‘Queer’ was reclaimed as an umbrella term for people identifying as not-heterosexual and/or not-cisgender in the early 1980s, but being queer is more than just being non-straight/non-cis; it’s a political and ideological statement, a label asserting an identity distinct from gay and/or traditional gender identities.
People identifying as queer are typically not cis gays or cis lesbians, but bi, pan, ace, trans, nonbinary, intersex, etc.: we’re the silent/ced letters. We’re the marginalised majority within the LGBTQIA+ community, and
‘queer’ is our rallying cry.
And that’s equally pissing off and terrifying terfs and cis LGs.
There’s absolutely no historical or sociolinguistic reason why ‘queer’ should be a worse slur than ‘gay.’ Remember how we had all those campaigns to make people stop using ‘gay’ as a synonym for ‘bad’?
Yet nobody is suggesting we should abolish ‘gay’ as a label. We accept that even though ‘gay’ sometimes is and historically frequently was used in a derogatory manner, mlm individuals have the right to use that word. We have ad campaigns, twitter hashtags, and viral Facebook posts defending ‘gay’ as an identity label and asking people to stop using it as a slur.
Whereas ‘queer’ is treated exactly opposite: a small but vocal group of people within feminist and LGBTQIA+ circles insists that it’s a slur and demands that others to stop using it as a personal, self-chosen identity label.
Why?
Because “queer is a slur” was invented by terfs specifically to exclude trans, nonbinary, and
intersex people from feminist and non-heterosexual discourse, and was
subsequently adopted by cis gays and cis lesbians to exclude bi/pan and ace
people.
It’s classic divide-and-conquer tactics: when our umbrella term is redefined as a slur and we’re harassed into silence for using it, we no longer have a word for what we are allowing us to organise for social/political/economic support; we are denied the opportunity to influence or shape the spaces we inhabit; we can’t challenge existing community power structures; we’re erased from our own history.
Pro tip: when you alter historical evidence to deny a marginalised group empowerment, you’re one of the bad guys.
“Queer is a slur” is used by terfs and cis gays/lesbians to silence the voices of trans/nonbinary/intersex/bi/pan/ace people in society and even within our own communities, to isolate us and shame us for existing.
“Queer is a slur” is saying “I am offended by people who do not conform to traditional gender or sexual identities because they are not sexually available to me or validate my personal identity.”
“Queer is a slur” is defending heteronormativity.
“Queer is a slur” is frankly embarrassing. It’s an admission of ignorance and prejudice. It’s an insidious discriminatory discourse parroted uncritically in support of a divisive us-vs-them mentality targeting the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQIA+ community for lack of courage to confront the white cis straight men who pose an actual danger to us as individuals and as a community.
Tl;dr:
I’m here, I’m queer, and I’m too old for this shit.
I initially reblogged this without commentary, which implies endorsement, but on further reflection, I have to point out that “queer” is still used as a slur. Yes, it was reclaimed and now has an important political and ideological legacy. Yes, it is powerful in a positive way for many people. Erasing that part of the word’s history is unacceptable and anyone taking the stance that “queer” has never been anything but an insult at the very least need to learn some history. But stating unequivocally that queer is not a slur is just … untrue. Implying that LGBTQA+ people who have had “queer” used as a pejorative against them and therefore don’t feel comfortable with “queer” are defending heterosexuality is frankly offensive to them.
Also, this is the first I’m hearing about terfs “redefining” the term “queer” as a slur, I’m not really sure what’s going on there.
(yes, I’m queer and have been for like a decade. I like the term, personally. Of course, no one ever called me that in order to wound me, so it has no negative connotations for me.)
But stating unequivocally that queer is not a slur is just … untrue.
Implying that LGBTQA+ people who have had “queer” used as a pejorative
against them and therefore don’t feel comfortable with “queer” are
defending heterosexuality is frankly offensive to them.
1.
I’m not saying ‘queer’ has never been used in a derogatory way; of course it has. Every word can be an insult if it’s used as one, and this goes double for reclaimed terminology. ‘Gay’ and ‘queer’ are two such words, but we could also mention words like ‘fat’ and how it is being reclaimed by the fat acceptance movement, or the N-word being used by PoC. Both ‘fat’ and the N-word are loaded with meanings: historical, emotional, social, and political. Everyone understands that calling someone fat or the N-word as insults is hurtful and unacceptable behaviour, just like calling someone gay or queer as insults is also hurtful and unacceptable.
