I desperately need transphobes and all other pearl-clutching reactionaries to please learn the difference between a middle school GSA meeting and Pride.
And also, maybe recognize that minors will not explode or go blind or die and be immediately traumatized if they see a tiddy. If they see bear in a leather harness singing YMCA with a drag queen waving a butt plug in the air on top of a pride parade, children would literally be fine. Even if they know what a butt plug is, seeing one isn’t actually harmful. Assless chaps can’t hurt you.
every time I see LGBTQ discourse I think about that post that said masc cis lesbians get kicked out of bathrooms as cruelly as trans people do so why the fuck are some lesbians transphobic , and I think about how homophobes won’t check for your sexuality before calling us slurs and I think about how my local dyke March considers anyone who identifies as a dyke a dyke because fuck rainbow capitalism we are here to fight for our lives and I think about how my best friends are bisexual and I think about how lesbians have been loving each other in ways that the gender binary has never been able to understand(and never will) and I think about that post that says the worst thing the right did was convince queer people other queer people were the enemy
I’m full of feelings and queer rage tonight, so here goes.
Fuck the narrative that being trans is never a choice. I chosethis. I’m not some poor little boy trapped in the wrong body. I’m not some sob story wasting away. I probably would’ve been fine living my life as a woman and then I found trans people and related to them and I choseto embrace my identity and join them. I was born into my body with my gender and I will shape them with my bare fucking hands into what I want them to be.
I’m not making my identity more palatable for cis people. I chose this. I chose this and I chose to be myself and don’t you dare try to take that choice away from me.
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.
People hate Q*eer because it’s still used as the slur of choice in most of the world that the isn’t terminally online.
Also friendly reminder that Demisexual (and demiromantic by extension) were literally made up by some asshole online as an excuse for why he didn’t want his hypersexual OC to have sex with a few specific people. It’s literally the definition of using a made-up identity to feel special which the Transphobes and Homophobes in power use as justification for harming the LGBT community.
Being LGBT doesn’t make you special, and the entire goal of the community should be reinforcing that statement. We don’t want to be seen as different and special. We just want the opportunity to live our lives
I say in the post that I’m suspicious of folks who pointedly use LGBT without the plus. Congratulations on adding another validating data point to that.
So, you wanna go? Let’s fucking go.
1.) Until I see similar pearl clutching over gay, which as I said in the post was the slur of choice where I was growing up, you can cry me a river. I don’t know how I can emphasise enough that EVERY. FUCKING. TERM. WE. HAVE. has been and probably continues to be used as a slur by someone, but weirdly, none of them have the same pushback queer does. There are words that make me uncomfortable that I won’t use for myself, but if someone for example calls himself a proud faggot and wishes to be called that, I will salute that proud faggot.
2.) a.) [citation needed] - This reeks of the same kind of lying aphobic bullshit as “a-spec is stolen from autistics” or “allosexual is a bad word because uuuuuuhhhh reasons”.
b.) Don’t care even if the cite checks out. What, you think a word having some kind of Deep Dark Secret Origin is gonna stop a proud queer?
c.) How fucking dare you tell me my identity is made up, shithead? As if I don’t know myself enough to make that call? As if you’re the arbiter of what strangers on the Internet can call themselves? I almost wish I had that kind of arrogant confidence.
3.) Respectability politics will not save you. You cannot be one of The Good Ones forever. Homophobes want to shove the most milquetoast 2.5-children-and-a-white-picket-fence gay and lesbian couples back into the closet and take their kids away for corrupting them to boot. Transphobes will use the trans panic defense to murder even the Best Passer. Throwing anyone who doesn’t vibe with L, G, B, and/or T specifically under the bus isn’t going to suddenly make you okay in the minds of the folks who want to destroy us.
4.) Fucking speak for yourself. That’s the core difference between queer and LGBT-pointedly-no-plus. Queer folks admit that we are strange and different.Itis an anomaly, in the most basic sense of ‘doesn’t match the majority of the data’.
The queer folks say, and so what? The queer folks say, yes, we are weird. And the queer folks say, but that does not make us lesser.
The queer folks say: we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.
Who the fuck ever said we don’t want to be seen as different? We fucking ARE different, that’s the entire fucking point. Labels give us the chance to finally not feel like an outcast freak, we’re *queer* and we have a place to be with other queer people where our simple existence isn’t seen as a negative.
The goal of the fucking queer, LGBTQ+, gay, lesbian, trans, whatever you want to call it movement (personally I like queer) is to emphasize that WE’RE DIFFERENT AND WE’RE PEOPLE, TREAT US LIKE IT. Being the same as everyone else doesn’t do shit, it just lets that “everyone” continue to pretend they’re somehow better. So until being different isn’t seen as a reason to remove rights and harass, insult, and murder people, the point of the QUEER movement is to be loudly, blatantly, belligerently different and demand equality while doing it.
No idea where the “Demisexual was made up by some dude wanting to protect his hypersexual OC” or whatever story came from. “Demisexual” was first coined by someone who used to moderate the AVEN (Asexual Visibility & Education Network) forums back in the 2000s. He went by (and still goes by) sonofzeal online, and demisexual was a term he came up with to describe his own experiences with his sexuality. He wrote about it on his website here, and you can find more info with original sourcing back to the AVEN forums here.
He’s also a really good friend of mine. I hang out with him and his wife (who’s been my best friend since high school) every week. I remember how stressful modding AVEN used to be for him back in the day — I can recall times when his future-wife and I would visit his apartment and he’d be visibly frazzled and need to ask us to wait a few minutes while he sorted out some drama. He could passionately go on for hours about the difference between romantic and sexual (and aesthetic and sensual) attraction, about how asexuality (and aromanticism) is a spectrum. He cared a lot about the Asexual community (and the greater LGBTQ+ community) and still does, even though he’s not actively modding anymore.
“Gay” was the slur of choice where (and when) I was growing up — not for the “terminally online”, but for the people you say every day at school and work and the grocery store. But even putting aside the fact that all of our labels are slurs, I just look at it this way:
Given the choice between the company of “LG(BT-if-we’re-feeling-generous)” exclusionists who parrot whatever propaganda they hear fourth-hand from other baby-gays who can’t be bothered to learn their own history, and bully others as harshly as they worry they’ll be bullied; or the company of an open and accepting queer community that makes everyone feel welcome, supported, and protected, and takes delight in helping people understand themselves and each other better … I personally, as a bisexual/pansexual, demisexual person, will proudly stand with and among the queers every time. That’s what Pride is all about.
Thank you for providing this community history, and for citing your sources to do so.
I’m seeing a lot of criticism for Our Flag Means Death that goes “The real Stede Bonnet was a slave owner and Blackbeard was a rapist! How can anyone love this show????” and I thought I’d wade into this mess with my thoughts because I like to live dangerously. It’s gonna be a long post because it’s a multi-reasoned discussion. So hang on to your butts.
First, let me say, they were pirates. By the nature of what they did, they were murderers. They killed people. Stede was a wealthy landowner whose wealth was built on the tormented backs of enslaved people. Blackbeard was a rapist who, by the end of his career, traded in enslaved people. To bring in one of our fictional friends also (important for explaining why I don’t give a fuck), Jim is a murderer who doesn’t give a fuck about murdering. In no way am I denying that a) murder, rape and slavery are bad or that b) these folks are the kind of people I don’t want to meet in real life c) these people were absolute monsters. I am also in no way saying that we should alter the actual historical record. I am also in no way saying that historical examinations of these characters shouldn’t condemn their actions. Go ahead, condemn. They were bad people.
