I don’t want to detract from that post, but like- people not learning queer history is genuinely the source of so many of our problems in the queer community today.
It’s why people don’t understand the roots of the word “queer” in the first place, or why it’s important to so many people
It’s why people think “gay” is some apolitical neutral term with zero negative connotations, ever, for anyone
It’s why people actively feed into lesbian separatism, political lesbianism, and TERF movements without even knowing it
It’s why people think “LGBT” is some True Name that has never been changed, challenged, nor shaped over the years to better represent the community
It’s why people feed “who can reclaim which slurs” discourse without giving living human beings older than 25 any real consideration
It’s why people straight-up don’t know what the “drop the T” campaign was/is, or understand the troubled history between the trans community and the rest of the queer community
It’s why people don’t understand what “trans” used to mean, or how that meaning has changed over the years, or why
It’s why people don’t understand the differences between queer communities and identities by country, or often how they’re complicated by race
It’s why people don’t understand what “butch” and “femme” actually mean, the many definitions they can have, or how those labels have intersected across communities for decades now
It’s why people don’t understand the differences between the transfemme and transmascs communitys’ histories, or the differences in struggles they have- and then feed into those struggles without even realizing it
It’s why people straight-up recycle old homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, uncritically and unironically, as if they’ve discovered cool some new bigbrain hot take for the “super smart” gay kids
It’s why people treat these complicated, contradictory-sounding, or lesser-known identities like “trendy new ways to claim you’re oppressed”- without understanding the history behind those labels, and those communities, and that they’ve been here longer than any of these people have been alive.
Like… yes, we’re moving forward now. Things are changing, and in many ways, it’s for the better! But we seem to forget that most of our community was lost in the 80′s and 90′s, and those folks left a massive, gaping chasm behind.
We don’t have the same easy, communal roots to our history that we used to. And in order to rebuild that, we- the entire community- is going to have to do some work to learn it and teach it and move forward with it in mind.
