Here’s the thing. I’ve been carefully watching the recent upswing in ‘queer is a violent slur!’ rhetoric among young activits and I’ve noticed a few things in regard to it.
It’s recent (we’re talking just a few years old here – around twelve-thirteen years ago, when I first started exploring my Not-Straightness online and began figuring myself out, people in the large, popular LGBTQIAP+ Internet groups I’d frequent would overwhelmingly use ‘queer’ as an umbrella term / self-identify as queer and it was uncontroversial and accepted).
It started its propagation on Tumblr. How deeply it’s penetrated into real-life communities, I can’t really say, but the place where it began to spread online like a wildfire among young activists is Tumblr. This will be relevant shortly.
It’s heavily based on a lack of knowledge and refusal to accept community history, with detractors often denying the widespread reclamation of the term/denying the lived experiences of the people who reclaimed the term.
Yes, there is a generational gap and there’s something very interesting about it. Many detractors are LGBTQIAP+ teenagers, starting at thirteen (the minimum cutoff age for being a Tumblr user, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there are even younger people involved in this who are lying about their age). This is in direct opposition to every instance of controversy around the term over the last thirty years or so, when it was much older members of the community who had understandable issues with it / didn’t wish to reclaim it because of how it had been weaponized against them so often.
Among both the teenagers and the older people who engage in this rhetoric I’ve also noted blogs whose owners describe themselves as ‘radical feminists’, enough of them for the overlap to be noticeable. Again, keep this in mind for relevancy.
There are other overlaps to take note of. There’s an enormous overlap between the ‘queer is a violent slur!’ crowd and the ‘cishet aces aren’t LGBT’ lot. Controlling access to the community via gatekeeping goes hand-in-hand with policing the community’s language. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a deep wellspring of biphobia, panphobia and transphobia underneath the blatant aphobia that many of the people so vehemently against ‘queer’ also engage in.
Something that’s been repeatedly discussed by @vaspider and @wetwareproblem is the fact that the attack on ‘queer’ as an umbrella term means specifically that a term predominantly used by bi/pan/non-binary/genderqueer/intersex people is targeted, as opposed to any other. This ties in to the fact that far too many of the most vocal attackers identity as cis gays or lesbians. The fact that a term most often used by marginalized sections of the community is being targeted for elimination by people who have been repeatedly centered in everything from discussions and official history to activism and resources should set some massive warning flags waving.
Looking at all of this, I have a very dark suspicion. What conclusion can you draw when you see a very recent social phenomenon, popping up in a very specific place, with its rank-and-file made up of young, nominally well-meaning but generally inexperienced and uneducated activists, who have shown that they are ready to believe any claims if they come from a source they consider trustworthy? Add in the involvement of radical feminists, among whom panphobia, transphobia, hostility toward nonbinary people and the term ‘queer’ have been noted time and time again and the picture is a horrifying one.
Here it is: I suspect the backlash against ‘queer’ as an umbrella term and even a self-identifier was engineered and is currently spearheaded by a small and very specific group of people, who took advantage of the fact that Tumblr gave them everything they could have ever needed.
unfettered access to very young, inexperienced LGBTQIAP+ people
the ability to build high levels of trust among these people and influence everything from their opinions to their activism
Tumblr’s very design, where based on who you follow, you can end up seeing only what confirms everything you believe
What kept nagging at me was the complete switch of who was most vehemently against ‘queer’ as self-identifier and/or umbrella term. You don’t have decades where the pattern is one way (reservations or rejection among older activists, generalized popularity among younger ones) only for it to completely reverse within the span of a few years, in one particular place. The whole thing feels artificial. Add in everything above and it absolutely reeks.
Are there young people whose rejection of ‘queer’ comes from the fact that they’ve been personally and directly victimized by it? No doubt. But what I’m talking about here aren’t individual cases, but rather a concerted, well-orchestrated campaign to control the language of marginalized sections of the LGBTQIAP+ community and to expunge ‘queer’, both as self-identifier and as an umbrella term. There are many other words which have been constantly used and are still used as bludgeons against us, ‘gay’ chief among them, yet there is no similar campaign to expunge ‘gay’ as umbrella term, regardless of how many people have been victimized by its usage as a slur.
So what you end up with is a group of people, radfems/cis gays & lesbians among them – also heavily involved in the aphobic backlash now – with an ideological axe to grind against ‘queer’, who figured quickly enough that turning young adult activists against it wasn’t going to work, not when we’d spent a decade or more using it, not when the people before us were instrumental in reclaiming it. So instead they focused on Tumblr and on the youths they could influence here. Inexperience combined with too much uncritical trust led us to where we are and it was a simple thing: if the blogger Person A trusts to Be Right says something, then it must Be Right. All you need then is a sufficient number of people convinced that they’re In The Right passing this on to others with a similar lack of experience and knowledge. Picture an out-of-control forest fire, with the instigators fanning the flames / setting new fires when needed.
This is why I am DONE with concessions on this whole thing. I refused to bow my head and fired right back at the transphobic, biphobic/panphobic and aphobic backlashes both in the physical world and on this goddamn website. This thing is no different, with largely the same people behind it and a better smokescreen. To anyone genuinely hurt by my usage of ‘queer’: I also use LGBTQIAP+ as umbrella term, when needed. Also, I have no problems if you need to unfollow/block me. Prioritizing your well-being is important and I don’t begrudge that,
However, what I DO begrudge is the existence of a concerted campaign meant to completely deny the history and usage of the term most often used by me/people like me and as an identifier for our community, aiming for its demonization and elimination.