But in the context of enjoying Our Flag Means Death, I am not going to drop the show because it romanticises bad people. Why? Because, for one thing, the show never lets us forget that these people are violent people who hurt others for their own satisfaction. For every moment that Ed is soft and sweet and lost, he’s also a vicious killer who splits hairs to live with his own conscience and who has people tortured. For every moment Stede flinches at the sight of blood, he’s also fucking vicious with words. For every moment that Jim stands next to Olu and makes me melt, Jim also goes out and ruthlessly murders and doesn’t care when people die. In the context of the show, these are bad people. Bad people can be enjoyable protagonists. Bad people can be sympathetic. That doesn’t mean that they’re not bad people.
More importantly though, I’m not going to drop the show or condemn David Jenkins and Taika Waititi for romanticising the bad guys because frankly, that’s less important than what the show does. The show makes a point of giving us a very modern glimpse of what microaggressions really are and why they’re a problem, shown through the lense of the characters of colour. This is more interesting and, frankly, more valuable to a largely-white audience than if the show continually condemned Stede for owning people. Slavery is a big bad evil that we look at and go ‘yup, that’s a really bad person. Fucker owned humans, what the shit.’ It’s easy to look at a slave owner and go ‘I hate that person.’ It’s harder for a white audience to recognise the problem in saying “such a colourful crew” when the crew is not all white–and the white crew contains multiple celts, notably–and “you’re so well-spoken for Africans.” The show puts those lines out there and makes us stop and think about them. They make us uncomfortable and they choose carefully who gets the more racist lines so we learn something. (Now, I am white so I will also say that I cannot speak to how an audience of colour perceives these lines. My hope is that they’re well enough done that the members of the audience who see them see their experience reflected and are glad to see the people who say these things being punished, but I just don’t have enough friends of colour to survey this.) The show has chosen to focus on more modern issues and frankly, I think that’s valid and good.
The show has chosen carefully who it portrays as heroes and yes, those heroes are bad people, but those people are also marginalised people. Now, there’s certainly something to be said for criticising stories where the marginalised people are also bad people but there’s no one except the children and maybe Doug in the entire show who I can point at and say ‘you’re actually a really good person.’ Even Mary is down to murder when Stede gets in her way. And the children and Doug aren’t heroes of the story. The entire story, protagonists and antagonists, is about bad people. The heroes though, out of that huge group of bad people, are adult people, many of whom are people of colour, most or all of whom are queer as fuck, who are living lives.
It’s easy to forget, I think, how rare it is to have a story where people are unapologetic queer adults. It’s so new and it’s still so unusual that it makes Our Flag Means Death feel like a fever-fuelled fantasy for me and many other queer adults. Let me try to explain, because this is the biggest reason I literally do not give a fuck about historical Blackbeard, historical Stede Bonnet, and the fact that Jim is a murderer.
When I was six, I was asked to write down my full name in kindergarten, a precursor to learning to sign our names. I wrote it out and realised with dawning horror that my name meant that everyone around me thought I was a girl. It had never occurred to me until that moment that I might be a girl. It was a world-tilting, perspective-shifting moment that I remember with a gut twist to this very day. It’s been 29 years. I have lived life, been through some seriously traumatic shit, and to this day that remains one of the most traumatic moments of my life. I didn’t even have a word for what flavour of queer I was until I was 20, but when I was six, I realised the world thought I was a girl (they were wrong) and that has been in my soul ever since.
In those 29 years, I can count on one hand the number of enjoyable shows that have given me nuanced representation of adults, aimed at adults, living their queer lives. Torchwood comes to mind as one of the few and I literally have that tattooed on my body because it was that important to me. I have sat at the table and received crumbs for 29 years. Dumbledore was gay. Castiel was gay. Dean maybe being bisexual until I was told he wasn’t. Willow was gay/bi. And none of those experiences were aimed at adults and portrayed as adult experiences on screen, for all that these were the crumbs I was given. Queer as Folk, Queer Eye, and The L Word existed. There was a bisexual character on Grey’s Anatomy. I acknowledge these shows and characters have existed but they’re so rare and I have been told I should be grateful, that I should celebrate them.
But they weren’t made for me. Not the me I am today as a 35 year old autistic human. Not the me I am today who has survived violence and rape. Not the me I am today who has survived homelessness. Not the me I am today who has had to walk away from my entire family to build a life where I could be unapologetically me. Not the me I am today who has had to physically harm people to escape with my life. Not the me I am today who was cast out of trans support groups for being nonbinary and trying to ‘destroy’ the transgender rights movement by ‘being indecisive.’
Society has cast me as one of the bad guys. I’m the person who walks away. I’m the person who ghosts someone who hurts me. I’m the person who sought community and was told that my presence would destroy that community. I’m the person who’s been left because I was ‘too dangerous’ simply because my trauma gave me a mental health diagnosis.
I’m sure some adult queer people see themselves reflected in those shows and characters, but I never have. I was never going to be able to afford to go to medical school. The only person on the L Word who looked even somewhat like me was Shane. Queer as Folk was okay, I guess but I wasn’t one of the heroes.
Our Flag Means Death was made for me. It’s a feast for someone who’s had crumbs for 29 years. It’s about learning to be who you are, without apology for that–the show TELLS US, DIRECTLY, IN THE TEXT never to apologise for being happy. It’s not about coming out. It’s not about being nervous someone won’t accept you for being queer. It’s about being queer. It’s not about being a queer person in a straight world. That’s new. That’s innovative.
Our Flag Means Death is about carrying your traumas and living with them. It’s about not having to be a good person to deserve being happy and that’s important because guess what? Despite my best efforts, despite working my ass off, I haven’t always been a good person. You can’t survive in a world that’s out to break you and always be a good person. But Our Flag Means Death tells me that I deserve to be happy, whether I’ve been perfect my whole life or not. Our Flag Means Death has neurodivergent-coded characters who are allowed to have flaws and don’t have to be rainman to be worthy of love. Jim can be a nonbinary murderer and still be worthy of love and joy.
Our Flag Means Death is about finding who you are and finding the people who will celebrate you with you. It’s not about slavery and rape.
It’s about adults experiencing joy as queer, marginalised people who have been tormented by society. It’s about adults being allowed to have traumas and being loved whether those traumas exist or not. It’s about people who aren’t perfect, who aren’t even good still being deserving of love and respect.
And guys? That’s fucking revolutionary. Our Flag Means Death was made for me and it was made for a lot of people like me who didn’t grow up in a world that said it was okay to be me. And that’s why I don’t give a fuck about historical accuracy or whether or not it’s romanticising the bad guys. I am one of the bad guys.
Because the problem isn’t Our Flag Means Death. The problem is a society that cast me from birth as one of the bad guys just for being born different and forged me so that I can’t see myself in the good guys.
The mainstream LGBTQIA movement is becoming increasingly puritanical. In my eyes, this is a subconsciousness effort by queer people to fight for our rights by appeasing the cis-het overlords. Basically we are trying to get them to give us rights by acting just like them.
In reality however, we aren’t like them and we really shouldn’t be. The sexual status quo is fundamentally harmful and objectively flawed. Furthermore, appeasing one’s oppressors never works, it just makes the oppressors more powerful.
