up.
Bisexuals make up the majority of the LGBTQ+ community and a huge percentage if not the majority of people in general.
It’s easy to feel like you’re alone if you’re bi or questioning. The most powerful thing we can tell bi youth is ‘you are not alone’. It’s what saved my life as a kid.
All my bi siblings are more than welcome here!!! I love yall!
Honestly “queer” is so useful for people like me w/ a “complicated orientation” b/c instead of having to say I’m “asexual panromantic” and explain what that means, I can just say “I’m queer” and it tells you all you need to know (that I’m not straight).
yeah sure good for you but don’t ever ever use that word for someone who doesn’t identify as it themselves, it’s not an umbrella term for everyone. also “pan/ace” would definitely work, even if you don’t want to use it, other people could. i use ace lesbian and definitely not the q slur.
Wow its almost like they were just talking about using it on themselves for individual reasons and you butted in to be an ass and be condescending because you think you’re superior for not using queer, then you called their identity a slur right to them. But that can’t possibly be what you were trying to do, right?
Anyone is allowed to use it for themselves, I never said no one should do that if that’s what they want. Queer is a slur though. I just want people to be aware of that, I have no idea if OP is aware of that or not but some people using that word aren’t. I’m tired of people including me and other people who don’t want to be included in that word, and before anyone asks, I never meant that OP did that, because I literally have no idea if they do.
Queer is a slur as much as any other LGBT+ word, I just want you to be aware of that.
“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella – gay rights, gay marriage, gay community – when discussing the entire community.
Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.
Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.
Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.
So if you’re not going to come onto gay people’s posts for the same behavior, maybe critically analyze why exactly you feel the need to be so condescending to Queer people, specifically on posts that ONLY have to do with personal identity. Why you feel the need to insist to Queer people that their identities are slurs, to directly slap away the power of reclaiming a word from them by demanding it remain in the hands of the Straights as a perpetual slur.
I think an important difference between gay and queer is however, that queer started out as a slur used against members of the community and continues to be used as a slur in many places. Whereas gay began as a word the community chose itself to describe itself and was then later used by homophobes and heterosexuals in general in a negative way, meaning however, that gay doesn’t hold the same negative connotations as queer for many people simply because it was our word that they took, and not a word that they forced on us to make us “strange” or “other” like queer means.
That’s…. Not true. People think so because the history before gay was reclaimed is way older (older than any love community member’s lifetimes, probably,) but gay had the exact same origins.
It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.
The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”
There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.
The more recent history of the mid to late 20th century more prevalently favored queer as a slur, as is represented in our media. However its clearly undeniable that the switch back to gay as the popular community slur (along with the ever present f slur,) happened in the 2000s. Which is trying to be denied and rewritten by the anti queer crowd, who completely ignore the words popularity with community members who actually lived through when it was a popular slur.
Yes to all of this. When it comes to words for “not straight” there are hardly any choices that didn’t originate as ways to stigmatize or pathologize us. We are all using reclaimed slurs to describe ourselves.
Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet.
Somebody else pointed this out earlier to me, and of course I’ve lost the post, but it’s really suspicious that of all the reclaimed slurs, the one that gets the most pushback is the one that is most radically accepting of all identities
“hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it.
Queer is an ideology and an identity, historically and now. It is an umbrella for that ideology and an umbrella for those identities, historically and now. They can’t be conflated (with LGBT) and it’s super fucking disingenuous to pretend one is just the tarnished besmirched dirty slur version of the other. They’re different. In my particular work for example, Queer bioethics is different from LGBT bioethics and conflating the two will muddle any discussion you try to have about them because they lead to literally opposite conclusions in some cases.
Yeah I freaking love pancakes
Wait wrong post
By far the best addition to this post
This is one of those things where I feel like an old.
Like, *the* slogan I associate with pride is, “We’re here, we’re queer – get used to it!”
There was a TV show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that was total mainstream pap. (Not that the show wasn’t riddles problematic elements from the concept out, but ‘queer’ in the title was clearly meant as a positive.)
I just have a hard time processing queer as anything but reclaimed.
They actually shot “Queer As Folk” in my city!
