So the topic of “queer as a slur” came up in a fb conversation and my answer pretty much distilled out a lot of things that Tumblr has been saying for a while on the subject, as well as my personal experience.
See, here’s the thing. I marched in the streets using the word Queer as a word of power. “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” We worked hard to reclaim that word and it’s been publicly reclaimed longer than the word “gay” has, tbh. Gay was being used as an insult within the last decade. We had to do a coordinated public service campaign to get people to stop using it to mean “bad”.
Queer studies have been a thing for decades. Academics study “Queer theory”. It IS the one word we have that is inclusive, and the only reason people keep editing themselves out of it is because of a concentrated campaign from trans exclusionists, which got picked up by biphobes and aphobes and everyone who is not comfortable with the umbrella being inclusive.
This is an act of infiltration and subversion from conservative elements. It’s a common tactic for conservatives and right wingers to send people into groups and twist the message to divide the group. Radical feminists got in bed with the religious right on the subject of sex work, and used the inherent isolationist tendencies of the gay and lesbian community to make it sound like there are “limited resources” which “shouldn’t be divided among too many people”… which is completely the opposite of the truth, which is that the larger the umbrella, the more people working together, the more collective power people have to change things to be better for everyone.
It hurts NOTHING to be loving and open and accepting of everyone who says, “I’m not straight, and I’m on your side.”
We don’t get to second-guess people’s identities. We don’t. That’s sacred. And people who reject “queer” are doing just that.
I identify as queer. Every time someone says “q-slur” or shies away from saying the name of my identity, they’re giving MY WORD back to the assholes.
So I flat out don’t trust people who say “q-slur” or act like my identity is a bad word. People who do that are stating loud and clear that they don’t value me, don’t see me as a person, and that my identity, the word that means the most about who I am, is “bad” to them.
It makes me think that people who use that word are listening too much to bigots and not enough to the most marginalized people in this ridiculous attempt at community.
I marched in the street for my word. People DIED for my word. Fuck yeah, it was a slur. But it’s not when I use it. It’s not when people use it as a positive identifier. Because we fucking reclaimed it.
You know what else was a slur? Gay. Lesbian. Trans. Even bisexual has been used to mock people. We don’t have many words that weren’t slurs, because what makes a word a slur is not the word itself, but how it is used.
People use “woman” as a slur, when they speak the word like a sledgehammer. But there is nothing inherently derogatory about the word.
When I say “Queer” I’m saying “You’re welcome here. The storm is scary out here, but my umbrella is big and we accept you. We welcome you. We CHERISH you.”
When someone refuses my word? They say the umbrella is not for me, and I do not accept that.
It’s 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, and the sewing room at Chelsea’s High
School of Fashion Industries is buzzing. Students frantically stitch
pearls onto gowns, fix frayed seams and puzzle over why the garment on
the dress form doesn’t quite match their sketch. At one point, Rafa
Sultana — a petite 12th-grader in a cream brocade tunic — goes over to
her blue two-piece ensemble and lops off a good 6 inches from the hem.
“I wanted to put a little cape on the back or the side, but I didn’t
have enough fabric,” says Sultana. “We’ll see how it turns out.”
Anti-Prom started in 2004 as a free event for kids who felt they
didn’t fit in at, or couldn’t afford, their own prom. Participants don’t
need a date, LGBTQ youth can bring their partners and creative dress
and costumes are welcome. In 2011, the library asked HSFI students to
harness the skills they learned in their classes and design wild,
fantastical outfits for the event, to be worn by themselves or by their
friends. In the years since, the event has evolved into a huge party,
with an annual runway show, giveaways and dancing. Some 350 students
from all over the five boroughs attend.
“If we wanna talk about biology like using tha as a defense for being transphobic is actually a thing. Let’s look at something. I actually wrote a paper on trans athletes in sports and was direct to this article by my professor when i started writing it. But people don’t click on links that prove them wrong so here’s some excerpts:
“The public is by now used to the idea that sex is biological while gender is a social construct. But where in our biology does sex reside: in our genes, in our genitals, in our hormones? And is it even possible to separate biological sex from the environmental influence of gender?“
““It is very difficult to come up with an absolute line,” says Arthur Arnold, distinguished professor of integrative biology and physiology at the University of California Los Angeles“
“They found that other genetically male (XY) women had a double dose of a gene on the X chromosome, DAX1, that antagonizes male development, even if SRY is working. Then they found WNT4, another “anti-male” gene on the X chromosome that, if over-expressed, overwhelms the “pro-male” SRY. Rather than a singular bully that “imposed” masculinity, sex differentiation began to look more like a negotiation.“
“But the coroner actually found that Walsh’s cells were mismatched: some carried XY chromosomes, and some carried chromosomes with one X,“
“Walsh had mixed chromosomes, mixed internal sex organs and mixed external genitalia. As for her gender identity, the coroner, Samuel Gerber, offered his own assessment. “Socially, culturally and legally, Stella Walsh was accepted as a female for 69 years. She lived and died a female.”
