#discussion of queerphobia
i love blocking people for tagging my identity as a slur <3
This pride month, lets keep the gatekeeping and attacking of queer comrades to a minimum and instead practice radical kindness and acceptance of other queers, even (ESPECIALLY!) if you don’t understand their identity or reasons.
The only way we can win liberation is by sticking together and supporting each other, not by infighting and tearing each other down over perceived wrongs. A bi lesbian or aroace person or queer kinkster are all on the same side when the fascists start knocking. Pride is a riot, stand with your fellow comrades this season and fight with us (and not against us) for our collective survival.
Here’s the thing about LGBT+ vs. Queer.
I’m ace, nonbinary, and demiromantic. With LGBT+ I’m included in the plus. And I’m happy to be included! Indeed, folks pointedly using LGBT without the plus makes my hackles raise.
But. I am sick of being in the fucking plus sign like an afterthought.
And no, adding more to the alphabet soup doesn’t help that feeling. There’s a limit to what human brains can cram in. I don’t think it’s reasonable to make folks say an increasingly long acronym every time they mention the community. I appreciate the effort, but you’re always going to either leave someone out or cram them into the miscellaneous field the plus sign represents.
With Queer I’m just there, alongside my queer siblings. The details may be different, but I’m just as queer as a cis allo gay man or a trans allo straight woman or a genderfuck individual.
We already tried to meet folks who don’t like queer as a word halfway with MOGAI. Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignment, and Intersex. It’s inclusive without using the Dreaded Q-Word. Surely, if the objection was to “queer” as a Terribly Traumatizing Word (just like, oh, every other word used for us: “gay” was the slur of choice where I was growing up), MOGAI would be the perfect solution, yes?
And yet, that was thrown back into our faces and turned into an insult. So, at that point, I said fuck it and fuck you. I’m queer,and if its inclusivity makes you mad, good.
Read it and read it again. Stop trying to define everything by colonial binaries and dictating other people’s identity. Stop using the language that TERFs and other transphobes brought and build in our communities. Fight this rhetoric. Embrace the irrationality of queerness. In the end, we’re the ones keeping our community alive. We have to stand up for each other and fight queerphobia, even when it comes from those withinthe community. Thank you, Alitsanosga for writing all of this out and sharing.
Alt text bc I can’t fucking figure out any other way to do it, sorry: Screenshots from a thread by @saturniidaemon with text reading:
On lesbianism, white queerness, and 2S identity:I am a two-spirit. My identity is specific to my Tribe and Clan, and even more specific to my family. I am not a man, I am not a woman, and I am not nonbinary; I am not defined by what I am not. I am a two-spirit and I am a lesbian. That’s not debatable. But I am not a non-man.
There’s an idea of two-spirits that we are just the ethnic version of non-binary We’re not. The reason you’re so comfortable calling us non-binary is because your idea of queerness is centered around the binary&what you are not: you’re not cishet, you’re not the oppressor, etc
White queers like to speak about 2S identities constantly as if we are monolith. “It’s just a gender” “it’s not a gender” “they’re not trans” “they’re not queer” “they don’t belong here” The community tries to decide for the individual and that’s so weird to me.
So much of white queerness is inherently about exclusion. You need strict labels to exclude the people you fear. You write your definitions around your fear of intruders and by consequence you exclude the people that need your support the most.
You need people to “prove” they are queer before you let them in. You’re like a fortress and you let vulnerable people drown in the moat; ignoring that the real oppressors don’t need to be a Trojan horse to do damage, ignoring they are actively burning down the castle.
It’s very sad to me, because it’s ultimately tearing the community apart even further. I’ve never felt very welcome in white lesbian circles and they’ve never understood my experience of gender, but it’s gotten worse in the past 5 or so years.As TERFs start to revive gold star lesbianism and center hatred of men as their definition of lesbianism, you start to get these younger lesbians that don’t know history that start to parrot the rhetoric. First it’s “non-men loving non-men” then it’s “you’re too close to Man™”
For many two-spirit lesbians like myself, this is very concerning. White lesbians are historically not the ones targeted by radfems. Now we’ve gotten to the point that there are people denying that lesbian is an mspec (multispec) identity while including (white) nonbinary people
White nonbinary people (usually AFAB nonbinary people) are seen as woman lite and are welcome in white lesbian spaces while queer Indigenous people are considered dangerous because white lesbians can’t understand their gender. When did understanding become a requirement?
We’re getting very dangerously close to “lesbianism is ONLY attraction to women” and very close to “lesbianism is only attraction to *a very specific type of (white) woman*” and I really need young white lesbians to read about political lesbianism so they can see this
I don’t want to hear “not all lesbians” or “well then they aren’t welcome” because every time this rhetoric goes unchallenged you are actively welcoming these people to continue it and make it more and more extreme. Yes, even the kind that seems to have nothing to do with racism
Almost all of your exclusionary rhetoric is based on the racist ideas of political lesbianism and I do not know why you all cannot see that they want to move goalposts. It wasn’t just bi lesbians, it wasn’t just he/him lesbians, it wasn’t just nonbinary lesbians. It’s a tactic.
It really feels like young lesbians are not only letting us go backwards, but encouraging it. And that’s thanks in part to the historical racism of political lesbianism, but many of these people ARE old enough to think critically and talk to people who’ve been through this.
So far I’ve seen this in younger lesbian spaces; the ones with older generations (the ones that don’t welcome TERFs) have been pretty welcoming even if not totally understanding, because they at least recognize that you don’t need to understand someone’s experience to validate it
But I’m really concerned for the young Indigenous lesbians who don’t feel comfortable around older people and are going to these younger lesbian spaces only to be indoctrinated with thinly veiled TERF rhetoric. It makes me very concerned for our spaces as well.
So I’ll say again I am not a non-man and I am not a non-woman. I’m not defined by what I am not. I do not ascribe to your binary-centric definitions of queerness. I experience queer attraction to women. I’m a lesbian. You do not get to use community to decide my individuality.
Thread by ~Alitsanosga Pronouns: hi’a/vsgina/utseli/uwasa“
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