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cherryblossomshadow · 1 year ago

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What baffles me is how people will wholly jump on the assumption that queer identity is always and only political, ignoring that it has practical protective value for people whose identities aren't easily crammed into 1-2 letters of the acronym.

I meet the criteria for a few different identities under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, and using the singular word Queer for myself is not JUST personal preference it's also to protect my privacy. I don't know how often this happens to people with less ambiguous presentation, but often the fixed labels other people find comforting are nightmares for me, because people can & will take "LGBTQ" as an invitation to interrogate me about my exact place in the acronym. For full context I also say this as someone who can self-disclose as trans and get asked "Oh, which direction?" but I don't think my experience is as much of a minority as passing discourse would lead us to believe.

Now, I don't think the labels themselves create this -- people feeling entitled to invade our privacy is a cultural issue and any causal relationships are multi-directional -- but I do adopt Queer as a response to that sense of entitlement. It's the full-stop that asserts to people NO I will not elaborate for your comfort, I will not contort my experience into an easily explainable lie. Having to disgorge intimate details of my life to avoid people's [often dangerous] confusion about "what" I am...that ain't liberating, nor empowering. It's a demeaning power relationship that I'm routinely forced into.

People hear "Queer as in Fuck You," and seem to just assume we're saying "Fuck You" just to be snarky, like there's nothing to legitimately say "Fuck You" about. But the above? That continual expectation to disclose just to get a basic level of safety and acceptance? *Warrants* a "Fuck You." (comment courtesy of @pulpchamber)

I wasn't going to opine, but this discussion makes me think of a YouTube video about fandom. Yes, seriously. There's a part of the video where they say:

The longer you stay in a fandom space, the more risk you incur of becoming possessive of the property in question. The fandom stops feeling like a community of houses and more like a single room in your house for you and your friends to relax in, where you know the source material better than anyone else. Understand that in order to maintain its power as a place of refuge, nothing threatening can enter this safe space. And as defined by the previous point, any different readings of a source text can be perceived as a threat, because they supposedly undermine your experience of the story you love and care about so much. The people who share your interpretations are right, and that makes them hip. And the people who don't are wrong, and that makes them crazy and stupid. And you have to put those crazy stupid people in their place, because if more people buy into their interpretation than yours, it makes you wrong and YOU'RE the stupid and crazy one. When you've built your safe space around one ship or headcanon, and other fans ship something else, it doesn't feel like they're partying in the house down the lane with the door closed and the curtains drawn. It feels like just by existing they've barged into your house and hung up shipping banners all over the place, because there can only be one right interpretation, and there can only be one canon ship, and the safe space only has one room. And so, housecleaning takes the form of harassment and smear campaigns. A sort of "get out of my house" battle cry. It's a protection of the self and one's self-care routine. "Nothing I don't like can be in my safe space," be that thing a piece of analysis, a ship, or porn. But castle law should not apply to fandom spaces. We're a community, not a single house

And some of the arguments about "one true definition" for certain labels sometimes feel like they follow a similar logic. Getting in the weeds about using "queer" as an umbrella term. Over using "gay" as an umbrella term. Bisexual versus pansexual. And so on

I don't assume that I know what a word means to someone. Maybe [insert word] was an important part of their journey to them, even though it may have certain associations they wish it didn't. Maybe they just like the vibe of a certain word or literally the color palette 😂It's not my business.

if i say "the queer community", i am referring to the community of self identified queers. if you're not a self identified queer, then i wasn't talking about you!

"i don't like to be called queer because it hurt me!" cool, fine, whatever. the word gay hurt me, i get it. but see, i didn't actually call you queer, i was talking about, and this might be difficult to follow; people who like being queer! that's why i said "queer community", to refer to the broad community of queers.

"but i'm gay/lesbian/bi/ace/whatever and i don't like it being used as an umbrella term!" okay, cool. if someone forces you under an umbrella you don't like that sure does suck! i hate being forced under the "LBGT+" umbrella myself. i absolutely loathed "trans*", i get it, trust me. i would like to draw your attention to the fact that i just said "queer community", which explicit in text and implicit in meaning, refers to a community of people... bare with me here.... people who are queer. if you do not consider yourself queer.... then it wasn't about you. it was about me and my community.

"but i know what group you're talking about and it applies to me too!" okay but you see that, you see that you're putting yourself under the umbrella there right? and then complaining about it, right? it's not my fault you decided it was about you? you're always going "it's okay for you to use, but" and then attack us when we do use it for ourselves, by shoving yourself under an imagined umbrella of your construction, hurting us in the shove, and then screaming like you were forced in here.

