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.
I just thought I should bring this to tumblr’s attention. Transgender activists rarely have the opportunity to run for political office, but Morgane Oger just became the official party nominee in a riding in Vancouver, for one of the two large political parties in the province of British Columbia.
To my knowledge a transgender person has never successfully been elected as a MLA (member of legislative assembly) in Canada.
I’m probably going to get a lot of hate for this, but here goes nothing:
In the midst of everything going on in the world right now, in the midst of all of the amazingly important fights being fought for incredibly essential causes, can we please, please, please take a bit of a step back from the “future is female” rhetoric, or at least take a serious, hard introspective look at the ways it’s incredibly binary and gender essentialist (and often cyclically misogynist) itself?
It absolutely crushes me that I feel like I’ve had an incredibly hard time participating in recent vital social conversations, but every time I see rhetoric used like “if only girls ruled the world, we would already have world peace,” I can’t help but recoil a bit. If by “the future is female,” you mean that you’re campaigning for a world where we don’t need to even have conversations anymore about equal rights regardless of gender, I am with you more than I can express, and please keep on fighting, and I’ll keep on fighting right beside you even harder. But so often, that doesn’t seem like what’s meant by “the future is female,” or at least it’s not how it’s coming across, always.
“If girls ruled the world, we would already have world peace” is not feminism, full stop. End of debate.
It’s Ryan-Gosling-feminism-lite, where women are special snowflake beings of pure virginal light who no man could ever hope to hold a candle to the moral piety of. It’s a slippery slope to the view that gender roles are essential and innate, so that men can hold doors open for women and always pay the bill at the restaurant out of chauvinistic chivalry. It’s a slippery slope to propping up the white, middle-class, straight, Christian, enforced-picket-fence-child-rearing-nuclear-family-unit kyriarchy just as hard on our side as on theirs.
It’s more of the same “girls girls girls are just the bestest and so soft and sweet and wonderful and made of sunshine and flowers and rainbows and unicorn sparkles and hair braiding while giggling drunkenly in a bathroom at a party” that turns all possible relationships between women into bestie BFF friendship bracelet making therapy sessions, which is especially erasive of the queer female experience, and more broadly, female sexuality, and more broadly even than that, female productive and creative energy in general, and its ability to exist outside of the presence of a man. It’s horrifically TERF-y and makes trans boys and other nonbinary individuals (including all the ones out there in red-state middle America who will never have the words and safe space to say that out loud or to identify that that’s what the unease inside them is) internalize a shit ton of self-hatred that maybe their identity is only a product of their internalized misogyny. It’s horrifically white feminist, see: the white female election vote debacle.
It’s incredibly erasive of the complexity of women as, you know.
People.
Not pure virginal white light vessels or soft unicorn rainbow sparkle hair-braiders or moon children witches with a special connection to mother earth or sassy bad bitches doing it for the sisterhood or whatever other ways we as feminists make ourselves into one dimensional stereotypes all on our own.
Fuck that noise.
Women are humans.
Listen: I’ve unfortunately known a lot of shitty, abusive, toxic people in my life. And a great deal of them were women, since as full and proper humans and not emblems of pure middle-school-BFF white light, women have the capacity inside them to be terrible, or wonderful, or terrible and wonderful all at once. And while our society at large so often excuses terrible men for heinous acts, which is the entire point of so many conversations happening right now, our society also so often pretends that – in ways that all stem back to misogyny just the same – equally terrible women just don’t exist full stop.
And that lets terrible women slip under the radar and hide under the sheepskin of the patriarchy. That allows us, in liberal social justice conversation circles, to decry the actions of a violent abusive man as an emblem of everything that’s wrong with the patriarchy, but too often, when a woman (especially a white, able-bodied, gender-presentation-conforming, physically attractive one) takes equally violent actions, we prop it up as the “sisterhood” finally getting “karmic justice” on the patriarchy, which isn’t any better than female rapists and pedophiles being tongue-tutted at with a wink by grown men as “naughty naughty girls” their fourteen-year-old libidos wish they had as a high school teacher. That allows – in something I’ve personally experienced in my life, and I know I can’t be the only one – for judicial and law enforcement officials, social workers and children’s services employees, and so many others in positions of authority across the country to dismiss cases of female-on-female violence as something that can surely be hugged out over a good talk and a cup of tea.
That so often allows us to not recognize, not even know how to begin to recognize, abusive behavior when it comes from a source with a body our society genders as female. Especially when that abuse is being directed at another person with a body recognized as female, especially if that abuse isn’t the kind we societally gender as masculine (physical force, neglect, aggression) but is the kind we gender as feminine (emotional and psychological abuse, hypersurveillance, gaslighting). Especially if that relationship isn’t a sexual one where someone wears the lip gloss and someone has the buzz cut. Especially when that relationship is a parent/child(-of any gender) one where the “unending purity and graciousness of a mother’s love” allows unfathomable numbers of women to abuse children and get away with it completely unrecognized.
