#people often like to complain about micro identities but why do you think they exist

[ratbastarddotfuck]

Okay this one is not gonna be a popular take on tumblr but.

Identity policing is pointless and dangerous and honestly only really works in online spaces. I say this and you might think "yeah identity policing sucks" but I need you to think a bit deeper.

When you get into a real life queer community (and I DO mean queer specifically, radical inclusionist queers) people don't give a shit. You hear this kind of thing a lot on tumblr but I think it is important to specify, because a lot of more general "lgbt+" groups HAVE been poisoned by the online discourse.

I've been a part of a proper queer community for a couple of years now and here is the thing.

Many more people than you think have a constantly shifting sense of identity, or experience multiple, supposedly conflicting identities at once, and they are allowed to express those identities in a way that makes them comfortable.

My partner is a nonbinary trans woman. They date people of many different genders, and generally consider themself to be bi. But sometimes they refer to themself as a lesbian, because they feel like or want to be a lesbian on that day. They are still dating and love me/their other non-woman partners on these days, it's just an identity they resonate with at that time. This is what I mean when I say constantly shifting identity.

I am a gay, bisexual, asexual, genderfluid nonbinary transmasc. I experience so many different identities at once - my gender and my sexuality are informed by each other constantly. I always feel more masc when I am attracted to a masc person, and I always feel less masc (but rarely more fem) when I am attracted to more fem people. Any time I feel attraction I usually consider it gay attraction, even if I feel attraction to multiple differently gendered people at once - I'm bisexual from a technical standpoint, but I'm almost always just gay (but sometimes I truly am just a raging bisexual). I am genderfluid but I am also always nonbinary. My gender goes between multiple, often unidentifiable nonbinary genders, but rarely if ever a binary one.

When I talk to cis people, or less-radical trans people, I generally just say I'm a bi nonbinary person. Nobody needs to know all of that except the people I want to tell it to. BUT those are all facets of my identity that I do experience and I am allowed to express those. Just the other day I tagged a post about how much I love my partner (wife, I said in that post) with "lesbian" - the reason being they were having a lesbian day and I was very much in love with them and feeling pretty much a "gay almost-woman" myself.

(And this, by the way, is why the word queer is so useful and important and you can pry it from my cold dead hands :)

Another thing to think about is how we treat genderfluid people and their attraction in general. There are often posts with a "mlm/nblm" or "wlw/nblw" tag at the end - do these include genderfluid people? Am I allowed to reblog a mlm post when I'm having a man-adjacent day, even if I don't always feel like a mlm? Am I allowed to reblog a wlw post on a woman-adjacent day? My identity can fluctuate minute to minute, am I going to get a callout post from someone who doesn't understand the intricacies of my identity if I reblog a mlm post and a wlw post in quick succession?

And this is bringing me to the next part of this discussion, and the reason it is important to think about: the culture on tumblr (and, i believe, twitter) of calling people out for having what YOU perceive to be conflicting identities, saying that they're "appropriating x identity" or using it for clout or to escape the repercussions of an offhand comment they made that you didn't like (and I can name at least one popular tumblr user who did and still sometimes does experience targeted callouts and harassment for being a "lesbophobe" because they identify as a lesbian in a way the tumblr culture at large doesn't like, but I digress).

You do not and can not know the intricacies of someone's identity unless they tell you. If you read the earlier parts of this post and agreed or understood that people can have multiple "conflicting" identities, then I do not want to see you sharing callout posts for people who ID in a nonconventional way. You don't know, and overall it really does not fucking matter. The oft-repeated line of "how does it impact you if someone is gay/trans/etc", spoken to homophobes and transphobes frequently, is applicable here: how does it impact you if someone identifies in a supposedly nonconventional or conflicting way? It does not. And in real life queer communities, people do not give a shit, because we have bigger problems to deal with OUTSIDE the community, we don't have time for infighting. We have more in common than we have apart.