However, “queer is a slur” is not a statement of fact pointing out the obvious notion that ‘queer’ can be and sometimes is used to insult people. “Queer is a slur” is a trans-exclusionary catchphrase coined to shame queer people into silence. The original post above is a textbook example: a person who does not identify as queer messages a complete stranger (me) who does identify as queer for the sole reason of telling her 1) your chosen label is offensive (= your existence is offensive to me), 2) “grow up” = change your label.
If queer had been a triggering word to the sender of the message, they
could have taken any number of steps to protect themselves from seeing triggering content on their dash: asking me to tag posts containing the word, using one of the tumblr blacklist tools I linked in my second post, or simply blocking me. But they didn’t; they told me to stop self-identifying as queer, to censor the language I use about myself and my community. That is an act of aggression.
2.
Implying that {not feeling] comfortable with “queer” [is]
defending heterosexuality
Not heterosexuality. Heteronormativity. ‘Queer’ is a self-identifier used primarily by people who reject the binary gender paradigm, traditional gender roles, genital myopia, and the understanding of sexuality which uses heterosexuality as the golden standard from which all other sexualities deviate.
There’s sadly a lot of heteronormativity in gay and lesbian groupings, especially where lesbians and terfs overlap, and it’s marginalising trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, intersex, and similar people in the LGBTQIA+ community in particular. The people saying “queer is a slur” are usually the same people saying trans women aren’t women and don’t belong in female (especially lesbian) spaces, that trans women and passing trans men have male privilege, that ace people are heterosexual, etc.
This all comes back to terfs and their branding of ‘queer’ as a slur to target trans people and prevent them from organising with other members of the community, and gays and lesbians co-opting it to marginalise and gatekeep bi/pan and ace people. There’s a movement among terfs and LGs, especially online, to prevent this:
So yes, ‘queer’ can be used as a slur. But “queer is a slur” is a very specific phrase meaning “if you’re not gay or lesbian, you don’t deserve a voice in your own community.” Be on high alert when you observe someone saying “queer a slur” to an actual queer-identified person. It’s a censorship technique.
The beginning of We Know The Way is actually in two different languages – the first verse is Samoan while the chorus is Tokelauan, one of the native languages of composer Opetaia Foa‘i. The English verses were built around the Samoan and Tokelauan lines, which roughly translate to:
We are voyagers called by the great god of the sea, Who puts up a challenge. We take up the good challenge, So get ready. Oh, oh! There is land up ahead. A bird in flight to take us there, Oh, oh! This beautiful land, The place I was looking for, we will make our home.
Do you ever wonder if the reason that different cultures have such wildly different onomatopoeias for the noise a cat makes is that cats have regional accents?
Actually, they do.
There’s a lot of evidence that animals have regional accents. Both birds and sperm whales in fact to vocalise differently depending on where they grew up.
As for felines themselves, there’s an ongoing study underway on at Lund University precisely about this.
As a phonologist who has watched entirely too many cat videos on the internet, I can confirm that cats of differing countries do have differentiated accents in their cries. Felines in England tend to have shorter, lower “mow” whereas Japanese cats do tend to make glides into high vowels, and are sustained longer, such as the ubiqutous use of “nyaaaan” in Japanese onomatopoeia.
As a linguist, I can affirm that the sounds produced for communication are determined every bit as much by anatomical features as they are by communicative experience.
Has anyone ever taken a look at cats’ body sizes and shapes, especially in the face and throat? Especially the width of the throat, the length of the nose, depth of the chest, and size of the jaws and mouth.
Look at all these face, chest, and throat shapes. That alone would indicate differences in their sounds.
What I really want to see is comparing maine coons bred in different countries and raised by litters from different regions being compared, or cats with the same size/shape (to cover anatomical inconsistencies) being compared, even across a continent.
But the tricky thing is, even cats from the same place have different voices and preferred “syllables” they’ll sustain, or how rapidly they call, or for how long.
Does anyone know who that study (re: cat accents) is being conducted by? I can’t find any mentions of that one, specifically… (All the Google results I’m getting are about what certain cat noises mean, or the big debate on ‘do cats have a special language for humans/dogs/other cats’, ‘what noises do cats make we can’t hear’, etc… I can’t find a study or article on the accent thing.)