TERFs and radical gender/sexuality bianarists are flooding social media and blogging sites with propaganda smearing the word queer in the hopes of silencing all of us who don’t identify with their hate politics. I fought hard to reclaim the word queer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s the one word that doesn’t worship exclusion. Which is why these people are trying to convince you not to use it. fuck that noise. there is literally no word i could use to identify my sexuality that hasn’t been thrown at me in hatred, fear, and violence. No way am I giving up the one of those that allows me to talk about all of my community without trying to put people in boxes they don’t fit in.
I will never not reblog this post. Queer, queer, queer here.
“Queer” has been claimed by queer people as a self-descriptor since at least 1910. It’s an insult to those historical people (and all the generations of queer historical people who have identified as queer since then) to pretend that the people using it as a slur owned it more than the queer people who used it as a self-descriptor.
Source: George Chauncey, “Gay New York,” page 101
They don’t want us to use queer because they don’t want to be lumped in with anyone who’s not cis gay or cis lesbian. So fine. You don’t like the word queer? You don’t want to be in the “queer” community? Get the fuck out, then. Y’all don’t welcome us in your community anyway, so we’ll just have our own.
And it’ll be queer as fuck.
I fucking love the word queer ❤
Or, to put it another way, using a great old slogan of the community: I’m not gay as in happy, I’m queer as in fuck you.
Yes yes yes yes yes! These younglings today don’t know their queer history but feel so free to comment on it. Trying so desperately to assimilate into straight culture by turning your nose up at queer, and all the people who take refuge under its umbrella. Queer accepted me when nobody else would, not even the LGBT groups.
Queer is full of the types of people who don’t make good poster children for the middle class assimilationist cis gay couple just looking to get married and have some kids. Queer forces us to realize the fight didn’t end with gay marriage, and cis gays are gonna have to step out of the spotlight sometimes, and realize cis gays have privilege, and fight for someone with less. Trans people, nonbinary people, people in nontraditional relationship structures, aromantics, asexuals, sex workers. Heck more and more bisexual people these days are switching over to queer because the amount of biphobia in the so-called lgBt community is so alienating, and also because so many of us feel the term bisexual reinforces a false gender dichotomy and we’re too tired of jokes about kitchenware to use pansexual.
Part of what I love about the term queer is that it does make people uncomfortable. It makes them aware of their privilege, exposes certain biases, even within the LGBT community. What’s so wrong with a movement that strives to fight for everybody, huh? Huh?
Proudly bi, proudly queer, and being part of this movement when I was young was an honor.
Text of a manifesto originally passed out by people marching with the ACT UP contingent in the New York Gay Pride Day parade, 1990. –
An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose
Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred. (We have been carefully taught to hate ourselves.) And now of course it means fighting a virus as well, and all those homo-haters who are using AIDS to wipe us off the face of the earth.
Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it’s about gender-f— and secrets, what’s beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it’s about the night. Being queer is “grass roots” because we know that everyone of us, every body, every c—, every heart and a– and d— is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored. Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility.
We are an army because we have to be. We are an army because we are so powerful. (We have so much to fight for; we are the most precious of endangered species.) And we are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is. Desire and lust, too. We invented them. We come out of the closet, face the rejection of society, face firing squads, just to love each other! Every time we f—, we win.
We must fight for ourselves (no else is going to do it) and if in that process we bring greater freedom to the world at large then great. (We’ve given so much to that world: democracy, all the arts, the concepts of love, philosophy and the soul, to name just a few of the gifts from our ancient Greek Dykes, Fags.) Let’s make every space a Lesbian and Gay space. Every street a part of our sexual geography. A city of yearning and then total satisfaction. A city and a country where we can be safe and free and more. We must look at our lives and see what’s best in them, see what is queer and what is straight and let that straight chaff fall away! Remember there is so, so little time. And I want to be a lover of each and every one of you. Next year, we march naked.
guys. if you go to college and want to study our history and current political climate etc? do you know what that department is called? “Queer Studies”. So could you fucking stop, you little babies.
I am officially Old as Fuck ™ compared to most Tumblrites.
