#but it's a true thing nonetheless that for most reactionary movements they find pain points and offer validation

[thedreadvampy]

So like there's still that ask expanding on the Exclusionist Leads To TERFery argument sitting in my inbox and I will respond to it when I can formulate an answer that's less than 2000 words long.

but I wanted to spin out a specific thing which is that anon repeated the ol' "queer is a slur is TERF Rhetoric that TERFs Started" and that is something I have a very DIFFERENT lot of feelings about

the idea that queer is a slur wasn't started by TERFs. It was started by.......people using queer as a slur........a thing that they still very much do.....

Look, I like the word queer. I self-describe as queer and I use the word queer interchangeably with LGBTQ. I have friends who only want to be called queer bc it sums up the fluidity or nonspecificity of their identity. I think queer is a useful and valuable terminology for us to have in our wheelhouse and personally I prefer it to LGBT because it makes a lot more space for the muddiness and complexity of sexual and gender identities.

but it's a slur.

or at least, it originates as a slur. it gets its power from being a reclaimed slur. when people say "we're here we're queer get over it" they're throwing the word back in the faces of those who use it against them and saying "you don't get to own this part of me, I'm taking back ownership".

and like. that's a reclamation and I believe powerfully in the strength and beauty of reclaiming that word

but it's also not unreasonable that people who have been hurt by it (which. in the wider world it still is often a slur) might not want to reclaim it or deal with it.

like. I love the word queer and while I wouldn't refer directly to someone who hates it as queer, I do passionately believe in its value and use as a general term. but. it's reductive and honestly offensively unkind the way many people act as if having a complex or negative relationship to a word often flung as a weapon, with a long history of violence as well as reclamation, is evidence of gullibility or malice.

there are a lot of reasons people don't like the word queer and some of them I find odious - the vitriol some people sling around at "kweers" in their hatred of the term queer is honestly just. depressing. and there are people who hate it because it runs counter to their desire to carve the community up into neatly divided Ls, Gs, Bs and Ts and also forget the Ts. but there are also people who think queer is a slur because it's been used as a slur against them. or who don't believe in reclamation. or who are uncomfortable with a word reclaimed as a defiant political statement being coopted by corporate interests.

like there's a lot of reasons people have to dislike the word queer and consider it a slur. and to boil them all down to "oh it's TERF Rhetoric" is not just reductive it's largely untrue and it's aggressively uninterested in other people's experiences and needs. and to say "queer was never a slur until TERFs started spreading this rhetoric" is a) factually untrue and b) ignores a century or so of very diverse opinions about the use of the word.

also. relatedly. other people have said this better than me but this watering down of what TERFism is and this framing where everything bad is TERF Rhetoric honestly just feeds into TERF's ability to fly under the radar like. a lot of TERFs consider themselves queer, because TERFs are not a monolith, they're a disparate group limited by a core philosophy that is specifically and only defined by a hatred and distrust of trans womanhood.

and a lot of people who aren't TERFs hate the word queer, or, like me, like the word but think whether or not it's a slur is very situation-dependent.

and this tendency to say something false about TERFs to bolster an unrelated point (TERFs created the concept that queer is a slur) if anything helps weaken people's resilience to TERFism because ultimately the strongest recruitment tactic TERFs use isn't a slippery slope of exclusionism, it's trauma. like any reactionary movement, they hook onto people's trauma and fears and they tell them 'you're right, you're heard, you're suffering and the world's against you and it's their fault.' and if someone comes into an LGBTQ space and says 'I am exhausted by having the word queer spat at me I never want to hear it again' and a bunch of people turn around and say 'uhhhh claiming that queer is a slur is actually terf rhetoric so we're not interested in you spouting TERF Propaganda' like. Is this helping the community? is this resisting TERFs? or is it just muddying the lines of what TERFs are and why we don't want them here and reducing them to an abstract The Bad People?