No amount of sexual stuff a child or teenager could see at pride would, even if we assume it’s not ideal, come close to what it does to you to grow up seeing airbrushed models selling everything with sex and having all the humanity edited out of sexual things and the sexuality edited out of all things human, including mainstream porn. I would rather a 14y/o spend their free time in a kink dungeon than in front of a billboard, because when you see and learn sexuality through actual people you see that it’s not different from other forms of human connection and interaction. And being around kink in a context where you can walk up the the people and talk to them will teach you actual boundaries and consent. Something that our culture sorely lacks.
This is such a bad-faith argument that I don’t even know where to start, @disabledstemstudent. But… let’s treat it like it’s in good faith and you’ve just got some shit to unpack.
Let’s start out with this: no one is fucking in public at Pride. Pride isn’t the Folsom Street Fair, which I often see it compared to, and all of the “look at this man getting fisted in public” or whatever comes from Folsom and is presented as taking place at Pride. It’s technically true that Folsom is a Pride event, because it’s a Leather Pride event, but you aren’t going to stumble across someone fucking in public at Folsom. You have to deliberately enter the closed-off area where Folsom takes place, so if you’re seeing fucking in public at Pride, you’re either at Folsom and that’s on you, or someone is doing something they shouldn’t be. We’ll come back to that second idea in a minute, but for now, let’s reiterate:
No one is fucking in public at Pride.
So what are we really talking about, here? What’s the real bugaboo that people are discussing?
Two things: public nudity and “leather/fetish/kink clothing”.
(I put quotes around the latter because what we normally refer to as “fetish clothing” is only a very narrow segment of what people wear for kink purposes, but I’ll get back to that, too.)
What is it that people are really objecting to, here? “I don’t want to see almost naked people in public. I don’t want to see clothing which I consider to be sexual signaling. Someone wearing a pup mask in public is engaging in a public scene and I don’t consent to being part of that.”
All of this hinges on the concepts of 1) consent and 2) how queer sexuality is viewed as opposed to cishetallo sexuality. So let’s start peeling all of that apart.
So let’s first talk about Folsom vs Pride. Folsom Street Fair in SF is literally what the ‘this should be in an 18+ space’ crowd is advocating for! This IS that space!
But people are (deliberately in many cases, ignorantly in others) conflating Leather Pride, in September, with the Pride which sprung from the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day March organized by Brenda Howard, among others. That March, a continuation of the East Coast Homophile Organization’s 4th of July Marches started in Philly in 1965, gave birth to Pride Month.
Folsom, by contrast, began as a protest in San Francisco against gentrification of a historically gay neighborhood, and was specifically a queer/Leather pushback against people trying to re-closet the queer community during the AIDS crisis. San Francisco was specifically using the AIDS crisis as an excuse to close bathhouses and regulate bars, which started in 1984, so it’s not a surprise that the first Folsom Street Fair took place that year.
Both were protests against the ways in which white cishetalloperikyriarchy has tried to crush our community over the decades, but they are independent events with independent origins. They should not be conflated; if nothing else, it’s a disservice to our history.
However. Pride is not, and never has been, a family-friendly event; this protestation that it should be is rooted in protoTERF & white cis-gay sanitation attempts & ignores the history of the event itself. Pride was begun by kinksters, including Brenda Howard, famously quoted as saying, “Bi, Poly, Switch - I’m not greedy, I know what I want.” She was a Jewish disabled leather-community sex worker, & that identity is emblematic of the people who founded Pride in the first place.
This 'santization/cishet-friendliness’ of Pride completely plows over & astroterfs (not a typo) its roots:
All of the central figures in Stonewall were not cis, or gender-conforming, and Stonewall itself? Owned by the Mafia, since only they would bankroll gay bars at the time. (In fact, the rename of it was an attempt to keep the Mafia from having 'ownership’ since they owned Stonewall - there were concerns that the Mafia would say 'this is our event, you’re using the name of our bar.’ A far cry from Wells Fargo & Merck sponsorships, that.)
A scant few years later, in 1973, people were booing one of the activists from Stonewall, Sylvia Rivera, because the TERF-and-cis-LG pushback had already begun. The cis white LG’s were beginning their calls for respectability. This is the famous 'Y'all Better Quiet Down’ speech. People who were NOT at Stonewall were already trying to sanitize Pride, & there’s video from a radfem screaming at Sylvia and misgendering her. I will not name said radfem, may her name be obliterated.
Pride has ALWAYS included Leather and has ALWAYS included Kinksters because it was founded by them and this sanitization started as soon as the Comfortable felt like they could take Pride from the Most Afflicted and those who had been there. Like, the group Sylvia and Marsha founded was called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, run by trans sex workers for trans sex workers. This was NEVER the neat-and-tidy acceptable-to-straights corporate-friendly bullshit that people seem to think it is/should be now.
So now we’ve established that this event sprung from the “unrespectable queers” because the respectable ones had been doing the organizing before then and had resisted joining with the unrespectable queers, the kinksters and the leather daddies, because they didn’t want to be seen as “like that,” but when Pride became successful and actually got somewhere, they sure were happy to swoop on in and literally tell Sylvia and Marsha “you can’t march with us because you’re not respectable and you would drag us down.” (They showed up and walked in front of the parade.)
Well, so what? Why does it matter if they wanted to exclude trans sex workers who weren’t respectable in appearance, amirite? If the Respectable Gays wanted to swoop on in and take from the Unrespectable Queers what the latter built?
Well, aside from the fact that what they did and tried to do was shitty? Because the whole thing started because of sumptuary laws. Pride literally springs from cishetallos deciding what clothing is “acceptable” for queers to wear in public based not on how much of their body is covered but upon the perceived queerness of their clothing.
Stonewall began because cops were enforcing vice laws targeting trans and gnc people. At the time, it was illegal to wear more than 2 items of clothing associated w/'the wrong gender,’ so a trans woman wearing bra, panties, and a skirt was illegally dressed. So they were literally raiding bars, getting people’s IDs, and comparing their junk to their clothes and deciding who was illegally and immorally dressed.
Let that one sink in for a minute, in context. I wonder why Pride had so much emphasis on kinky queers & trans queers & GNC queers being out loud & Proud in whatever the fuck they wanted to wear on this ONE DAY when they were all together & physically more people than the police could stop. (Not that Pride wasn’t a permitted march from the first - it was - and it was a protest, not a party.)
And now that we’ve established that Pride, the protest March, not the street fair for corporations, is and always has been by and for the leather daddies and the Dykes on Bikes, the revolutionary contingent who got into fights with cops over the right to wear the clothes they wanted to wear – and had been doing so for years, by the way, Stonewall was just the first well documented violent conflict between cops acting on repressive vice laws which targeted femme queens in specific and the people they were oppressing with the weight of the law…
… let’s actually talk about consent.
Those vice laws were based on consent. The idea that the general public didn’t consenttoseeing trans women in public. The idea that the general public got to have a say on whether or not they consented to seeing trans people in public was the whole basis of those laws. I don’t consent to seeing you queers and recognizing you as queer.
But it’s different! The anti-kink-at-Pride crowd cries. This is explicitly sexual clothing!
First of all, no. It’s not. Kink is not inherently sexual.
Second of all, even if kink is inherently sexual, even if what you object to is clothing which signals sexually to other people, why is this particular clothing which signals sexually to other people what you object to? Why is it this?
