l assure you it's fine to acknowledge that some femmes incl. BIPOC femmes, can and want to be masculine. And that their presentations don't have to be feminised to "respect that they are a femme".
Femmes can be masc-, men-aligned, androgynous or xenogendered (cannot be defined by current gendered schemas).
Femmes can have short, long or textured hair. Have any physical features and statures. Wear makeup or be entirely makeupless. Have the most gorgeous manicured acrylics, or bite their nails into choppy tips. Dress to their heart's content or not care about fashion at all. Wear stiletto heels or worn-in boots, long swishy skirts or a suit and tie.
Femmes can have straps, packers, penises and any genitalia—and they can call these whatever they want, too. Femmes can sweat, curse, have a voice like a foghorn. Have any kind of personality and take up space. Be emotionally and sexually unavailable. Have financial independence and even oversight. Be strong, body build, do the heavy lifting, or not do physical exercise at all. Engage in physical and gruelling labour. Have body hair or none at all. Not be great with kids or to love taking care of them. Be family-centric, or have no ties to family at all.
Some femmes see these as feminine things ( and yes your packer/strap/penis can absolutely be feminine if you please ), others as masculine things. Some might be genderfluid and see these as characteristic of multiple genders. Others might not associate with gender at all. Some prefer masculine compliments, some feminine, some neutral, and others dependent on the giver & the context.
None of these makes them less femme, all of these can be of any gender or a-gendered. None of these require a white person's gender-detection skills to be validated and absorbed into Eurocolonial standards. And sometimes what you believe to be a compliment, may contain oppression, erasure and violence to another. Insisting otherwise is Racism, Femmephobia and Exorsexism.
Some of you with your femmephobia and ignorant white feminism, will insist that some BIPOC femmes' practices and attributes are "very feminine". When the whole point of BIPOC allyship is to not generalise gender, feminise nor masculinise BIPOC practices.
At this point, some of you are repeating the inverse, while believing that's allyship. Meanwhile it's your voice and generalised POV centered over a BIPOC's individual voice, and you're rewarded for your ignorant impositions. This is still white-centrism as arbiters of multicultural genderdiversity.
We are typically misgendered and stereotyped under Eurocolonial standards, when we each have unique associations with our own cultural practices and traits that might differ from people within the same culture.
We don't have to do away with our intracultural AND intercultural genderdiversity, just to fit white-dominated discourse.
We don't have to be reduced to a monolith, to please white performative activism.
And while we are at it, we can, but don’t have to participate in your language and terms if we don’t want to.
Intersectionality between Gender, Whiteness & Anglospherism
Parts:
Free Will & Determinism
Radicalisation of Identity Politics
Conclusion
References
TLDR;
Mind how you, as an Anglospheric-privileged person, dictate queer cultures, identities and experiences, against immigrants and ethnic minorities.
While some people lack choices in their queer journeys, not everyone does. Either way anti-LGBT parties would use both choice and anti-choice against us.
The focus should be on the autonomy of individuals in their own journey with their identities. That even if you “had a choice” to decide what you want to be, regardless of your national or ethnic origins—why should this be demonised? What is so dangerous about choosing your gender identity or what you wish to do to your body that anti-LGBT parties are wielding this like it’s the ultimate weapon? Why should we hide/exclude that embracing our autonomy, does happen?
To not demonise our own who center the availability of choice they have had in their queer journey, especially where these involves immigrant experiences w navigating Anglosphere language models and culture.
There is no such thing as ‘women’s representation’: intersectionality and second-generation gender and politics scholarship. By Ashlee Christoffersen & Orly Siow. (Christoffersen et al, 2024)
“Black and other feminists of colour have long argued that the category of ‘women’ is not neutral; indeed, it is ‘always already raced as white’ (Lewis, 2017: 117).”