“Martinez-Patino has androgen insensitivity syndrome. Her chromosomal sex is XY and she has male internal sex organs, but a genetic mutation means her androgen receptors don’t work….She developed as a typical female, and she and her family never doubted her gender..”
“But no study has ever shown that performance — say, finishing times in a race — correlates to athletes’ levels of testosterone. Testosterone is a complicated, dynamic substance: finishing a marathon causes it to plummet in men, while positive feedback from a coach can cause it to shoot up.“
“In one study of nearly 700 Olympians participating in 15 sports, 13.7 per cent of women had natural testosterone levels above the typical female range, 4.7 per cent were within the male range, and 16.5 per cent of men had levels below the typical male range…if hyperandrogenic women are overrepresented in elite sports, they themselves are still vastly outranked by female athletes who are winning with typical hormones.”
“there is little evidence that synthetic or “exogenous” testosterone behaves the same way as natural or “endogenous” testosterone“
I highly suggest reading the whole article but there’s your “biological sexes” analyzed by actual professionals who have studied this stuff. Because saying trans women have an unfair advantage is inherently transphobic. I don’t care what your reasoning is. If you see it as outsiders invading womens spaces you are transphobic.
Trans women are women! i know we say it a lot now but instead of wondering how they’r harming women, instead of arguing that it’s sexist to support trans women in womens sports, consider that they’re just fucking women who want to live their lives and have fulfilling careers. Instead of going “hmm they have an unfair advantage based on the fact i didn’t actually research this” consider that they are WOMEN just as woman as someone who identifies that way and has a uterus. It’s not unfair because they belong just like everyone else. If they are successful then they’re a successful female athlete done and done. end of story.
Cis women, there’s a lot of shit in the world out to get you, i feel that, but trans women are NOT one of them.
I’m not ace myself, so I’m coming at the whole acephobia thing from an outsider’s perspective, and as such, it’s not my place to speak to the experience of those on the receiving end of it.
However, as a bisexual dude, I can observe that many of the arguments that are employed to establish that ace folks have no place in the queer community are strikingly similar – indeed, at times practically word-for-word identical – to the arguments that were for many years (and in some circles still are) employed to establish that bisexual folks have no place in the queer community.
It’s enough to make a guy suspicious on general principle, you know?
I’ve gotten a few messages asking for (well, in some cases more “demanding”) elaboration, so: here are a few of the primary areas in which I’ve observed that arguments against bi inclusion and arguments against ace inclusion tend to exhibit significant overlap. There may well be others – these are simply the ones I’ve run into most frequently.
The Passing Argument
It has been argued that bisexual folks don’t have any grounds to complain about discrimination and violence suffered in relation to their orientation, because a bisexual person is able to pass as straight simply by choosing partners of the appropriate gender. Therefore, any discrimination and violence that a bisexual person does experience must be construed as voluntarily undertaken, since they could have passed, and freely chose not to.
This argument is similarly applied to ace folks via the assertion that being ace poses no particular barrier to seeking a partner of a socially acceptable gender, so any failure to do so must likewise be construed as voluntary.
The Performativity Argument
It has been argued that bisexual folks ought to be excluded from queer communities because sexual orientation is purely performative; i.e., being gay is defined in terms of currently having a sexual partner of the same gender. A bisexual person who has a partner of a different gender is functionally indistinguishable from a straight person, and must therefore be regarded as straight. Conversely, a bisexual person whose current partner is of the same gender must nonetheless be regarded with suspicion, because they could “turn straight” at any time simply by leaving that partner.
This argument is similarly applied to ace folks via the assertion that their orientation has no discernible performative component; an ace person is functionally indistinguishable from a straight person who simply isn’t involved in a sexual relationship at that particular moment, so ace folks must therefore be regarded as straight by default.
(An astute reader may notice that the passing argument dovetails neatly into the performativity argument: those who choose not to seek partners of a socially acceptable gender may be dismissed because any violence and discrimination they experience is a consequence of their voluntary failure to pass, while those who do seek such partners are performatively straight and therefore to be shunned. It’s a neat little system.)
The Mistaken Identity Argument
It has been argued that, while bisexual folks may suffer discrimination and physical and sexual violence, they’re not targeted by such acts because they’re bisexual. Any discrimination and violence a bisexual person suffers in relation to their orientation is suffered because they were mistaken for a gay person. Any effort on their part to discuss such experiences is therefore to be regarded as appropriative, in spite of the fact that they personally experienced it. In short, a bisexual person’s own experience of violence and discrimination doesn’t truly “belong” to them: it “belongs” to the purely hypothetical gay person their persecutors allegedly mistook them for.