Why aren’t you objecting to cishet women in plunging necklines or wearing tiny bikinis to the beach? Why aren’t you protesting billboards where m/f couples in almost nothing, or sometimes totally nothing, literally have their tongues down each other’s throats?
Is it because this clothing is indicative of what you think of as deviant sexuality?
I’m willing to bet it is, and if that’s the case, then there’s an awful lot to unpack there about who and what has a deviant sexuality and why we hypersexualize and condemn queer displays of sexuality, especially QTPOC sexuality.
(There is a lot of very racialized bias in this conversation but that is not mine to unpack – I just need to stop and say YES THIS EXISTS, because boy it sure does.)
Why exactly do we think queer sexuality displays require MORE consent than the hypersaturated cishet sexuality surrounding us like a dank BUYTHISNOW miasma every time we turn on a TV/walk out the door?
The answer is internalized homophobia & transphobia. That’s yours to unpack, and it is not the job of a random stranger to change their behavior because you see queer sexuality as inherently more sexual or aggressive, nor is it their job to regulate their clothing according to the possible sexual trauma or sexual orientation of others.
The idea of consent in sexuality and discussed in BDSM/Leather communities centers around the idea that someone should not do something to you without your consent. It’s a good concept! I like it! It’s correct that it is a cornerstone of BDSM and it SHOULD BE.
But, and this is really important, so I need you to read this several times and really sit with it:
The idea that someone simply wearing a pup mask in public is doing something to you while a woman in a thong bikini is not requires you to be examining the world through the homophobic lenses which society smacks on all of our eyes.
Read it again. Think about it. Be okay with the fact that this fact makes you uncomfortable and resistant to recognizing it. Be okay with your discomfort so you can actually unpack that.
The idea that you need to consent to seeing a leather daddy in a harness, but skinny cishet white girls at clubs aren’tdoing something to you by wearing bondage pants & harnesses (which they do, all the time, & no one blinks) comes from internalized homophobia and transphobia.
The way that we view queer sexual signaling no more overt than what cishet people do constantly and base entire economic systems around as doing something to us in a way that requires us to consent to even seeing it is based in homophobia and transphobia.
It is exactly the same mentality that meant my school administrators in the 90s fired a gay teacher because kids might see her at school events with her partner.
It is exactly the same mentality that meant that the administrators first barred the only lesbian couple at my school from holding hands & kissing each other goodbye in the halls and then barred the straight couples from doing so too when rightful claims of discrimination flared.
And? All of this argument requires us to think of Pride as a singular event with no variations, striations, separate areas, etc. This is clearly not the case. If you look at the slate of events for any major city’s Pride events, there are very clearly multiple different events across multiple days for most of them. If you want to create a PG-13 event, or attend one, most places have those!
Expecting the entirety of Pride to be kid-safe is ahistorical, treats adults like children, and requires you to smack them homophobic glasses right back on your eyeballs and insist that the Bad Queers go back into the closet.
And, of course, this all ties into the “pedophile” and “groomer” bullshit which has sprung back up like fucking mushrooms. Oh, those bad nasty queers who are … wearing leather pants in public and going bare-chested and wearing a face mask and a leash! Oh no! They’re making things unsafe for our children by wearing clothing less revealing than the average beach!
But it’s bad clothing because it’s queer clothing and queer sexuality is, in this mindset, inherently threatening and doing something to you. So engaging with this argument supports that shit, and honestly… it’s fucking obscene.
Using this argument against queer adults who are literally just there enjoying the company of other queer adults is fucking violence. This argument and its root implications are the accusations which got (and still get) queers evicted, fired, and beaten to death.
So, IN CONCLUSION:
How dare you come to an event founded by kinksters and swarm around them like the other animals clamoring at the Little Red Hen for the bread she baked?
How dare you look at the leather daddies who survived AIDS and say “we climbed on your back to where we are now, where big corporations see the dollar signs in the queer community rather than condemning us to literally die in the streets, now go away, because you’re unsightly and we don’t wanna see you anymore?”
How dare you engage this in an environment where they’re literally trying to make social transition for minors illegal. What is social transition? Clothing. So now we’re back to “wearing the 'wrong gender’s’ clothing” is the crime they’re trying to make a Thing again in Florida.
How dare you and everyone making this shit-ass argument year after year look at Dykes on Bikes who nursed and buried their dying friends when no one else would and say “mmm, you’re a pedophile actually because you want to go topless in the sun and show off the tattoos that you got in defiance of a world that didn’t want you to live, and ride through the street with your lover’s arms around you for one day, pretending this world still doesn’t want you dead?”
How dare you wield the very important language of consent like a fucking scythe against your fellow queers?
That is a tool, not a fucking weapon.
Do not use it to attack our history, this event that your elders made for you.
Strangers on the street are not responsible for your sexual trauma, and if your trauma is so bad that you can’t walk around in public and see people wearing sexually-signaling clothing, then I commend you to mental health care and wish you the best of luck, because that’s almost all the clothing that people wear, in one form or another.
Itstill isn’t the responsibility of adults wearing clothing they are otherwise permitted to wear to change that clothing because you don’t like the messaging it sends about who they fuck and how they fuck. A leather harness and a slinky black dress both convey that information, so why is only one of those things objectionable?
But Spider! What if I’m walking down the street at New York Pride and a dude has his dick out and is getting a blowjob right there in the street!
Well, buddy, then that’s bad regardless of whether the dude in question is wearing leather pants or a polo shirt and khakis, but…
… why did you only picture one of those two images when you read that sentence? Why did you immediately conjure up a specific image in your mind, and why wasn’t it a dude in jeans and a t-shirt? Trust me, the gays in polo shirts and khakis fuck just as much as the ones in mesh shirts and latex dick slings.
Yeah. That shit is yours to unpack and deal with, not other people’s to cater to.
British transphobes have graduated to claiming that bisexual women are tainted by our association with men and thus change the “vibe” of women-only spaces. It’s true, every time I walk into the room, I’m also bringing the spirit of every man who’s been inside my vagina. They live up there like lil ghosts.
This people are genuinely the goofiest dumbest bigots.
Considering the fact that some lesbians have previously had relationships or children with men, this kind of thing is especially gross. Like, this is also punishing some lesbians for having lived through internalized homophobia/lived in very hostile and unsafe environments.
the powers that terfs give men are just insane. they act like being a man makes you a fucking chaos magician bending reality to your whim.
This is literally not changed at all from the 1970s political lesbian shit that birthed TERFery, that’s the fucking wild thing. Like, there have been no advancements in this discussion at all in the past fifty fucking years. They are still saying the exact same shit.
This is part of the reason, by the way, that I’m so adamant that you can’t use anything that comes from that entire swath of transphobic 2nd-wave feminism. You can’t use the term “compulsory heterosexuality” without reckoning with the fact that its coiner thanked Janice Fucking Raymond in the foreword of the writing which established the term. You can’t use definitions of lesbianism which center men or define lesbianism by its exclusion of men without reckoning with the fact that this centering of men comes directly from wanting to exclude trans women.
The only way to stop drinking that tainted water is to drink from another well.
Yes to all of this, but for extra weird? is the genderqueer flag, does she fucking think all genderqueer folks are afab and not even a little masc? Wtf?
No, unfortunately those symbols are used by TERFs on Twitter to mean the suffragette flag, and are a means of marking themselves as TERFs. They just happen to be close in color to the genderqueer flag.