I came of age after they discovered HIV and before they discovered how to treat it. THAT is how old I am.
I worked and marched with friends and loved ones and the banner that brought everyone together was “Queer.” The word doesn’t need to be reclaimed. It has been reclaimed. Before a lot of y’all were ever born.
Trying to school your elders about shit of which you know nothing doesn’t build community. It’s part of a rejection of the idea that the LGBTQ community is multigenerational. It’s a rejection of the idea that there is gay, lesbian, QUEER life after 30. Its refusing to consider that those who went before did an awful damn lot to make where you are now possible.
The older I get, the more I find heterosexual couples so…weird. It’s not that men and women are inherently different in irreconcilable ways, is that they’re socialized to believe they are, and it shows in how male/female couples interact. There is this awkward, unnecessary communication barrier between them based on their perceived gender differences. This obviously doesn’t apply to all heterosexual couples; I’m sure there are plenty with great communication and so on. But the large majority of the ones I’ve encountered in the past few years just don’t. It’s uncomfortable to watch.
They have all these weird notions about each other’s genders, and it’s so out of place for me. Like, women will let their husbands get away with not doing housework because “men are helpless” and men will talk about how their wives are “just hormonal” when they come to them with a legitimate grievance that needs to be talked about, and so on and so forth. Just a lot of back and forth that seems perfectly normal to them, but to an outsider who doesn’t experience this kind of heteronormative behavior often it’s like…
i’d like to share my hypothesis that this exact phenomenon is why straight writers struggle to write gay relationships (or project heteronormative constructs onto those relationships). they literally just don’t understand a relationship where one person doesn’t treat the other like they’re part of an alien species.
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
what i mean by that is that many repressed or questioning lesbians don’t think they can be a lesbian for whatever reason, but they want to be. they’re drawn to the word lesbian, lesbian culture, and lesbians in general. they dread the idea that they’ll have to settle down with a man eventually. they wish they could be a lesbian so that they’ll have a reason to not be with men, but they think they’re not cool or brave enough, or that maybe they could possibly, theoretically love a guy at some point so calling themselves a lesbian would be wrong. so to all those questioning wlw out there, i’m telling you right now: if you want to be a lesbian, you’re probably a lesbian. you’re allowed to be a lesbian.
This is a really large project and not one which I’m remotely qualified to figure out by myself, but here are a few disconnected thoughts:
For a lot of people especially in the early stages of coming out, it can be easier to say, e.g. “I want to be a man,” than “I am a man.” The prevailing narrative right now is that a trans man was always a man and doesn’t leave much room for desire or becoming. This narrative is convenient for people who can confidently assert a transgender identity, but it makes it hard for people to recognize the qualitative experience of dysphoria, which very frequently manifests as wanting to be rather than feeling like you already are. I don’t think it would be a good idea to replace one totalizing narrative with another one, but if there had been a little more pluralism in how we talk about these things I wouldn’t have had to worry if it was offensive to trans people for me to think about wanting to be a woman without being one.
Due to both community dynamics and the narratives we’ve settled on, it can be really difficult for someone to recognize commonalities between their experiences and trans people’s while thinking of themself as cis. Cis people (and “cis” people) are told that they can’t understand what it’s like to be trans, that transitioning would make them incredibly dysphoric and if they don’t realize that it’s because of a failure of introspection, that it’s offensive to even make the comparison. This results in closeted trans people assuming that their experiences can’t possibly be the same as trans people’s and therefore don’t constitute any evidence that they might be trans.
People keep throwing around the phrase “gender identity” like it refers to a specific qualitative experience, of course without describing what that experience feels like. (Giving such a description would be impossible because that’s not what gender identity is.) How the fuck is anyone supposed to know what their gender identity is when you put it that way?
