The notes on this are… about as bad as you’d expect, in pretty much the way you’d expect, but I want to point something out.
A lot of the people insisting that queer is a slur will also insist, sometimes in the same breath, that to claim a place under the umbrella of queer identity is to self-identify as a “freak,” as “abnormal,” as Bad and Wrong and Other. While at the same time insisting that they are normal, that not being straight does not mean they are not normal.
And like. I only started unpacking this pretty recently myself, so I guess it’s a lot to expect the same of people who seem to be mostly a decade-plus younger, but y’all. please. take a minute. sit with this thought: why do you equate “normal” with “good”?
Because I think that’s a logical fallacy that gets ingrained in most of us, unconsciously, long before we’re old enough to recognize it. We are taught, on a society-wide level, that normal = good. So the corollary to that, which does not even need to be spoken aloud most of the time, must be that not normal = not good.
But “normal” is a perfectly neutral state of being.
To be normal is to be more or less the same as those around you. Statistically average. A member of the majority group. And it is certainly easier to be normal, in most contexts, but there is no actual moral value attached to it. Unless you choose to put it there.
Normal can be confining, for many people. There are a lot more ways to not be normal, and some of them are easy and some of them are hard; but all of them change the way people treat you and the way you move through the world.
And I could throw in the Harrison Bergeron argument here: Olympic gold medalists aren’t normal! Oscar winners aren’t normal! Nobel Prize winners aren’t normal! If we insist that normal is better, we’ll squash exceptional people down to fit in normal-sized boxes!
But that’s not really how the fallacy of normal = good operates, in practice.
The way it actually operates? In a majority-white society, people of color are told they are not normal. In a mostly able-bodied society, disabled people are told they are not normal. In a majority-Christian society, every other faith (or lack thereof ) is told they are not normal. In a society that tells itself that everyone is middle class, people living in poverty are told they are not normal. In a mostly heterosexual society, queer people are told they are not normal.
And because we have all internalized the idea that normal = good, those of us who do not fit in the normal-sized box often feel a great deal of shame. We internalize self-hatred. We feel as though we have been rejected — as if, because “normal” doesn’t fit us, we are misshapen.
But if you learn to treat “normal” as a perfectly neutral state of being, it’s a lot easier to let all of that go.
Maybe that’s why, historically, the queer umbrella has often been a home for people who were already marginalized in other ways. Once you’ve let go of the need to be normal in one area of your life — or if you were never allowed it in the first place — it gets easier to claim, with pride, a title that means I am not normal. It gets easier to say that what you are is something good, in the face of a society that tells us to hate ourselves for it.
Or, I guess, you can get on social media and call people names and insist that you’re not like those other weirdos. You’re normal. So normal. See? You fit in the normal-shaped box-just fine! That means you must be good, right? Because if normal is good, then anything else must be bad. Right?