They’ve straight up claimed that genderqueer folks are actually stealing the suffragette colours and perverting them actually.
They know what that flag is, they’re lying about themselves because they know that people will quick-parse read them as non-terf and so will fly under the radar.
We have 2 options:
1. Give up the genderqueer flag, or
2. Be so savagely and viciously proud about being genderqueer, throw it in their faces, call ANYONE with those colours they/them or whatever other pronouns you want, violently reject those colours as symbolic of the suffragette movement, and call them genderqueer
It’s funny bc I live in Portland and if you leave a Cascadia flag out in a PDX winter, it starts looking just like a genderqueer flag. ♂️
RIP to myself, I’m sure I’m about to be called a TERF. But I have questions.
Like first, what is wrong with wanting to have a space filled with only people who do not center men in their life?
The one universal fact of my life as a Lesbian is that everywhere I look men are the center of attention. All my straight friends, my queer friends and my bisexual friends center men in their lives.
But as someone who centers women in my life, I would like a break sometimes from having to hear about men. I would like to just focus on women for a little bit. I would just like to have a space where I can say. I love women. Women are the best. Women are everything. Without someone chiming in with What aboutisms.
Not every space is for everyone. I’m not going to take my cis gendered ass into a trans space. That’s not my spot. That is their safe space to connect and relate to each other and they deserve and are entitled to that space.
The questions is why can’t I have a space where I can connect and relate to women who are exclusively attracted to other women?
This is literally just me saying why can’t I have a safe space for myself as a Lesbian. The majority of Lesbian spaces are now WLW spaces. Which means that inevitably I have to hear about men. Which means it’s no longer a space that centers women.
I feel like inclusion is so important. There should always be spaces where everyone is welcome. I’m 1000% on board with that. However, there should also be safe spaces where people of the same identities can meet to relate and connect.
This is a genuine question, by the way. Women should be allowed to take up space and not have it intruded upon by others just because they want to be there.
The problem is saying these things and asking for these things will get my attacked and I wonder why Gay men aren’t being held to the same standard? Why is every Lesbian that wants a lesbian space evil?
I can go through it step-by-step with you but the first step is the one in which you are going to have to acknowledge that we have an entire system of oppression designed to force everyone to center cis men in their lives, and this has nothing to do with sexuality, attraction to men, or being a good little lesbian. Honestly, the system of identifying as a lesbian in which you define lesbianism as an opposition to men, and an opposition to centering your life around them, is in itself centered around men and maleness.
It’s deeply deeply unhealthy to center your life around another person, including a romantic partner. My life as a bisexual is centered around a woman, myself. It was my straight mother and my straight grandmother who taught me that this was my right as a human being. My mother’s life is not centered around her husband, or even her children, and my grandmother, a twice divorcee, and one time widow, Never once centered her life around a husband, not even her third husband, who she loved dearly.
There is also a special message given to women, that says that we should center our lives around other people, our partners, our children, our families. This is deeply unhealthy, and you should definitely work on centuring your life around yourself. Not on other women, not on your relationships with them, but around yourself. The patriarchal society will insist that this is selfish, but it is not, and it has nothing to do with your capacity to love, cherish and help many people.
My best friend in the world is my brother. We’re a year apart, and we have always had each other’s backs. The person I spend the most time with is probably my other brother, who is paralyzed, and I’m his caretaker. My father was my primary caregiver when I was a young child, because my mom doesn’t really know what to do with children before they’re about eight, and my dad does. I’m very close to him, just like I’m also very close to my mother. None of this means that I center my life around any of these people, and none of it has anything to do with my sexuality, because while being bi is part of my identity, it is hardly the sum of me.
There are lesbians who have fathers, brothers, sons, guy best friends, some of whom even center their lives around these relationships, because as I said, we have an entire cultural system designed to to get everyone of every gender and sexuality to center their lives around cis men.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to have spaces where everybody shares one common characteristic, including lesbian only spaces. Sometimes, you just want to be somewhere where your experience on that front is completely normative. The problem comes when you start saying things like, “I just want to be in a space that isn’t centered around men, lesbians are the only people I know who don’t center their lives around men.” The problem comes when you start claiming that lesbians are better feminists, or that bisexual women are somehow letting down the cause. The problem comes when you act like bisexual women have cooties.
And yes, all of this is lesbian separatist gateway terf rhetoric designed to target specifically lesbians for recruitment into terfdom. I have a post about how that works here: [link].
British transphobes have graduated to claiming that bisexual women are tainted by our association with men and thus change the “vibe” of women-only spaces. It’s true, every time I walk into the room, I’m also bringing the spirit of every man who’s been inside my vagina. They live up there like lil ghosts.
This people are genuinely the goofiest dumbest bigots.
[Image id: screenshot of a tweet from Femme Loves green heart emoji white heart emoji purple heart emoji @femmeloves. The tweet reads: “Lesbians know that even having a bisexual woman in the room changes the vibe. Not to say that it’s *worse*, just that it’s *different*. Lesbian only spaces are the only places in the world boundaried about with a hard and final "no” to men. Those spaces are everything.“ end id]
Highlights from the thread include referring to a hypothetical trans woman as a "male body”, and whining about not being welcome in inclusive queer spaces because of her anti-trans bigotry, and about having lost a friend because he refuses to speak to her sweet bigoted self. She also mentions 2003 as perhaps the best time to be gay. Put a pin in that.
I think saying they “graduated” to anything ignores the fact that this is straight up the standard old school biphobia common in exclusionary, supposedly feminist, circles, such as terfdom for decades, and when I came of age online, in the 2000s, and early 2010s, this was EVERYWHERE. You might notice that 2003 was before same sex marriage was legalized nationwide in the US, before a kid could even contemplate taking a same sex partner to a school dance in most parts of the country, and when “that’s so gay” was the favorite schoolyard taunt. That was the best time to be gay, according to FemmeLove, better than now. Really. I know that FemmeLove is British, but somehow I doubt the UK in 2003 was a paradise for the gays compared to today. Forgive me for being just a little bit cynical, but I suspect that FemmeLove looks back so fondly on 2003, because back then, not only transphobia, but biphobia was not only rampant, but accepted in large parts of the mainstream gay and lesbian communities.
My favorite variant of the idea expressed in the above tweet, popular in the early 2000s, is that bisexual women are “sexually available to men”. This makes bi women gross and dirty, because somehow in these “feminists’” minds, a woman’s moral compass lies between her legs, and contact with, or lack of aversion to, the almightly penis (and I say penis, because the venn diagram between people who think of themselves as feminists and hold these beliefs, and people that think trans women are men, is not quite a circle, but it’s damn close), causes a woman to be forever changed and made “bad”. If that sounds like old school patriarchy to you, and the sort of thing that actual feminists are fighting against, good for you for being observant.
But anyway, this “sexually available to men” thing makes bi women not only gross and bad, but also a danger to lesbian women, because our very existence makes men think that women who are attracted to other women are also attracted to men, and this will mean that men will think that lesbians are sexually availible to them! So men who persue or even sexually assault lesbians are somehow bi women’s fault for existing.