"but it's a--" listen.

listen to me.

you might think i'm being obstinant and maybe i am a little! but i'm trying to illuminate a point here. you've constructed an idea in your head of "us" as a monolith, a singular group that you want covered by a singular umbrella with a singular term; and you've decided that this "us" group - including you - is who i'm talking about right now, and then you've gotten shitty at me for using a word you don't like for an idea you projected over my words.

but here's the secret: there is no singular group like that. there is no monolith. there is no singular cohesive "us". there's just people, individuals with infinite experiences and selves and sexualities and genders and loves and all these beautiful things, and sometimes when we're similar enough we band together into groups and pick labels; gay, trans, queer, rainbow, whatever. these are just names, names for imagined groups, imagined groups with fake made up boundaries! people will argue there are definitions, gay means this, lesbian means that; but people will always disagree, so the names expand and the groups get broader. msm, wlw, bi, pan, genderqueer, rainbow quiltbag alphabet soup!

and you can expand and contact and refine and broaden but you will never cover everyone. at some point, you have to just accept letting people self define, and decide if they want to be in the group. if you have a "gay" group, the socially straight msm will get shitty at being called gay and it's not the fault of either the gays or the word "gay" that they're not included! people will expand and stretch and redefine and shrink, all these groups and labels will ebb and flow as different people have different needs and want to include - and exclude!- different people for their communities.

but some of "us", many generations ago, got sick and tired of constantly redefining labels and groups and decided to pick a nice word for ourselves and welcome anyone who liked it to use it, and that's queer. maybe it was already a slur that we reclaimed, maybe it was already our word before it became a slur, maybe it was just common slang for someone a little unusual and oddball and we liked that! historians both academic and communal disagree! it doesn't even matter, it's our word; "our" being anyone who likes it. if you like "queer" and want to be queer and respect the existing queers, you're welcome. and generation after generation, we pass it on for anyone to use, to say: it's okay not to box yourself in, it's okay not to define yourself down to the molecule, it's okay to be free, to come and go, to love and be whatever. it's our sanctuary. you are queer if you want to be queer. that is the gift that was given to me by the queers that came before me, i will gift it in turn to anyone that wants to carry it forwards. not everyone has to be queer, but we chose to be.

and you motherfuckers.

you motherfuckers keep smashing through the windows of our sanctuary, declaring it to be your umbrella, scream about slurs like we've never been hurt in our lives, and then hurl violence and vitriol at us because you personally hate being inside our sanctuary and want the entire structure destroyed and rebuilt for you.

fuck you.

i suffered through years of torment and abuse being called gay and having it spat at me with hate, being berated in church for questioning love, being screamed at and beaten by family and classmates and having them spit - literally - the word gay at me. i suffered through it, i survived it, i flourished to spite it and was embraced by queers who taught me love for myself and gave me safe sanctuary in this beautiful, ambiguous word, and you don't get to take that away from me.

if i say "us queers" and you come at me about how it hurts you and start yelling about umbrellas and slurs: 1) i wasn't fucking talking about you, 2) you're not part of my community and don't get to tell me what i call it, and 3) you are the fucking problem here, you are the one doing the hurting right now.

when you come into my community of queers and tell me that our sanctuary is "a slur", you are indistinguishable to me from the people spitting "gay" as they beat me.

if you're gay as in happy, you're free to be that and i won't stop you or tell you your whole core is a slur. you pick whatever umbrella you want to imagine for yourself, and i'll probably chose not to stand under it.

because i am queer. as in fuck. you.

and you will have to kill me to stop me being queer

#i copy notes #queer #i speak #queer discourse #slur #i had never heard of #transstar #transasterisk #queer history #not a monolith #words mean different things to different people #Why Fandoms Are So Toxic #The Sin Squad

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submalevolentgrace · 1 year ago

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#love this and all but. where does that * lead to? the one after trans#i couldnt find it in the rbs but i mightve not looked hard enough

yeah it didn't occur to me when i was writing this up how confusing this would be to someone that has never seen the term for themselves in the wild, so, i'll do my best to clarify.

the term i'm talking about above is trans* in and of itself. i'm not like saying trans with a footnote asterisk, but, just, trans*. the word includes the symbol.

it was a whole thing in the early 2010's, where some people seemingly decided the term trans wasn't inclusive enough of all trans people somehow, and that the solution to this was the brand new totally different term trans*.

none of the proponents of it could seem to give sensible reasons for why trans wasn't inclusive enough, but they were aggressively passionate that it wasn't, and needed replacing. nor was there any consensus on how the new term should be pronounced.... i heard people in person say "transstar", the mouthful "transasterisk", and frustratingly, just "trans" pronounced identically but somehow still magically different and the intent was worth arguing over. it was a very, what we would now call, chronically online take. (anyone else remember how "transwoman" was briefly one of the most vile slurs you could possibly say?)

the fact that the * symbol is regularly used in computers as a wildcard (ie not read as text) and thus was unsearchable and unfilterable was not lost on us then, nor is it now, when it's probably the reason nobody can search about the terms' short history and thankful fade into irrelevance.

and, for the record, the reason i hate the term trans* isn't just because i think it's stupid, it's because of all the horizontal hate it caused and i was often enough on the receiving end of, for daring to call myself trans on livejournal..... not unlike i get from lovely well adjusted people here in these notes on tumblr about the word queer!

anyway, hope that clears it up

stay queer (if you are), but also try to stay off the endless treadmill of replacing the whole lexicon every few years