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
we’re now working with (arbitrary but useful) separate categories for sexuality, gender, and gender expression.
what may be missing is sexual expression. and maybe kink and poly should be framed as falling under sexual expression. like, these are ways of being SNC, maybe.
of the current three, gender expression is kind of given short shrift in the discourse; there are comprehensible reasons for that and yet it’s not a particularly satisfactory state of affairs. bigtime competing access needs, alas. and presumably the same sorts of issues would arise around how to deal discursively with sexual expression. so my bringing this up may just be doubling/mirroring the can of worms we already have to contend with on that front, i.e., maybe I’m not helping.
but if nothing else it might help some ppl wrap their heads around what these things are even doing in the conversation, why they keep coming up, why there need to be ways to talk about them. like, even if you end up at the conclusion that expression stuff needs to be deprioritized in favor of identity stuff, maybe just in certain contexts, having the lexicon with which to articulate why and acknowledge tradeoffs and so on is going to be useful and might help dial down some of the unthinking contempt.
I’ve been personally categorizing ‘sexual expression’ as a 4th category for a while. It seems like the obvious extrapolation of the general consensus on how to talk about gender vs sexuality. If gender expression is a thing, sexual expression has to be a thing, too. They’re related but can be conceptually separated, and sometimes that’s useful. Especially when you start getting into kinks that are all about presenting as one gender, but being treated as a second one during a scene, crossdressing, stuff like that. And poly, too, of course – including desiring sex with multiple partners at a time, and so forth… that’s all specific expressions of a person’s sexuality, that isn’t necessarily easily expressed by just talking about who you are or who you’re attracted to – it’s also about what you’re attracted to and desire.
Every so often a post comes across my dash accusing women who like gay porn (aka slash fandom) of being just as disgusting and exploitative as men who like lesbian porn. I disagree.
I am a gay, nonbinary trans dude. I didn’t really fully embrace this fact about myself until I was in my 30s. But I have known I was genderqueer since I was 19, and felt deeply uncomfortable with identifying as female or straight for even longer. In the 15 years between coming to terms with being genderqueer and actually starting to transition, slash fandom WAS my only real access to a community supportive of my queer identity or queer sexual exploration. Why? Because when I tried to come out to IRL gay friends I was called an attention-seeking faghag, a pervert and a dyke in denial. This attitude of ‘oh you’re just a tourist straight girl and your presence is a threat to our identity’ kept me in the closet for over a decade.
If we want to normalize the idea of queer people, we also need to normalize the idea of enjoying queer sexuality. Gay sex between consenting adults is normal, healthy sex. Enjoying queer porn doesn’t equate to harming IRL gay people or threatening anyone’s queer identity, no matter who is doing the enjoying. If liking queer sex is perverted then by necessity all queer people are perverts.
The grossness of both icky slash and icky mainstream porn do not come from straight people being straight in gay spaces. They come from the gender essentialism and violent misogyny that we have all been indoctrinated with since early childhood. Gender essentialism and violent misogyny are not integral to being straight, and the assumption that they are helps to perpetuate them.
Several weeks ago, I became frustrated with the failure of words like ‘straight’ or ‘gay’ to encompass relationships of non-binary people. I coined the term dionysian to describe non-binary relationships and attraction, which are neither ‘opposite gender’ nor necessarily ‘same gender’. You can read the original post and the elaboration in the provided links.
The term itself, referring to a hellenic deity of trans and intersex people, was met with justified criticism. In response to ensuing debate, a channel was started on Discord and promoted on tumblr for NB people to come and help decide on a new word to fill this lexical gap. After a solid week of hard debate, the dozens present narrowed our work down to two terms and then held a poll on tumblr.
The results of the poll favored diamoric as the replacement term for dionysian.
The best place to read about the definition of diamoric is in the two links in the first paragraph. Simply substitute the old term for the new. The definition provided for dionysian still accurately describes the spirit of this term.
The Definition
Diamoric is an intentionally flexible, loose term.
It came out of recognizing the failure of binary terms like “straight” and “gay” to be useful or accurate for many NB people. NB genders vary so vastly that even two non-binary people in a relationship may not feel that their relationship is accurately described as “same-gender” or “gay”, and can even feel misgendered by the implications. For example, my own relationship as an androgyne with an nb trans boy can only be construed as a gay relationship if you reduce us both to our genitals. A non-binary person in a relationship with a binary man or woman is at an even further loss. Their relationship is far from “straight”, but it’s not technically “gay” or “same-gender” either. So what is it?
It’s diamoric.
The Etymology
From the greek prefix “dia-”, meaning “passing through”, “going apart”, and “thoroughly/completely” and the latin “amor” for love, diamoric literally refers to love, attraction, or partnerships that pass through, go apart from, or completely encompass the gender spectrum.
The use of this word includes all types of love, romantic or not.
The preferred pronunciation is [ ,daɪə’mɔɹɪk ], or “dye – uh – MOR – ik”.
A diamoric relationship or attraction is one that involves at least one non-binary person.
A genderfluid person’s attraction to a woman is diamoric.
An enby’s hook-up with an androgyne is diamoric.
A man’s queerplatonic partnership with a demiboy is diamoric (and could also be achillean if they chose to use both).
A genderfluid woman’s romance with a genderfluid man is diamoric (and could also be gay, sapphic, or achillean depending on how their genders line up in time.)
A bigender person’s marriage to an agender person is diamoric.
A triad between a woman, a demigirl, and an agender person is diamoric.
A man’s attraction to an enby is diamoric.
A lesbian dating an agender person is a lesbian in a diamoric relationship.
A diamoric person is a person who centers NB people and NB partnerships in their life.
Only non-binary people may use diamoric as an identity. Only NB people can call themselvesdiamoric. Technically, any NB person who seeks partnerships of any kind with any gender could call themselves diamoric, but it’s most useful and meaningful for NBs who wish to proclaim their prioritization of other NBs.
An NB person who is most interested in, happiest, and most comfortable with other NB people may find it a useful self-identifier; they are diamoric. Even if they would be content dating men or women, but they don’t want to define themselves by that, and would rather define themselves by their love for NB people and for being NB – they are diamoric.
Diamoric is not meant to replace existing words.
It is meant to give language to people who feel they have none.
If you’re an NB lesbian and your sapphic attraction is your priority, you may never feel inclined to use diamoric, and that’s fine. But if you’re an NB lesbian who wishes to emphasize your NB identity in addition to your love for women, “diamoric lesbian” might be a label that you like.
If you’re a demiboy who loves men and ‘achillean’ is all you need, more power to you. You don’t have to use this word if it says nothing about you that achillean doesn’t.
This word is a supplement to existing language that is free to use by NBs who want or need it. It is not a word to be imposed on NBs who don’t need it.
Fun things:
I’m so gay? More like I’m so dia 😉
Calling your NB partner your diamour!
Want to include diamoric in your sexual orientation? How about dia-bisexual! Dia-pansexual! Dia-gay!