And let’s get into just what “sexually availible” means, because it is in fact a way to disregard the concept of consent, and replace it with attraction to a whole gender. This whole “sexually available to men” thing cropped up every time anyone brought up the statistic that bisexual women face higher rates of abuse and sexual assault than either lesbian or straight women, and it was invariably brought up to say bisexual women deserved it. What did they expect, making themselves sexually availible to men? Somehow the idea that some of the abuse and sexual assault suffered by bisexual women, or indeed lesbian women, might have occured at the hands of other women, never entered the conversation, and when it did, because somebody like me brought it up, let’s just say that when some women brought up being abused and assaulted by other women, they were laughed at. Don’t be silly. Women are never rapists and abusers. This is why I was so turned off by the “love between women is so pure” positivity posts: [Link].
I’ve even seen some biphobic lesbians make The irrelevancy of consent in this framework explicit, and, as they say these days, “say the quiet part out loud,” by which I mean, I have heard biphobic lesbians wandering if bisexual women can really be raped, since they are sexually available to men. If you’ve noticed that this is just a biphobic variant of the whole, “it’s not rape if she’s a slut” thing, congratulations, you’re two for two on sniffing out misogynistic, victim-blaming, patriarchal bullshit, masquerading as feminism and lesbian liberation.
Much like terfs who go on and on about men, but only ever seem to care about trans women, lesbian biphobes might claim their loathing and scorn for bi women is because they’re sexually availible to men, they never seem to have the same bile for straight women. I’ve got many theories as to why, But one of them, and I think the one responsible for most of this, is that a lot of people might resent their place in a hierarchy, might resent the way they are marginalized, but they don’t resent the hierarchy, they just want to change their place within it. And ultimately a lot of people like this are willing to resign themselves to their place in the hierarchy, if they can bully, torment, and subjugate someone else. They aren’t interested in liberation from the oppressive system that marginalizes them, they just want a chance to do the marginalizing. This is a huge part of why bigotries tend to run together, and why you rarely find somebody who is just prejudiced against one group. And it’s why there is a well-trodden path from terfdom to the alt-right and white supremacy.
Terfs, biphobic lesbians, and their ilk like to call any (cis) woman who calls them out on their bullshit, a pick-me, which they define as a woman who allies with men and the Patriarchy, selling out her sisters in exchange for the benefits that compliance brings. This is ironic, because by that definition, terfs and biphobic lesbians, and other pseudo-feminists like them, are the biggest pick-mes of them all. They sell out their sisters to the Patriarchy and rape culture, in exchange for self-satisfaction, the illusion of being better and purer than those dirty, tainted women, and the dubious pleasure of getting to personally shit on those other women.
I feel so incredibly isolated from wlw and sapphic culture on this site, much less so than I do to queer women I meet in real life. There are just so many attitudes that I do not share or even find dangerous and abhorant, so many experiences I do not share, and so many assumptions I do not share that I just feel constantly out of place.
I see these weird echoes of old political movements I thought had died out, puritanical patriarchy, and a seductive form of gender essentualism all rolled up into normative wlw discourse on this site, and it makes me a little batty.
For me, the stand out bits are on the mild end the idea that lesbians, or more rarely women dating other women, naturally center their lives around women and that this makes them better feminists, and on the extreme end, the idea that women’s relationships with other women are pure and wonderful and if you say or imply otherwise, you have internalized misogyny or lesphobia or are otherwise self hating.
The former bugs me because there are a lot of terrible assumptions underlying it, and it kicks certain queer women under the bus. Not only of course does it give bi women in relationships with men the shaft (and I see it a lot as a way some lesbian women claim superiority over their bisexual sisters) but what about the lesbian women for whom the most important person in their life is their young son or their disabled brother? Are they less lesbian, less sapphic, less feminist for it?
And then there’s the underlying idea that women either do or should center their lives around their romantic partners. Society of course teaches us this is exactly the way it’s supposed to be, while not expecting the same of men. We never for example say that a straight man’s life is naturally centered about women and their needs, and so is innately more feminist. That idea is rightly viewed as ridiculous. Centering your life around a romantic partner is neither healthy or safe, and certainly not an innate part of being a woman, and there is nothing especially feminist about absorbing this particular piece of gender essentualism into our community attitudes. My life is centered around me. It is after all, my life. And it was my straight grandmother and mother, both of whom are feminists, who raised me to know that I had the right to be the center of my own existence. That remains the same no matter the gender of anyone else I choose to have in my life, and it has no relationship to my sexuality.
On the more extreme end, the idea that women’s relationships with other women are always pure is pretty horrifying to me. I was abused by another girl. As a child, most of the worst bullies I faced were other girls, and most of my adult abusers were women. Women are not pure. Women are human. And there are some women, including queer women and sapphic women, who really suck. Abuse is about power. Abusers pick victims, who for one reason or another, they have power over. Because of the patriarchy, men are much more likely to have power over women than the reverse, but that is not universal. Women abuse men. Men abuse other men, people of all genders abuse people of all genders, and yes, women abuse women, within romantic relationships as well as without. The idea that women are better, that men are naturally more violent and brutal, is downright Victorian, and absolutely sexist and an artifact of the patriarchy. The idea that there is no abuse in women’s queer relationships, or between women more generally, helps and protects abusers. It tells women who were abused by other women that their experiences are not valid. Part of this unwillingness to admit to abuse within the community is the stereotype of the predatory queer woman, and the fears that admitting that yes, there is abuse in this community, just like there is in any community made up of humans, is saying yes, the straights are right about us, we are innately abusive. And undoubtably there will be straight people who see it that way, but those are straight people who were always going to see us as predatory, and I am not willing to silence victims for them. No woman should ever be made to feel as if they are betraying the community for coming forward with their abuse.
Even aside from abuse, women’s relationships with other women can be messy, even toxic. They can be loving, and screwed up, marked by selfishness and jealousy, and comfort and safety. They are relationships between human beings. And no one should be made to feel ashamed, or like they are letting down the community because their relationship isn’t perfect. I know it’s easy when society tells us our relationships are wrong and unnatural, to say “no, they are perfect,” and that it is much less satisfying to say “no, they are just as flawed and messy and potentially wonderful as any other.” But in the long run, allowing ourselves to be honest is vital to keeping ourselves safe and supporting each other. And this is exactly what we are not doing on this site. And I’m tired of it. I’m tired of wlw and sapphic positivity just making me feel isolated and adrift.
Somebody liked this recently, and seeing the like in my notes reminded me of this post, and while I still agree with everything I said here, it struck me rereading this that all of the things I was mentioning as alienating are in fact gateway terf rhetoric, And it’s not at all a coincidence either that I would find it alienating, or that it would be gender essentialist and secretly regressive and reactionary.
It’s also not a coincidence that this particular rhetoric was common in the young sapphic community, especially the lesbian community, not because terfs are more likely to be lesbians, or because lesbians are particularly vulnerable to terfdom or transphobia more broadly, but because this particular set of gateway rhetoric is tailored to target young lesbians in particular, and young wlw more broadly, especially those without an offline queer community.
It’s also not at all surprising that nothing I talked about four years ago had anything explicitly to do with trans people, or had overt bigotry in it of any kind. This is the gateway rhetoric. They don’t want you to see where they’re going with it, until they’ve got you buying into it already.
Hate movements, cults, and abusive relationships all work in similar ways. And yes, it is both ironic and incredibly predictable that part of drawing young sapphic, especially lesbian women into an abusive dynamic, would be convincing them that that the people doing this to them, as women, as feminists, as other wlw, could never abuse them. There is nothing an abuser likes more.