The other thing about the word “queer” is that almost everyone I’ve seen opposed to it have been cis, binary gays and lesbians. Not wanting it applied to yourself is fine, but I think people underestimate the appeal of vague, inclusive terminology when they already have language to easily and non-invasively describe themselves.
Saying “I’m gay/lesbian/bi” is pretty simple. Just about everyone knows what you mean, and you quickly establish yourself as a member of a community. Saying “I’m a trans nonbinary bi woman who’s celibate due to dysphoria and possibly on the ace spectrum”… not so much. You’re lucky to find anyone who understands even half of that, and explaining it requires revealing a ton of personal information. The appeal of “queer” is being able to identify yourself without profiling yourself. It’s welcoming and functional terminology to those who do not have the luxury of simplified language and occupy complicated identities. *That’s* why people use it – there are currently not alternatives to express the same sentiment.
It’s not people “oppressing themselves” or naively and irresponsibly using a word with loaded history. It’s easy to dismiss it as bad or unnecessary if you already have the luxury of language to comfortably describe yourself.
There’s another dimension that always, always gets overlooked in contemporary discussions about the word “queer:” class. The last paragraph here reminds me of a old quote: “rich lesbians are ‘sapphic,’ poor lesbians are ‘dykes’.”
The reclaiming of the slur “queer” was an intensely political process, and people who came up during the 90s, or who came up mostly around people who did so, were divided on class and political lines on questions of assimilation into straight capitalist society.
Bourgeois gays and lesbians already had “the luxury of language” to describe themselves – normalized through struggle, thanks to groups like the Gay Liberation Front.
Everyone else, from poor gays and lesbians to bi and trans people and so on, had no such language. These people were the ones for whom social/economic assimilation was not an option.
The only language left, the only word which united this particular underclass, was “queer.” “Queer” came to mean an opposition to assimilation – to straight culture, capitalism, patriarchy, and to upper class gays and lesbians who wanted to throw the rest of us under the bus for a seat at that table – and a solidarity among those marginalized for their sexuality/gender id/presentation.
(Groups which reclaimed “queer,” like Queer Patrol (armed against homophobic violence), (Queers) Bash Back! (action and theory against fascism, homophobia, and transphobia), and Queerbomb (in response to corporate/state co-optation of mainstream Gay Pride), were “ultraleft,” working-class, anti-capitalist, and functioned around solidarity and direct action.)
The contemporary discourse around “queer” as a reclaimed-or-not slur both ignores and reproduces this history. The most marginalized among us, as OP notes, need this language. The ones who have problems with it are, generally, among those who have language – or “community,” or social/economic/political support – of their own.
Honestly “queer” is so useful for people like me w/ a “complicated orientation” b/c instead of having to say I’m “asexual panromantic” and explain what that means, I can just say “I’m queer” and it tells you all you need to know (that I’m not straight).
yeah sure good for you but don’t ever ever use that word for someone who doesn’t identify as it themselves, it’s not an umbrella term for everyone. also “pan/ace” would definitely work, even if you don’t want to use it, other people could. i use ace lesbian and definitely not the q slur.
Wow its almost like they were just talking about using it on themselves for individual reasons and you butted in to be an ass and be condescending because you think you’re superior for not using queer, then you called their identity a slur right to them. But that can’t possibly be what you were trying to do, right?
Anyone is allowed to use it for themselves, I never said no one should do that if that’s what they want. Queer is a slur though. I just want people to be aware of that, I have no idea if OP is aware of that or not but some people using that word aren’t. I’m tired of people including me and other people who don’t want to be included in that word, and before anyone asks, I never meant that OP did that, because I literally have no idea if they do.
Queer is a slur as much as any other LGBT+ word, I just want you to be aware of that.
“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella – gay rights, gay marriage, gay community – when discussing the entire community.
Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.
Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.
Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.
So if you’re not going to come onto gay people’s posts for the same behavior, maybe critically analyze why exactly you feel the need to be so condescending to Queer people, specifically on posts that ONLY have to do with personal identity. Why you feel the need to insist to Queer people that their identities are slurs, to directly slap away the power of reclaiming a word from them by demanding it remain in the hands of the Straights as a perpetual slur.
I think an important difference between gay and queer is however, that queer started out as a slur used against members of the community and continues to be used as a slur in many places. Whereas gay began as a word the community chose itself to describe itself and was then later used by homophobes and heterosexuals in general in a negative way, meaning however, that gay doesn’t hold the same negative connotations as queer for many people simply because it was our word that they took, and not a word that they forced on us to make us “strange” or “other” like queer means.