If conceptually reclaiming your womanhood (or, same at you, dude feminists, reclaiming the womanhood of people you love) in some way is important to you and your identity, that’s incredible, and I support you wholeheartedly with whatever you need to do for that. And it should go without stating that I’m 1000% onboard and then some with dismantling the garbage of the patriarchy that got us here to the hot mess that is 2017. And women’s marches and declarations of feminist identity and all are so unbelievably, unbearably important right now, in the face of so many civil rights dangers, and please don’t misinterpret that I’m advocating against them somehow.
But before you tangle up your “girls run the world” rhetoric into fighting this fight we’re right now, please stop and consider all the people who have been abused by terrible women, too. Please stop to consider what your strong independent white feminism is doing to women of color, queer women, the trans/nonbinary community, victims of female abusers, and others whose experiences are too intersectional to conform with a single idea of reclamative womanhood.
If women (exclusively, hierarchically, systematically, in isolation) ran the world, we wouldn’t have world peace – we’d probably be in just as much of a mess, albeit maybe in different ways, than we are right now, because people are people are people, full stop, end of debate.
Let’s all run the world together, please? That’s the only way it’s going to get any better.
i can’t believe i got to see a scene on tv where two conventionally attractive people were about to have a Typical TV Make Out session until the guy stopped and said “sorry, i don’t want sex. i never have.” like that feels amazing for so many ace kids who always felt like they were broken or weird for not behaving the way that they’ve seen on TV. im so so so happy
I haven’t been using tumblr much recently, but for those who do follow and haven’t read it on other social media, I am now working as a measurer for a Hong Kong tailor and acting as a tailoring agent, specifically helping LGBT+ people and women in the UK (London) who have difficulty getting clothes that fit them.
Right now I am working pro bono, and since I am not taking any profit (and therefore don’t need to factor in tax), this is an opportunity to get MTM clothing at much cheaper than possible otherwise (since I don’t charge anything but have access to industry prices).
Those interested, shirts are between 20-50 pounds, suits are anywhere from 100-400 pounds, depending on tailor and material. Doesn’t include shipping, alterations, and other logistics stuff like fit guarantee and so on.
Here are some photos of clothes I’ve gotten from the HK tailors. Not all of the mare from the tailors I will be using, and it took quite a few fittings and commissions to get the fit how I wanted it, but should give some indication as to what can be done.
Anyway if you or anyone you know might be interested shoot me a message and I’ll be happy to answer any questions. I’m also happy to help as a stylist/consultant in general for dressing in menswear and buying suits, alterations, and so on, which might not be readily available.
I’m happy to give general advice and potentially help those overseas to get shirts or even suits made, so don’t hesitate to contact me if you don’t live in the UK/London either, but I will have to make it clear that without a fitting with someone who is experienced, it’d be more difficult to get a suit/jacket that fits very well.
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.
Coming soon:MyTransHealth, an app connecting trans people to knowledgeable, reliable and affordable healthcare providers.
19% of trans people have been refused healthcare because of their gender identity. 50% of trans people have had to teach their doctors about trans-related medical care. 28% of trans people have been harassed in medical settings. This app is desperately needed. Follow them at mytranshealth.
I AM CRYING HOLY SHIT. This is so important. You know I’m serious because I am actually using these things called capitalization and punctuation. You guys. Please. Please boost the hell out of this. It means so much.
*SLAMS THE SHIT OUT OF THE REBLOG BUTTON*
omg pls make this international / not just US-centric!
We won’t rest until every trans person on the planet has access to safe, affordable, and reliable health care.
This used to be prominent slang within the community, and I don’t hear it much any more, at least not in my corner of the world. I remember times in which I was approached in public and someone asked, “are you in the family?” And proceeded to ask me about the local gay scene when I said yes
My coworker just reminded me of this. He’s an older gay man that is often afraid to be himself because of homophobia, but we’re getting close so he’s pretty open around me, as a fellow “member of the family”. Another gay guy we work with did something pretty flamboyant, so my coworker looked at me and said, “that’s family”
I mean I just love it it was definitely a term used during a time when homophobia was pretty severe, but you were safe around your “family” you could be yourself with family
Plus can you imagine how much “”“family values”“” conservatives would lose their minds it’s a win win
Yeah! This was used by the gaggle of older queer folk I hung out with in Montgomery, AL back in the day. Reminds me of better times… Which is hilarious because they weren’t actually better it was just we huddled together in abject terror of the world instead of knifing everyone who was a slightly different flavor of queer like we do these days lol
Oh my goodness, is this old enough that people don’t remember it anymore? It was definitely the vogue term when I was coming up as a wee baby queer. It doesn’t work in all contexts, but I was sure it was still in use in places, at least.
(It did used to cause some confusion. I asked a gay friend once if someone was a family member and they thought I meant also-gay rather than what I actually meant which was ‘Is he related to you’?“ lmao)
Steel Phoenix Studios 