But anyway, hate groups, cults, and abusive relationships all work in similar ways. They never start out with the pain. They start out with “love bombing”. Typically when we talk about love bombing, we’re talking about cults, But hate groups and abusers do the same thing. The goal is to get you to see the group/abuser as a source for affirmation and comfort. Then, they isolate you, so they are your only source for affirmation and comfort. It’s only after they’ve gotten you both hooked and trapped that they start hurting you. And since they’re your only source for comfort and affirmation, when they hurt you, you go back to them for comfort for the hurt they caused. This is part of what makes it so very hard to leave.
This is a lot easier for an in person abuser or cult leader to pull off, than it is for an amorphous online hate movement like terfs (or not coincidentally, the alt-right), because when there is no formal structure, offline monitoring of members, or group you can be kicked out of, the movement has to rely on you, prospective member, to isolate yourself. But lucky for them, there is a handy mechanism for just that: increasingly nasty rhetoric that if you start using, will drive others away from you, leaving you with no one but the hate group and the other people on the road to hate.
The fact that this rhetoric at first has no overt bigotry in it serves several useful purposes. Firstly, it makes it easy to swallow for people who don’t want to see themselves as bigots. Two, it means that it’s really easy for anyone who finds the rhetoric appealing to dismiss the people who see it and smell a rat. Thirdly, and this is the most insidious, it means that the gateway rhetoric may just catch some members of the group that the hate group targets, who can be deployed as useful shields. How many times have you seen someone point out online that a post is kinda terfy, only for the poster to respond, “how dare you, I am a trans woman, how dare you call me a terf?” This is why that happens. That trans woman is swimming at the surface of the sea of terf rhetoric, unaware of just how deep it goes, and though she’s unlikely to sink deeper, while she is there, she is a useful sheild for the very people who hate her.
So how does this gateway rhetoric draw in future terfs? How does this pipeline work? Very simply, it serves the cause of all hate groups, that when a hate group starts doing that affirmation and comfort thing, they affirm their potential recruit for what they are, not who they are, In this case as women (by which they mean cis women, though they won’t say so this early), and in this specific pathway, as lesbians, and to a lesser degree, wlw more generally. This is of course why I was seeing this particular rhetoric so commonly in positivity posts, Because of course it’s love bombing, but it’s specifically love bombing you for how you fit into a category. And as part of this category, you are better than other people.
Once you have swallowed the sweet sugared pill, the “group I am part of is better than other groups,” pill, It’s not hard to accept the corollary, other groups are worse than my group. That’s why the next step in this pipeline is to talk about why men suck, about how the patriarchy and the systems of oppression that exploit and/or persecute everybody who doesn’t belong to an arbitrary and socialy constructed category of maleness, didn’t come about because of historical and societal factors, but instead because men innately oppress women, That this is natural to men, inherent to them, as opposed to like every other system of oppression, a social construct.
This is where a lot more people start actually recognizing the terf rhetoric when they see it and calling it out, which can do one of two things, depending on the person hearing it, and how emotionally invested they have become in this narrative. Either it can snap them out of it, and keep them from going any deeper as they say to themselves, “wait these people are right holy crap,” or it can make that person go deeper, to respond to the criticism with reintrenchment, and to view the person doing the criticizing as an enemy, not to be trusted, isolating themselves further.
And once they’ve gotten you to accept that men innately oppress women, because men as men are naturally bad and cruel, It’s easy to say that men are not only naturally bad and cruel, but biologically programmed to be bad and cruel, and that by men, we mean assigned male at birth. And then it’s easy to say that trans women are men, they are bad and cruel, and the only reason they would “pretend” to be women is to appropriate female oppression, infiltrate women’s spaces, to do what all men want to do, which is victimize “real” women and girls. And now you’re at full blown terfdom.
There are many gateways into terfdom, just as there are many gateways into white supremacy. This particular gateway is tailored to appeal to young lesbians, but there are other gateways, targetted to appeal to many other groups of women. It’s not a coincidence that this rhetoric has embedded in it retrogressive and reactionary gender essentialist views about womanhood and manhood, and frankly disregards any genders outside of those two completely. Terf ideology is retrogressive, reactionary, and gender essentialist, and getting a potential recruit to adopt that framework, is the first step in turning that potential recruit into an actual recruit.
Four years later, I look back on this post about about common ideas that I found troubling, that left me feeling alienated from my community, and now I see something much more insidious and dangerous even than I realized back then, the signs of a concerted effort by a hate group to recruit in my community.
pride SHOULD have weirdos and freaks actually. it shouldnt be sanitized and full of cookie cutter cis white thin ppl. say queer make out in the streets wear leather bring back flagging. stop trying to turn pride into a fun event for cishet families. queer ppl arent zoo exhibits. i want to see angry queers shouting their pride in the streets not be bombarded with rainbow pens from banks. keep pride a riot.
So “queer” isn’t just an identity that’s broadly inclusive because, I don’t know, we like big parties. There’s actually an underlying ethic, a queer theory, that has political implications.
Its name reclaims a slur because the point is to say, “I am different, but that’s not a bad thing.” The queer movement is about upholding the right of all people to deviate from an oppressive cisgender, heterosexual, patriarchal norm.Broadening the spectrum of acceptable diversity; questioning and dismantling the social pressures that police and punish deviance. Changing not just our own lives, but how our entire society thinks about sex and gender.
That’s why “queer” embraces so many different groups. It’s not trying to erase their differences, but to try to coherently understand the complex overlapping pressures that affect each of them, and to extend our reach beyond the LGBT+ community. It’s about the right of lesbians to live without men and the right of trans and nonbinary people to be who they are, the right of asexuals to define for themselves what’s significant in their lives, the right of straight men to be vulnerable and emotional and nonviolent. When the great queering project is done, you will see the changes everywhere, not just in small LGBT+ enclaves.
It’s recognizing that something that harms or oppresses one of us is pretty likely to harm all of us, so we all benefit from taking it down together.
Did you just say emotional straight men are qu*er? Did you deadass just say that cishet men are part of the lgbt community? And y’all wonder why so many people hate it?
(sigh) I’ll repeat myself:
For everyone who’s like “Whoa, I was with you until you threw straight men in there”:
Homophobia is a huge part of how all men are policed. If a man isn’t strong, tough, aggressive, and dominant? He gets called gay. So this isn’t “Soft straight men are totally LGBT+ and belong in your gay support group!” but it is “Part of the work of disassembling homophobia is changing how it affects straight men.”
It’s the same way that men aren’t the primary intended beneficiaries of feminism, but part of the work of feminism is addressing and changing toxic masculinity. If you’re effective enough at changing the system, you change it for everyone.
To reiterate: One way that toxic masculinity is kept as the default pattern of behavior for straight men is that they are punished, quickly and efficiently, for any show of vulnerability. Dismantling the structures that enforce traditional gender roles is one way to ensure that LGBT people are welcomed in society.
The world would be much more accepting if Joe Cishet didn’t feel the need to correct every single deviation from the toxic behaviors he believes are required.
The purpose of the queer coalition is to end the practice of, “you must have [X list of traits] to participate in these parts of society.”
Can cishet men be queer?
Why does it matter?
Being queer isn’t about what specific identity or traits you have. It’s about saying, “HEY! Average isn’t the pinnacle of human existence! We didn’t build this world so everyone could strive to be just like their neighbors! People can be different and we can celebrate that difference, not shun it!”