That’s…. Not true. People think so because the history before gay was reclaimed is way older (older than any love community member’s lifetimes, probably,) but gay had the exact same origins.
It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.
The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”
There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.
The more recent history of the mid to late 20th century more prevalently favored queer as a slur, as is represented in our media. However its clearly undeniable that the switch back to gay as the popular community slur (along with the ever present f slur,) happened in the 2000s. Which is trying to be denied and rewritten by the anti queer crowd, who completely ignore the words popularity with community members who actually lived through when it was a popular slur.
Yes to all of this. When it comes to words for “not straight” there are hardly any choices that didn’t originate as ways to stigmatize or pathologize us. We are all using reclaimed slurs to describe ourselves.
Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet.
Somebody else pointed this out earlier to me, and of course I’ve lost the post, but it’s really suspicious that of all the reclaimed slurs, the one that gets the most pushback is the one that is most radically accepting of all identities
“hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it.
Queer is an ideology and an identity, historically and now. It is an umbrella for that ideology and an umbrella for those identities, historically and now. They can’t be conflated (with LGBT) and it’s super fucking disingenuous to pretend one is just the tarnished besmirched dirty slur version of the other. They’re different. In my particular work for example, Queer bioethics is different from LGBT bioethics and conflating the two will muddle any discussion you try to have about them because they lead to literally opposite conclusions in some cases.
Yeah I freaking love pancakes
Wait wrong post
By far the best addition to this post
This is one of those things where I feel like an old.
Like, *the* slogan I associate with pride is, “We’re here, we’re queer – get used to it!”
There was a TV show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that was total mainstream pap. (Not that the show wasn’t riddles problematic elements from the concept out, but ‘queer’ in the title was clearly meant as a positive.)
I just have a hard time processing queer as anything but reclaimed.
They actually shot “Queer As Folk” in my city!
TERFs and radical gender/sexuality bianarists are flooding social media and blogging sites with propaganda smearing the word queer in the hopes of silencing all of us who don’t identify with their hate politics. I fought hard to reclaim the word queer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s the one word that doesn’t worship exclusion. Which is why these people are trying to convince you not to use it. fuck that noise. there is literally no word i could use to identify my sexuality that hasn’t been thrown at me in hatred, fear, and violence. No way am I giving up the one of those that allows me to talk about all of my community without trying to put people in boxes they don’t fit in.
I will never not reblog this post. Queer, queer, queer here.
“Queer” has been claimed by queer people as a self-descriptor since at least 1910. It’s an insult to those historical people (and all the generations of queer historical people who have identified as queer since then) to pretend that the people using it as a slur owned it more than the queer people who used it as a self-descriptor.
Source: George Chauncey, “Gay New York,” page 101
They don’t want us to use queer because they don’t want to be lumped in with anyone who’s not cis gay or cis lesbian. So fine. You don’t like the word queer? You don’t want to be in the “queer” community? Get the fuck out, then. Y’all don’t welcome us in your community anyway, so we’ll just have our own.
And it’ll be queer as fuck.
I fucking love the word queer ❤
The pushback against queer is RECENT.
Look, kids. I’m officially Old. And when my little queer (bisexual, grey-asexual) arse was realising this, I was in HIGH SCHOOL. And you know when that was? This was before AZT use was widespread. HIV was a death sentence. You know who nursed those guys, ran their errands and sat with them as they were dying from AIDS? Well, me, for one (mostly I was just doing grocery shopping but I sat my fair share of deathbed vigils as a young teen) but it was the queer community. That was how we identified. And lesbian women and trans folk and people from ALL KINDS of orientations got together and cared for these people (mostly gay men and trans women, and a lot of sex workers in there).
We were queer. And we were, and still are, fucking angry. Betrayed by our governments, in lots of cases disowned by our families, all we had was each other. And we were queer.
And then later, we had queer studies and queer theory at uni. This is over 20-30 years ago. They do not name university courses after slurs. They named it after OUR IDENTITY.
So you children, who never nursed your dying friends want to come along and declare MY IDENTITY A SLUR?
FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU.
YOU ARE WRONG. YOU ARE AHISTORICAL AND YOU. ARE. WRONG.