There were some things that the trans student organization at my undergraduate university did that seemed really helpful in ways that I don’t see very often. It was explicitly for trans people “and allies”. I don’t think anyone showed up there because they were a cis person who just really wanted to support trans people, but it meant people could show up without being sure they were trans, or without being comfortable asserting a trans identity. People could make friends and work through questions, and if they eventually decided they were cis they could keep showing up and maintain their relationships and place in the community. A significant fraction of the organization body didn’t identify during the time of my involvement as anything other than the gender they’d been assigned at birth, and they weren’t considered lesser members of the community for it. This made it a place where people could figure things out in a low-stakes environment without worrying that their place in the community was predicated on eventually coming to the right answer. I don’t think that every trans community should be like this –it is understandable and legitimate for trans people to want a community where they don’t have to deal with cis people– but if there were more communities like that one I think it would be really helpful.
In the sphere of Yelling About Things On The Internet, I think it would be beneficial for trans people to engage more seriously with things cis people write about their experiences with gender. Existing engagement tends to involve grouping experiences into either “you’re cis so your experience has nothing to do with mine as a trans person” or “you’re actually trans, you just don’t know it yet”. Actually listening and examining points of similarity and difference without trying to fit everything into a particular narrative doesn’t happen very much. This would make those conversations more accessible to questioning people, and would also aid in the development of language to help clarify the qualitative differences in question. Obviously no one’s obligated to do this kind of outreach, but I think it could do a lot more good than some of the other things people devote their energy to, like arguing with TERFs.
A position I’ve been turning over in my head lately is that a lot of the problems this approach is designed to fix come from the intersection of trans advocacy and SJ culture generally. The basic framework of modern SJ is that there are a handful of binary “axes of privilege” that define the social dynamic and one’s position within it – usually three to six, but never enough – and someone on the “privileged” side of an axis isn’t permitted to contradict or criticize someone on the “unprivileged” side on anything pertaining to that axis. On the whole, people on the “privileged” side are expected to function as silent Pythagorean initiates sitting outside the curtain in any serious discussion of those issues.
I think this approach causes problems across the board, but I can recognize that in many situations it’s trying to solve an actual problem by giving the control of small, personalized spaces (those where this philosophy holds sway) to people who are disenfranchised in the broader social sphere. The problem with applying this logic to the trans/cis binary is that in terms of social perception and usually self-perception, everybody is presorted as cis. That’s what “cisgender” means. When you apply this sort of logic to a category like trans/cis, the effect is that it pushes most people toward the “privileged” category that isn’t allowed to talk about the subject and locks them there, except the ones who are so eager to be allowed to have an opinion on the subject that they’re prepared to adopt whatever affiliation gives them the right – who can be very nice people in their own way but aren’t really the group you want to select for.
I think it’s good to include allies in general for the reasons mentioned in the OP, but I think the word “allies” should never be used under any circumstances as it’s unsalvageable by this point. It’s functionally an idpol category of its own just for people who want to help out with other idpol categories. Setting aside the fact that “allies” have a justifiably bad reputation as making other people’s problems about themselves and being in it mainly for their own woke self-image, the term imports the entire narrative where you’re a pair of hands with no right to an opinion. I can’t imagine any context where I would ever be willing to identify as an “ally” of anything in the SJ sense on account of all the freight yoked to it, so a group that’s for “trans people and allies” is still a group where I’d feel unwelcome. If you want to know what would work to be genuinely inclusive: make it a community of shared interest or goals, rather than centering it around an identity group and assuming that the shared interest and goals will follow naturally.
I am unwilling to give up “allies” just yet, since many of the queer adults I know used to think they were “allies”; I just reject the “no right to an opinion” narrative. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, they may not be entitled to a ton of deference to it.
But also, yes, I have known so many trans people who were severely harmed by the “cis people can’t have these thoughts or opinions” notion. Understanding that gender dysphoria is a thing most cis people can also experience is incredibly useful.
Most cis women, if they thought about “being a man”, would experience revulsion and horror. It would feel awful. Same for most cis men thinking about “being a woman”. That’s gender dysphoria. If you think you’re a cis woman, and you think about being a man, and it sounds awesome and comfortable? You’re probably not actually what we normally mean by “a cis woman”.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have been in the queer movement for 20+ years, to have studied queer theory, to have contributed to you potentially enjoying the rights you have today because I was part of a groundswell of lobbying and direct action in the 1990s….
