So what Iâve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff theyâre saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, âOh my god, Iâm so sorry, I never meant to say that.â
Like, âqueer is a slurâ: I get the impression that people saying this are like⊠oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as âf*gsâ. Like, âOh wow, thatâs a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?â
So theyâre really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.Â
Thatâs because thereâs a history of âpolitical lesbiansâ, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the âcorrectâ sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that donât contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.Â
When âqueer theoryâ arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like âThe Queer Disappearance of Lesbiansâ, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis âgold star lesbianâ (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, âqueerâ was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didnât know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as âqueerâ were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and âqueerâ was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didnât get chased out of. If someone didnât disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didnât want to be called queer themselves, they could just say âI donât like being called queerâ and that was that. Being âqueerâ was to being LGBT as being a âfeministâ was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isnât evident when these interactions happen. We donât sit down and say, âOkay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, andâŠâ Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, âDO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,â because we cannot find a way to say, âThis word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldnât be alive in the same way if I lost it.â And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But Iâve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, âOh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didnât realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.â
And that? That gives me hope for the future.
Similarily:Â âDyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldnât use them.â
When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why canât we just use those without poaching someone elseâs?
And often, theyâre really shocked when I tell them: We donât. We canât. Iâd love to; itâs not possible.
âLesbianâ used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didnât interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not theyâd at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other menâthe important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.
Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchyâs evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was âsleeping with the enemyâ and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.
(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)
That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of âdouble discriminationâ; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..
So every time I hear that phrase, itâs another painful reminder for me of all the experiences Iâve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences donât get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally havenât learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.
And once Iâve explained it, Iâve had a heartening number of lesbians go, âThatâs not what I wanted to happen, so Iâm going to stop saying that.â
This is good information for people who carry on with the âqueer is a slurâ rhetoric and donât comprehend the push back.
ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term âqueerâ was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now itâs a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space iâve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history butâŠyep
Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were âheterosexualâ, âhomosexualâ, and âmonosexualâ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by Magnus Hirschfeld and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.
Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.
Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against âqueerâ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled âQueerâ. It was just⊠there, and so were we!
So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone whoâs called themself queer longer than theyâve been alive - that âque*r is a slur.â Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how itâs been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.
Worth noting here is a sneaky new front Iâve seen radfems start using:
Yeah, okay, maybe older LGBTs use queer and fag and dykeâŠbut theyâre cringey, and you donât want to be cringe, do you?
Iâm not even joking. They strip the loud-and-proud aspects of our history out of all context, remove every bit of blood, sweat, and tears the queer community poured into things like anti-discrimination laws and AIDS research funding, and use those screams of rebellion to say weâre weird, and you wouldnât want to be WEIRD.
Stop and think about that for a minute.
Yeah. They are not the arbiters of our community and they never were, and itâs important to not give them the time of day.
