Sudden thought: why do so many people who do not identify as queer and don’t want anything to do with the word think they can police who is queer and who gets to reclaim or use the word?
We’ve gotten to a point where “LGBT” and “queer” mean very different identities, communities and philosophies; they are not the same thing. Rather, LGBT and queer are more like two different communities under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. So why aren’t we taking this separation to its ultimate conclusion? Why are we still allowing non-queer people to police what it means to be queer? Why are we still entertaining the “queer is a slur so don’t use it ever” or “only SGA and trans people are queer” conversations as valid when they come from people who are not queer and reject queerness? People who are so violently opposed to the word that they’re on a quest to eradicate it from all LGBTQIA+ spaces?
They are not queer, yet they’re continually speaking over queer-identified people in the attempt to restrict, define and silence a word and community that isn’t theirs.
If you don’t like how many different identities and relationships are welcome in queer spaces, your thoughts on this, as a non-queer person, are superfluous and irrelevant. You don’t get to make strawman arguments about BDSM-practicing heterosexuals considering themselves queer: this isn’t your concern. Dealing with BDSM-practicing heterosexuals, and figuring out whether or not they can call themselves queer or if their identification is valid, is our job, as queer people of the queer community. You don’t get to make lists of the precise identities targeted by queer-as-a-slur and argue only those people get to use the word; deciding who is queer enough to use the word is our job, as queer people of the queer community. You don’t get to decide when queer is permissible to reclaim or if folks who have never been explicitly targeted by it can use it; that’s our job, as queer people of the queer community.
(And if queer people want to share the word with anyone who isn’t cis, heterosexual, heteromantic or perisex, as seems to be the consensus among a vast majority of queer people? If you’re not queer yourself, you don’t get to have a say in this. You don’t get to take your toxic exclusionary rhetoric and apply it to a community not your own.)
If you’re not queer, your opinion on who gets to be queer and just who reclaims or uses the word is worthless. You don’t belong in this conversation. You have no authority on this subject. You’re just another annoying invader attempting to derail and erase.
It is past time that we stopped engaging with non-queer people attempting to police queer and started treating them as we treat cis folk attempting to police trans/NB/agender/cultural gender spaces and conversations.
Of course, we’ll see an upsurge in “I could be queer if I wanted” and “discoursers IDing as queer only for the purpose of discourse”, but we handle that dishonesty in other conversations. We can handle that here as well.
TL;DR: Queer and LGBT are not the same communities, so why are we allowing non-queer LGBT people to have a say on who is queer and how it is used?
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