Fuck you. Fuck your exclusionary politics. Gay has been used as a slur far more recently than queer. As has lesbian.
You want to police the queer community. You want to gate-keep. You want to exclude people like me, you want to define what a woman is, what genders people can be.
WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER. Get used to it.
Honestly, the way some people act it’s like. . You can’t reclaim slurs, but you can’t create new words without being branded the butt of a joke, so people who don’t feel like outlet labels fit them are supposed to just sit and suffer in silence.
If you don’t want to be called queer then fine, but don’t erase the history of those who used it, who fought for it TO be used as an umbrella term. If you don’t want it applied to you then fine, but don’t say what it should and shouldn’t be used for. If we went off of if things have been used against us as slurs then we wouldn’t have anything to call ourselves.
I’m here, I’m queer, and it took me a damn long time to get used to it and I’m not going back now.
So I’m going to be bitter and old here for a minute.
The absolute refusal to allow anyone to use queer as an umbrella is both novel and regressive (I know, I know). For decades, queer was an accepted and neutral way to concisely refer to a coalition of loosely connected communities and identities. Queer theory, queer film, queer spaces, queer history.
This use came after another few decades of committed work in reclaiming the word from oppressors who flat out stole it from us.
It took a lot of effort to wrestle it back out of their hands, and now I’m expected to just give it over to them because decades of unity and collective action and shared experience don’t matter because a handful of (usually white, almost exclusively american) kids on this godawful website have deicded it’s illegal for me to “force it on others” and that I should instead just let them for LGBT or gay or whatever else on me.
Like, fuck off?
Fuck off.
I am going to refer to my community in the way that I have been doing for an entire lifetime. Not just my specific identity, which is queer as fuck, but the whole fucking shebang.
And I will not hand the word back over to straight people with a nice little ribbon and a coat of polish and say “here, some kids decided it was cool if I let you stab them with this word so here you go” like
Fucking, why would I ever.
Frankly, and I know how people are going to react to this but, frankly?
I damned well will use queer to refer to my community as well as myself, and anyone who wants to take it away from me can take it over my COLD DEAD QUEER LITTLE FINGERS.
I will not sit by and let antsy, nervous kids who don’t know a damn thing about our history talk down to me about how “well, actually” when they can’t even recognize the fact that trans people were still being policed out of here literally three fucking years ago.
The presumption and the ignorance are staggering.
So yeah.
Queer as in fuck you people in particular.
And, to my followers who are made uncomfortable by this, well. I will regret losing you on some level, but not enough to stop.
I fully intend to use queer as the umbrella term it has been for my entire life. LGBT never did my intersex, pansexual ass any favours anyway.
My point is, I’m not going to be referring to the “LGBT” community at all, anymore. It’s going to be 100% queer here, in a more conscious and consistent way than it has been before. Because, you see, even people who do use queer as an identity unashamedly have gotten into this pattern of being apologetic or conditional about it, with a constant, overbearing tone that even when we do use queer as a community term with have to hedge it and gentle it because it’s so dangerous.
but it’s fuckign not.
We spent decades pulling the danger out of it.
And ‘m not going to let it sneak back in.
Every time someone says “queer is a slur, you shouldn’t use it” I feel like they’re trying to fucking gaslight me. Like, I was there when it got reclaimed. I read “Queer Science”, I saw the “Queer Studies Departments” in college and the majors in Queer Theory. Kids do not get to invalidate my life out of ignorance. And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with, because how would the kids who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about know to invalidate that word?
You go. Reclaim that reclamation. I’ll probably use LGBT+ and queer interchangeably, like I always have, and if some kid tries to lecture my 47-year-old ass on the matter I’m just going to have to look at them over my imaginary librarian glasses and tell them “no. you’re wrong. Go back to school, kid, you need to remember you’re sharing the world with adults and there is a consensual reality you have entered into. You don’t get to make it up from scratch any more than I did.”
And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with
Because it’s absolutely surreal to see someone who is fifteen years old speak as if queer’s been used to constantly attack and smear and belittle and insult them, when they’re about twenty years too late, at the very least, to have gone through that as a teenager. I’ve seen it happen so many times, with so many teenagers on here, that it reads honestly like a script – like a Discourse Point someone’s taught them that they need to trot out as an argument, always and forever, amen. I made this connection over a year ago, when the screaming against ‘queer’ started in earnest on here and thought about it more in-depth when a number of very young activists both here and on Twitter told me unironically and with a straight face that they took all of their discourse points from the likes of leftbians and other exclusionists, starting with your garden-variety aphobes and biphobes and ending with outright radfems / TWERFs / SWERFs.