This argument is applied to ace folks practically verbatim – no particular adaptation is necessary.
I’ll add The Contribution Argument, which involves one of these gatekeeping behaviors:
1) rewriting history to erase bisexual and asexual contributions to political LGBTQ rights movements, and then claiming that bisexuals and asexuals have never done anything for the community at large
2) arguing that modernday bisexuals and asexuals should be excluded from current political movements because our goals are distinct from, or even contradictory to the goals of the LGBTQ rights movement at large
3) interpreting any attempt on the part of bi/asexuals to make safe spaces for ourselves within the community as an attack on LG safe spaces, generally by reframing bi/ace pride as homo/lesbophobia, or by dismissing accusations of bi/acephobia as inherently homo/lesbophobic
In other words, arguing that bisexuals and asexuals, rather than being contributing members of the community, are parasites on the community, leeching from, and undermining the community and its goals.
The Contribution Argument is an interesting one because it goes way beyond popular biphobia.
It’s often been asserted that bisexual folks ought to be excluded from the LG community because that community is specifically for folks who experience homophobia, and bisexual folks don’t experience homophobia, save by misidentification. (See the Mistaken Identity Argument, above.)
However, anybody who’s over the age of 30 can tell you that the positioning of the experience of homophobia as the community’s great unifier is, itself, a relatively novel development.
Up until quite recently (and by “recently” I mean as recently as the mid 1980s), even lesbians were routinely characterised by the leaders of mainstream gay rights activism as unwelcome parasites, riding on the movement’s coattails and contributing nothing in return.
Not only is identifying the experience of homophobia – defined narrowly as discrimination against those who are actively involved in sexual relationships with persons of the same gender – as the sole qualifier for inclusion a totally arbitrary place to draw the line, it’s baldly ahistorical.
Historically, a great many folks who do experience this type of homophobia have routinely been left out in the cold by mainstream activism for gender and sexual minorities – and the Contribution Argument, as you’ve outlined it here, is one of the primary tools that’s been used to justify that exclusion.
this post is literally just “why won’t those big meanie gays let asexuals in their club??? :(” written in the form of a jargon-filled essay for a philosophy class
I love your wording; because that’s precisely it. Its the “gay club.” As in, its the same fuckers who wanted us bi people to be excluded. It’s the same people who argued that we should drop the “T” to focus on the “gay movement.”
Newsflash: no one wants an invitation to that party. No one is “invading.” No one wants to be included in your “gay club.”
What we want is shits like you to quit perpetuating intra community bigotry and hatred in the LGBT+; because the only ones treating it like a “club” are those of you that check the “queer credentials” of everyone looking for a safe space and stamp their hands with “gay enough I guess” to let us pass through the gates. (Not that we get the same treatment as the ~VIP cis gays~ anyway.)
Anyway, nice to know that you people are still ignoring when bi ppl speak and repurpose that biphobia as ace hatred in the same breath :)))))) kinda :))))))) reinforces the points above :))))))))))
Terfs: wombyn are their ovaries!!! Ovaries make a wombybybynnn. Accept that u are a womynbdgnn you have ovaries !!!!
Me, a trans man on the danger list for ovarian cancer and is going to get them removed in the distant or near future:
not for long
You’re still female whether you have ovaries or not lmao
You heard it here first folks!! Females are females regardless of whether or not they have ovaries, so trans women are women regardless of their lack them. Well said 🙂
You played yourself like a damn fiddle, fool
i love watching terfs run circles around their own logic:
“you need ovaries to be a wombyn!!!”
transman: guess who got that shit removed I’m a Real Boy™ now
“nO not like that you still have a uterus that makes you female!!!”
ciswoman who’s had a complete hysterectomy: guess i’m not a woman then
“tHAT”S NOT WHAT I MEANT if you have a vagina/vulva you’re female!!!”
transwoman who’s had bottom surgery: oooh i’ve got one of those does that mean i’m a Real Girl™ now??”
“NO YOU DON’T HAVE OVARIES OR A UTERUS”
literally everyone except terfs: *squints*
i especially love to person in the notes who brought up needing to have “female muscle/fat distribution patterns” like I have some incredible news for you about exactly what Hormone Replacement Therapy does…
“Straight couples” you see at pride could very well be
bi, pan, ace, aro, or literally any of the other sexualities that aren’t straight
you misgendering a trans, nonbinary, etc. person
friends. They can be friends who are also LGBT. People holding hands or being affectionate in public does not automatically make them romantically or sexually involved
parents or friends showing support by being there for their LGBT children or friends
Steel Phoenix Studios 