“As part of the process of racially minoritised women’s exclusion from the category ‘women’, white women parliamentarians (including those advocating for gender equality) have been shown to have actively constructed the category in their own image (Christoffersen, 2024a). Contemporary examples of this process also abound within the rhetoric of female right-wing populist anti-gender politicians in Europe (see, among others, Farris, 2017; Sager and Mulinari, 2018; Bader and Mottier, 2020). Thus, the category of ‘women’ fails to encompass all ‘women’, even when it is qualified with references to diversity: ‘once you understand that embedded in the idea of “woman” are the normative values of white, bourgeois cisheteronormativity, then the entire fiction of “woman” is exposed’ (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023: 635). Therefore, despite best intentions, the term remains problematic as a starting point for gender and politics scholarship.”
“For example, in the field of political representation, not only do both white and certain racially minoritised women benefit from white supremacy, but they have also actively sought to maintain racial privileges by policing the borders of ‘womanhood’ and upholding the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ minority ethnic groups through processes of ‘post-racial gatekeeping’ (Saini et al, 2023). It is not therefore self-evident that ‘women’s’ or ‘diverse women’s’ inclusion should be the priority of efforts towards equitable representation. Gender as a social marker is always interlocking with others that change its qualities, meaning that neither ‘women’ nor ‘men’ are an inherently oppressed group. Gender is also not a binary category, as the burgeoning political scholarship on non-binary gender shows (see, for example, Solevid et al, 2021).”
A part of critical gender and queer theory that is rarely spoken about, is how much binary and non-binary genders and sexualities in culture, meaning and expression are characterised by Western and Anglospheric (US, UK, Canada, AU, NZ) archetypes.
This has become an increasingly pertinent topic given the globalisation of cultures and the undeniable dominance of Western media and portrayals in queer rhetoric. So much so that the Anglosphere’s queer culture has undercut the diversification of gender maps on the basis of international multiculturalism.
It is an uncomfortable one with many implications, that a specific group of people has tried to shut down. These people are often members of White, Anglospheric, or native English-speaking demographics, who may also be queer and from other marginalised intersections. They share an appeal to Anglospheric politics and an ignorance to how their institutions are non-generalisable to other cultures, languages and nations.
Many persons from the aforementioned subset often refuse to acknowledge how localised such gender maps are and reliant upon the collective subjective worldview. This is not without its reasons.
Worldview, which underpins perspective, knowledge models and “common sense”, is informed by culture, religion, local representations, and language models—which are all dependent on history and anthropology of that specific Petri dish.
Language significantly shapes how we understand and express gender. It impacts identity formation. It is derived from local cultures, which has predispositions towards certain archetypal notions. Its usage influences the relational map of human genders to grammatical gender classifications of other nouns. Therefore how we perceive such gendered categorisations of objects and people, constructing and reinforcing gender stereotypes. With the globally dominant language and culture being English and Anglospheric respectively, such has monopoly on queer theory, community and contributes heavily to the international consensus on queer politics and rights.
It should be therefore acknowledged that a delocalised entity is inherently non-binary to local gender maps. When a non-native English speaker, a migrant, or a non-Anglospheric local adopts the terms of an Anglospheric culture, many are making an agentic choice to identify with said term and draw relationships to its referent.
Secondly, that any who are imperfect fits to the divides between gender and sexual categories, who straddles or moves between these—co-opt terms and draws relations to its referents for their own basis of identity, both to enable communication and to conceptualise in accordance to a normative gender map. Such persons may consider themselves to be gender-diverse, fluid and intersex persons, who are often excluded from the discourse that centralises cisheteronormative assimilation.
Thirdly, that as with all use of language, terms offer a “best fit” graph of meaning based on plotted points. When used to describe identity, terms and their referents are not prescriptive, rather descriptive.
Such concerns throws some of the anti-choice beliefs into disarray and has implications on today’s queer discourse.
The reasons that most dominant societies use to “permit” queer persons our rights, is frequently on the basis that queer persons have no other choice but to *be* queer. Many have therefore adopted this rationale to demand basic human rights and liberation from systemic inequity.
