#anyway im cranky today because someone went in on me for being bi and calling myself queer

[god-sent-gender-bent]

This.

I'm begging young queers to hop offline for just a minute and go talk to actual IRL queer people. If me saying "Go talk to IRL queer people" makes you uncomfy, that's the first sign that you need to go do just that. The Internet is wonderful for meeting friends and exploring your gender and sexuality, but please remember that you are a real person and so is everyone else. And real life queer folk aren't easily out into neat little tags or categories like online.

Relationships and sexuality and gender are black and white. People like labels to categorize things. To help understand the world around them-- but real life is more like a spider web than a binary line. And it's beautiful that way. But trying to police people's relationships and their supports is exactly what The Straights(tm) do. Pride is about demanding the right to exist freely, whatever that may look like.

Also a separate tangent: LISTENNNNN to your queer elders. Yes that means the 30 year old millennial you call cringe. Yes that means the 50 year old POC drag queens and leather daddies. There's SO much queer history to be learned. And I'm SO, SO glad young queer kids have it a little easier than I did, and that they don't have to worry about things like not getting married or not being able to hold your loved one's hand in a hospital while they pass away-- but that doesn't mean you can sit in your bubble and disrespect the people that paved the way for you.

People in my generation had to figure a lot of our identities out on our own. Why? Because AIDS wiped out our elders. Our history. We had to try to recollect our history and our vocabulary and yeah, make some shit up as we went. So if you see older people calling themselves queer, dyke, faggot, and yes, tranny: mind your business. Those words have been in our history forever and have been reclaimed, and you'd know that if you talked to any queer person over the age of 30.

Anyway, I may sound curmudgeony, but I'm tired of 14 year old kids telling me I can't call myself queer because it's a slur. I won't censor my identity because there's nothing wrong with me. I'm a big, fat, loud queer. Go outside, touch some grass, and talk to some of your queer elders. You can learn a LOT.

There are two basic arguments for shutting the fuck up about cishets at Pride.

First: What if a trans kid asks their parents to show their support by attending Pride with them? What if a lesbian can only attend pride if she gets a ride from someone and the only person willing and able to drive her is her straight brother? What if a bi disabled person can't attend a large outdoor event without hands-on assistance from their straight partner? What if someone just wants to bring their fucking friends? What if, contrary to popular tumblr discourse, most queers don't inhabit perfectly pure social bubbles populated only by other queers? What if it's none of your business?

Second and perhaps more important: If you think you can tell that someone is CIS, let alone HET, by LOOKING at them, you are a cop and an idiot.