That was the lightbulb moment for me. Question:
what group has managed to spread their posts and their ideas far and wide on Tumblr, because people reblog without checking the source or reading between the lines?
and what group has had a vicious ideological axe to grind against ‘queer’ as both a self-descriptor and an umbrella-term for decades now?
The answer to both is radfems. I was there ten years ago when they were absolutely driving themselves into a frothing lather over the fact that a very large number of LGBTQIAP+ youth were describing ourselves and our communities as queer uncontroversially – seriously, this was so common on the English-speaking queer youth forums I used to frequent back then that no one batted an eyelash, specifically because the work of reclamation had already been done for decades and if, asked, the vast majority of people answered that they preferred queer because it was INCLUSIVE (which is and has always been the kryptonite for groups of people whose ideas revolved around gatekeeping the community and their precious selves being the arbiters of who gets in and who stays out), Radfems quickly realized that they weren’t going to be able to demonize the word in the eyes of Gen Xers or people at the older end of the Gen Y generation in the community, because we’d either contributed to the work of reclamation or spent our whole fucking lives in communities where queer was a badge of pride.
So, in what is honestly an absolutely brilliant move and which I’d be almost tempted to admire, if I didn’t want to spit everyone involved right between the eyes, radfems and other exclusionists targeted much younger LGBTQIAP+ people, leapfrogging a generation. Tumblr, in this sense, has been absolutely vital, both in giving them access to very young people who were just discovering themselves and whose knowledge of community history was nonexistent and in being built in such a way that radfems could make their posts go viral and attract tens of thousands of reblogs, if not more, if they knew to word them in just the right way (I’ve lost count of the number of what, at a shallow glance, seem like very decent PSAs on consent, but that at a closer reading were actually anti-BDSM screeds, easy to see for anyone who knows the dogwhistles).
If radfems have managed to mire this place in their ideas intensely enough that they’ve turned their anti-kink crusade into an omnipresent thing in certain progressive communities on Tumblr, it’s not impossible to make the logical leap that they’ve managed to do so with their decades-long anti-queer crusade as well.
I’d laugh and clap at the ingeniousness of it all, if it didn’t involve obliterating decades of community history, solidarity and reclamation efforts.
Please note this. Regardless of how you personally feel about the word, this backlash against it happened much more recently than many people seem to think. And it’s worth pointing out who benefits from the backlash, and it sure as hell isn’t the people who gave decades of their lives to make the word a sign of inclusivity and acceptance.
There’s a spanish “my name is cow” poem translation floating around, but its a word for word translation, without the same rhyme and meter so i.. fixed it
Yo soy vaca
en la noche,
cuando el sol
es ausente
y los hombres
se acuestan-
Yo trasnocho
lamo el pan.
(literally: I am cow/ in the night/ when the sun/ is absent/ and the men/ go to bed/ i stay up late/ i lik the bread)
My name is Calfe & Im too young to know yet what do with my Toung!
So till my Mom say “Dont Do That!” Ill stick it out And lik this cat.
My little Calfe, Im proud of yu– yur living like the Big Cows do. Yur doing just what Mom have said– for yu lik cat, and cat
lik bred.
Bad meme execution. 0/5 stars.
These poems are supposed to be imitative of 17th/18th century middle English poetry (pre-dating dictionaries and formalized spelling conventions) not early 2000s chatspeak, not babytalk.
These poems are also supposed to be in iambic diameter, giving them a pleasing songlike rhythm. The above has inconsistent syllabic structure from line to line.
These attributes are clearly illustrated in the prime:
So tired of people on this website and their flagrant disregard for syllabic structure.
No respect for the craft.
1. first of all, how dare you. i would never, N E V E R, put forth a cow poem with inconsistent syllabic structure. these may not be my finest work, but the iambic dimeter is IMPECCABLE. check my scansion again and come back to me. I guess “know what do yet” is not ideal, but it falls within the constraints of the form. i’m genuinely appalled by this. i have SEEN inconsistent scansion in this meme, i do NOT approve of it and i have NOT done it. how dare you. HOW DAR EYOU!!!
