so, in honor of pride month: please remember that âqueerâ has been a fully reclaimed, non-slur identity for decades now, and queer studies is a legitimate academic term, and itâs only been in the last decade that TERFs have pushed to reclassify it as a âslurâ starting in online spaces.Â
because âqueerâ is such a broad and flexible term, itâs much harder for bigoted, trans-exclusive, bi-phobic, a-phobic people to interrogate the queer community and try to divide it into who deserves respect and who deserves to be expelled. the queer community is extremely diverse, extremely accepting, and itâs entirely opt-in. no one can say youâre not really queer, because if you say youâre queer, you are.Â
this is extremely frustrating to terfs, who want a very narrow and rigidly policed LGB community (minus the T, A, and Q+, of course), so they have been working to reclassify queer as a slur. they target young isolated girls online, and take advantage of their earnest desire to be helpful and unproblematic, and they get them to repeat âqueer is a slurâ, and itâs incredibly sad and frustrating for us queers to deal with.
lesbian, gay, and queer are all slurs. theyâve all been used to insult us. and theyâre all reclaimed. people that donât want to be called queer donât have to be, but tagging posts with q*slur is an insult to everyone who identifies as queer. breaking into posts where queer people call themselves and each other queer and refer to the queer community of queers who call themselves that to let us know that âqueer is a slurâ is itself bigoted, TERF-aligned behavior.Â
please reblog this post, and accept that queer is a valid term with decades of history and millions of proudly self-identified people. the next time you see someone say âqueer is a slurâ, let them know that phrase is manufactured and propagated by TERFs as an attack on the queer community. weâll all have a much happier pride month if we stand up for each other against the real sources of hatred, rather than letting them get us to chew on each other for another year.Â
A new book explains why you, dear reader, are part of the problem.
Sean Illing:Â The issue here is something you call âpolitical hobbyism,â an approach to politics that has become dominant. Explain what that is.
Eitan Hersh:Â Political hobbyist is a catchall term for the person who spends a lot of time consuming news or signing online petitions or engaging online with people about this or that issue. They mistake this for actual politics, but itâs not because it doesnât contribute to power-building.
Sean Illing:Â Why not?
Eitan Hersh:Â When youâre a hobbyist, youâre learning the wrong information and practicing the wrong skills. You are typically learning about big national news items, and oftentimes itâs just drama. So a hobbyist might learn all the details of the Mueller report and feel thatâs important to know and will spend hours and hours on it.
But then if you asked him how he could get involved on some issues of importance in his local community or in his state, or where the pressure points are in his community to influence government, he has no idea. Heâs just caught up in the national news cycle and heâs not actually improving anything.
The hobbyist is also learning the wrong political skills. Online politics is all about provocation and signaling outrage. But changing peopleâs minds, turning your vote into many votes, requires empathy and face-to-face engagement. Not only are you not doing this online or when watching cable news, youâre learning exactly the wrong skill set.
Sean Illing:Â Why are white, college-educated liberals most likely to engage in political hobbyism?
Eitan Hersh:Â There are a few reasons. College-educated white people are likely to be in a social setting where they feel itâs a civic duty to participate in politics and to stay informed. They might find learning political facts to be intellectually gratifying. At the same time, the status quo for white, college-educated Americans is pretty good. They have good jobs. They arenât being conscripted into military service like past generations.
So as much as they might lament polarization or despise this or that politician, they arenât willing to roll up their sleeves and build political power. Itâs only if you donât need more power than you already have that you could possibly conceive of politics as an at-home leisure activity.
No one is spending more time learning facts and consuming news than college-educated white men. But research on real engagement â volunteering for groups and campaigns â shows itâs overwhelmingly women and disproportionately blacks and Latinos who are doing the real work of politics. Comfort with the status quo among college-educated whites, especially men, seems like the most likely explanation.
As to why this is more of a liberal problem than a conservative one, right now the white college-educated population is much more Democratic than Republican. Of course, thereâs plenty of hobbyism on both sides, but right now this group tends to lean Democratic.
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Sean Illing:Â What do political hobbyists get out of this kind of superficial engagement with politics? Emotional satisfaction? Is it about signaling who we are to other people?
Eitan Hersh:Â Itâs a shortcut to engagement. You get to feel connected to a sense of community and a sense of mission without doing any heavy lifting, which is partly why online engagement is emotion-driven. If you feel angry at something from your couch, you feel somehow connected to it, even if you havenât done anything.
Sean Illing:Â Youâre preaching boots-on-the-ground activism and face-to-face interaction, especially with people on the other side. What do you say to people who are cynical about the possibilities of persuasion, who feel like the chasm is so deep that itâs no longer possible to engage with political opponents?
Eitan Hersh:Â I guess I would say that theyâre wrong. Most of the people you engage with in real life are not at all like the caricatures in your head or online. Most of the people youâll encounter in your neighborhood or in a community group arenât raving Alex Jones followers. In reality, most people simply arenât that invested and donât have deeply held positions, and theyâre open to persuasion if youâre open to being kind to them.
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Sean Illing:Â The right seems to understand power better than the left, or perhaps thereâs something about the nature of conservatism that lends itself to the sort of politics youâre advocating.
Eitan Hersh:Â I think youâre onto something there. A bottom-up approach to political change that focuses on the local stuff or the local institutions, like churches or gun clubs, is just more common on the right. We used to think more about grassroots organizing focused on unions, for example, but unions have collapsed while churches have gotten disproportionately Republican.
Again, some of the key demographics of the left, like college-educated white people, donât attend any religious services at the same rate of people on the right, and so thereâs less community engagement. And some of the paramount issues for the left, like race or climate change, feel like non-local problems, and that itself is a deterrent.
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Sean Illing:Â Whatâs your advice for people who want to get involved and help build political power?
Eitan Hersh:Â I think they get started by building a cell of friends to do it with them locally, and they should be thinking about how they can dedicate at least one night a week to this, or a certain number of hours. The mindset is not âHow can I influence the next election?â The mindset has to be âIâm entitled to my own vote, but how many more can I influence?â
I profile lots of people in the book who are taking this kind of approach and accomplishing amazing things. Theyâre showing that if you can get 100 or 200 or 1,000 people to share your values and to cast a ballot or show up to an advocacy meeting, you really can make a huge difference.
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