…to have a 15 year old who’s spent maybe 8 months being political and has never inquired about queer history anonymously message me, “EXCUSE ME QU**R IS A SLUR LMAO OMG EMBARRASSSING AN aCTUAL ADULT WHO THINKS IT’S OKAY TO USE QU**R!~!!!!”
Dude, we are a slur. Queer folks are a slur to conservative straight people. Everything we are will be used as a slur by everyone who hates us. Gay is a slur. Lesbian is a slur. People will try to use all of our words against us. Don’t fucking let them get into your head to the point at which you’re telling actual queer people not to use the words we’ve used to unite ourselves and empower ourselves for decades.
yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees
The notes on this post since I first reblogged it from @asynca are a wild fucking ride.
“It was never our word, do some research.” Child do your own damn research, it’s been our word.
“If you’ve been part of the community for 20 years get off of Tumblr and go take care of your grandkids.” Man I would not want to be you in 20 years, realizing that shit, you don’t stop existing when you become a grown-up and you keep having interests. How do you think your life’s going to be between age 20 and age 80? Is it gonna be that boring to be you? And holy shit my grandkids? If Asy is anything like me, who came out at 13, how you expect me to have grandkids at 33ish? 35? Y’all. Really. And these are the same people who wail ‘respect your elders, don’t call them queer, they don’t like it,’ but out the other side of their mouth say ‘you’re not relevant, grandma, go away.’
Mmkay. Just show your hypocrisy a bit more, I guess.
“Just don’t call people things they don’t wanna be called.”
Aight, so, yeah. First off, ain’t nobody calling anybody part of the queer community who ain’t identifying as queer. Queer is, and has been, a radical political and mostly blue-collar portion of the LGBTQIPA+ community. It is defined by its rejection of Corporate Gay (white, upper-middle-class, cis gay exclusionary ‘palatable for TV’ gayness) and inclusion of the entire community, and its political activism.
Guess what, if you ain’t queer, you ain’t part of the queer community. Believe me, we don’t want you if you ain’t queer, because queers ain’t afraid to get their hands dirty and actually fight. And I am so so so tired of people thinking that we’re trying to coerce people into calling themselves queer. If you wanna be part of this community, great. Otherwise, you ain’t part of it and no one is trying to force you.
That said, it’s important to recognize that attempting to censor people’s self-identity is and has been a tactic of TERFs, “purity” culture advocates, and people who have tried to shut out bi, trans, pan, questioning, ace, non-binary, genderfluid and other ‘non-conforming’ identities. It’s not a new problem. I grew up listening to Ani DiFranco (I know she has issues, that’s another post) and the song “In or Out,” which expressly, in part, is about belonging and standards in the community was released on Imperfectly in 1992. Like, really. Little Plastic Castle addresses it, too, and that came out exactly 20 years ago in 1998.
The kids on this site are not the first group to think that they can determine who is ‘In or Out.’ This site’s would-be censors are not the first ones thinking, ‘I can just demand that you not be who you are when it makes me uncomfortable.’
Demanding that we not use our identity words to describe ourselves because it makes you uncomfortable is not acceptable. No one is accepting of the idea that ‘gay’ is a word which should simply not be used. And yet, we are meant to simply write off queer and stop using that word, instead of helping people work through their issues and/or working further on reclaiming and/or simply be left alone to our identities without having to justify them. This thought process that we should just drop the word because it’s ‘bad’ is the perfect intersection of Tumblr’s TERF-sponsored exclusionists and Tumblr’s anti-recovery culture, and it needs to stop.
Kids need to stop hiding behind the idea that ‘older people in the community don’t like queer and have trauma with it,’ because we are the older people in the community, and I’m here to tell you, my trauma was around gay and dyke. Queer is the word that gave me back my life. Stop trying to use us as your Shields Against Being Called On Your Bigotry, because we’re not interested.
People need to stop saying ‘don’t call others that,’ because we’re not talking to you if you don’t identify as queer. The community who identifies as queer is who we are addressing.
People need to stop attempting to suppress the word queer. It’s not going away. We are not going away. Or, to bring back what I grew up saying:
just moving along like everyone else 