Can a cishet man “be queer?” I dunno. I don’t think that’s important.
Can a cishet man “live a queer life?” Hell yes he can.
Can a cishet woman “be queer?” Wrong question.
Can a cishet woman “live a queer life?” Hell yes.
These aren’t “straight people appropriating queer culture.” They’re not taking it away from us, not picking and choosing bits of it to share with their cis het friends. These are people joining queer culture.
They’re not part of the LGBT community. They ARE part of the queer community.
this is a long-ish, text-heavy post but please read it, especially the last addition ^
Queer is a coalition, not a demographic.
^ This is why allies are part of the broader queer community while lesbian TERFs, exclusionists, etc. aren’t.
My mom’s friend who corrects anyone who gets my sibling’s pronouns wrong, who actively supports queer kids in her classroom, who welcomed her daughter’s trans girlfriend into her family? She is part of the queer community regardless of her sexuality, and anyone who says she can’t be needs to think about their definition of community. And by the same definition, TERFs aren’t part of the community because they choose not to be, because trying to control other people and justify their own bitterness and bigotry is more important to them.
“Can cishet people be queer?”
Listen. Listen. In 2007, I went to see a gay performance artist named Tim Miller. At that time he did pieces talking about the two major issues that had affected him as a queer man: surviving the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s as his friends dropped dead around him, and the fact that he wanted to marry his partner, who was Australian, and every time said partner came to the US there was a concern he’d be deported because his relationship made him “a risk for overstaying his visa.” Marriage would have given him a green card, but guess what you couldn’t do in 2007! Even if you got married in Maryland, it didn’t count for immigration purposes because it wasn’t federally recognized.
So one of the stories he told that night was about his high school German teacher, who was a butch lesbian. He ended the story with a line I have never forgotten:
“The queer kids, whether they’re gay or straight, have to stick together.”
This was a performance piece he’d first written IN 1994.
So: a man who survived a queer genocide says yes, you fucking well CAN be cishet and queer. I think he’d know.
(If you’re wondering: yes, he and the partner did finally get to get married. Assuming they’re both alive and well, they’ll celebrate 30 years in 2024.)
Ten years ago this October, I came out as Queer.
At the time, I identified as a cishet man, although I usually added some witty disclaimer like “but I’m not very good at it” or “but I don’t have a fucking complex about it” or something like that. Queer was my way of a) showing support to the community that had been there for me my entire life, and b) ditching the vague qualifiers.
It would be another eight months before the implications of this really kicked in. I had gone to see my mother on her deathbed, and taken all of the needful stuff out of my purse and put it into my pockets. When I got back to the car, I started putting everything back in my purse, and I was grouchy about it, because I hate having lots of stuff in my pockets. And I said to myself I should have said screw it and just taken the purse in with me, because the only surprise would have been that I had the audacity to bring it with me, not that I had one.
And that’s when it hit me that I was, in fact, Queer.
Since then it’s been… a journey. I now identify as trans/non-binary, and there are times I suspect I may just be a woman, but I have such a poor grasp on gender that I really don’t know. I’d never really thought about it before. I’ve come to realize that I’ve always had some level of body dysphoria, but I honestly don’t know if it’s connected to gender. (It… doesn’t feel like it, but again, still not clear on the concept.) I did one of those face-app gender swap things and there was a weird ache looking at it.
And I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I hadn’t started with Queer. I wouldn’t have gotten this far if the Queer community hadn’t bumped into the little sissy nerd and gone “Oh, hey, you can hang with us.” I wouldn’t have gotten this far if a huge chunk of the It Gets Better Project videos didn’t explicitly go out of their way to say “And all of this is for the nerds, too, and the weirdos, and the folks who are always told they don’t belong.”
You can have my Queer when you reincarnate as a quicker shot.
do y'all even know how much i hate being an “elder queer” at 40? a whole goddamn generation before me was wiped out by a plague that politicians deemed not their problem bc it was killing the “right” people. like. this was OPENLY STATED. i spent a large chunk of my childhood going to funerals. nevermind the fact that killing queer people for being queer wasn’t codified into law as a hate crime until i was a junior in high school.
i should NOT be an elder queer, i should be middle at most. i am a middle aged queer. most of the elder queers died.
when i was growing up i didn’t go to pride parades, i went to pride marches. because that’s 100% what they were in the 80s and 90s.
from the absolute bottom of my heart, LEARN OUR FUCKING HISTORY. a generation was nearly wiped out so you young queers could be here. don’t let that have been in vain, please.
I think this is really important.
I also think that it’s important for other LGBTQIA+ members to understand, not all of us learn the way others do, and that some of us aren’t able to just start researching the LGBTQIA+ history, we may even need some help, some advice, in order to fully understand the history, without being made to feel like we’re “just lazy” or made to feel stupid because we don’t know things the community thinks we should automatically know…
Some of us “young members” weren’t/aren’t allowed to research the community, so some of us aren’t sure where to start, where to learn all of the history. And I know I can’t be the only LGBTQIA+ member who feels like they’re not allowed to ask questions, otherwise we look “stupid” or slow, so here are some questions that I, as a young member, need some advice on, and hopefully it’ll help others who haven’t been able to ask for themselves out of fear or discomfort:
1) Where would those who know a lot about the LGBTQIA+ community and its history suggest that those who aren’t as knowledgeable about the community and its history start their research?
2) Are there any articles or books on the community and its history that are easier to read, where we can learn more about it without experiencing information overload?
3) For those of us with disabilities (learning disabilities, autism, ADHD, etc.,) who struggle to retain information that we might not understand is important to remember, are there any articles that have a timeline template, things to look at that don’t go into too much detail that we might not be able to remember?
4) Is there a list of books and websites online where we, as relatively new members, members who cannot take in a lot of information at once, and just those with general inquiries, can look up and read in bullet form the books and websites that others find helpful and not full of information that isn’t easy to follow?
Otherwise, I think that the poster had very good points.
The thing I think it’s most important to remember is a) the history of queer people is not a simple linear progression bad to less bad b) terminology and context changes fast, you need to take that into account when you are looking at historical stuff.
These are some resources I’d recommend:
Gay and lesbian history for kids yes, it’s “for kids”, but it’s a good jumping off point for finding stuff interesting to learn more about. Definately US centric, and kind of light on trans history.
I’m currently working my way through Let the Record Show, which is about the history of the ActUp movement and am learning a ton
This podcast is as close as you can come to having a chat with “queer elders” without actually doing it. All interviews, many of which were recorded in the 1980s, both with names you may have heard as well as people you probably haven’t. The latest season is on AIDS and really good, but there is also a lot talking about the preStonewall era of the homophile movement. There is also a book of the same name by Eric Marcus from the first set of interviews he did in the 80s. Primarily US focused
@queerasfact an Australian podcast, covering topics from all throughout history and around the world. Entertaining, and they explain their sources and reasoning very clearly
queer is such a good word. im queer as in fuck you. queer as in odd. queer as in fucked-in-the-head. queer as in i hope you choke on it. queer as in a slur i laugh at. queer as in not like you. queer as in none of your business. queer as in a line in the fucking dirt. queer as in we’re here. get used to it. queer as in this is who i am and what i am. queer as in im different and i dont fucking care. queer as in with or without you i exist and ill keep doing it. queer as in queer