Secondly: it is not absurd to suppose that the linguistic constraints of a Cow Poem would depend on the figure to whom Cow speaks. In the original (and perfect) “i lik the bred,” the narrative cow, like a Chaucerian non-characterized narrator, directs her speech to an imagined and unspecific listener; not to “the men,” who are characters within the poem, but to some more general audience. (See the Canterbury Tales prologue for an example of this voice in action.)
Later, poem_for_your_sprog has Cow address contemporaries like “dog.” You will notice that the voice of Cow varies slightly, in speaking to Dog, from her voice in the original “I lik the bred.” WHY, then, can we not extrapolate that Calfe – who is, after all, a narrator of limited capacity, being only a Baby Cow with a Baby Cow’s simplicity – would have its own variant voice? And why, too, would Cow not speak differently to her own Calfe than she does to an animal peer, or to reverent imaginary auditors? These are experiments within an emerging form – flawed experiments, certainly, but not mistakes ipso facto. Again: HOW DARE YOU!!!!!!!!
my name is Cow, and as yu see, its worth yor tiyme to studye me. but if yu dont like what yu red,
take 2 deep breths
and lik the bred.
I am willing to concede on second reading that the syllabic structure is passable, and in that regard I’ve wrongly impugned the integrity of your work, however I maintain that your Frankenstinian amalgam of fake middle English with fake modern American baby talk is thoroughly unconvincing as either middle English or as modern American baby talk.
It’s an aesthetic failure, IMH(inh)O*
You’ve created the linguistic equivalent of a spork — vitiating two perfectly serviceable tools by attempting to fuse them.
Writing ‘till mothere says / do not do that,’ would have conveyed roughly the same idea without feeling quite so awkwardly anachronistic.
My name is Rave, and I can see you’re bent on pa- tronizing me! ”Anachronistic” frankly seems a misplaced word to use of memes. But since you want to start that fight, let’s step outside and do this right.
Dude: if you want to not get wrecked you’d better get your facts correct.
Like, “Mothere,” friend, is not a word that Geoffrey Chau- cer ever heard.*
no one who speaks 2+ languages ever “randomly” switches in the middle of a sentence. like that just…….. doesn’t happen?
the only times people will get confused and mix them up is when:
a) they’re in an environment where they have to alternate between speaking two languages often/quickly, and the brain can’t keep up and messes up.
b) they’ve been in an environment where they have to speak/hear one language for a long time, and when they change settings it takes them a moment to not instinctively go for the other language.
c) they’re hearing one language (music, radio, background chatter) and trying to speak another
interrupting themselves in the middle of a conversation because they can only remember the word they wanna say in another language
having the perfect idiom/expression for a situation but it doesn’t translate as well
having the perfect word for a situation but it doesn’t even fucking exist in that language
if ur character is out in public with their family, i can guarantee u that they’ll talk shit about people around them in their native tongue
calling their significant others pet names is a conscious choice. it doesn’t just “slip up”. it may come naturally with time, but saying a word in another language is something you like… immediately notice
swearing is complicated and i’m not getting into it rn
anyone who has ever picked up another language has been pissed at specific vowels and pronunciations and this is the gospel truth
[forgets a word] [attempts to explicitely describe the thing they’re trying to say] [forgets a word while trying to explain themselves] “oh jesus christ nevermind”
will know how to speak a language but not know any of the mathematical/scientific/biological terms because they went to school in a different language and no one learns, like, algebra in a second language unless they studied in multiple languages.
[knows a word but they’ve only ever read it and they have no idea how it’s pronounced]
there’s probably more stuff that i’m forgetting rn but that’s like, the main bits. thank u for ur time
If I’m tired I might slip an accidental word of Russian in a sentence of otherwise sensible English. This is followed by an immediate moment of wait wtf was that sentence right why does it seem funny why are people looking at me funny. It may take a minute to figure out what I did. Most listeners, also, will generally not quite realise that wasn’t English, and will be wondering what the heck word was that. Unless they also know the other language, in which case they understood you regardless and are laughing at you.
This also tends to happen to me when I’ve been reading in Russian or watching movies or speaking to someone in Russian. But not always. Sometimes you are just that damn tired. The Russian word is usually a well-used, familiar one, so you can get stuff like ‘put on the чайник [kettle]’. Or it can surreptitiously replace a verb or descriptor.
Steel Phoenix Studios 