The lack of choice in one’s intra- and inter-personal gender experiences are valid and certainly more applicable to some persons than others—but it comes with some nuances.
It is for this reason that the social sciences has focused heavily on the unavailability of free will behind gender and sexual orientation, to legitimise queer politics.
Free Will & Determinism
Queer politics has had to fight against the historical assumptions of queer persons as dysfunctional and/or criminals/intentional deviants, and the inhumane treatments borne from such ideas—such as conversion therapy, correctional 🍇 and other forms of abuse. Determinism, the lack of choice and autonomy in one’s being, has been most effective in this regard.
On the other hand, Free Will and autonomy in one’s identity has been weaponised heavily by anti-TLGB parties to delegitimise queerness, frame queer persons as cultural rebels and deviants, enemies to the status quo who do not deserve legitimisation from the State, nor validation from their communities.
Determinism has been used as an approach against Free Will morality and appeals to nature. Where choosing to be any other way than how nature (or God) intended is immoral, but as long as it is beyond your control, it is justifiable. The extension of this to all queer interactions between agents and their environment, has become the “middle-ground” liberal rationale, which while applicable to some persons, is also done to appeal to the State.
It is therefore especially challenging for queer persons to even begin to address autonomy in gender and sexuality, when doing so could cause them to become liabilities to current queer politics, their communities (which are already scarce) and be subject to endangerment and rejection from all sides.
It causes the splintering of the community into those who operating on choice, versus those who do not. More aptly; it splinters queers central to the Anglosphere and its politics, versus queers who are peripheral to it.
Radicalisation of Identity Politics
The radicalisation of identity politics—that is the legitimisation of such identities without appealing to the state—has always been a topic of intersectional identity politics.
Such has denounced the need for critical queer theory to conform and assimilate into the normative ideas of state-sanctioned personhood, but rather challenges what can be considered human on the basis of maximised autonomy.
Punks, Bulldaggers & Welfare Queens by Cathy J. Cohen (Cohen, 1997)
…rebuff what they deem the assimilationist practices and policies of more established lesbian and gay organizations. These organizers and activists reject cultural norms of acceptable sexual behavior and identification and instead embrace political strategies which promote self-definition and full expression.
While biological predispositions, and socialisation to a smaller extent, have significant roles to play in determining a person’s gender and sexual orientation, deterministic approaches can often deny the autonomy of individuals in favour of assimilation and subjugation to the system. It ignores gender as a performance, a journey with an active agent however shaped by things sometimes beyond their control, and a site of activism.
Hostile parties have consistently attempted to keep any “influence” of queerness from leaking into cisheteronormative curriculums, for the sake of restricting worldviews.
This in turn controls informed ideas of what is possible to be, what is central versus alien, and therefore what deserves the utmost privilege of inclusion and empathy—to the exclusion of the non-normative.
Censorship restricts a person’s autonomy by limiting the paths of self-actualisation availed to them, but more significantly, such ideas of what legitimises personhood, reifies the global white cisheteronormative patriarchal able-bodied classist hegemony.
When the focus is more so on how a person cannot “help” themselves to be, this invites the collective to “fix” an individual in accordance with the status quo—or else to accept the person on a basis of “grace” (typically awarded on the basis of what is most affordable and convenient).
Such has occurred throughout history with the use of psychiatric interventions, conversion camps, “correctional” 🍇, “correctional” bullying, “correctional” behavioural facilities—some of which are now deemed inhumane only on the basis of how much suffering it produces versus how inefficient it is. It however, still deems such methods possible and useful as long as it meets the cost-benefit criteria.
The pivot to the focus on autonomy of individuals challenges the conditional acceptance of queer persons on how conveniently and affordably they fit into the status quo. It strongarms such coercive interventions as violating an individual’s autonomy, their availability of choice and the role of the State and its supporters, in the removal of autonomy.
Assimilation is killing us. We are falling into a trap. Some of us adopt an apologetic stance, stating "that's just the way I am" (read: "I'd be straight if I could."). Others pattern their behavior in such a way as to mimic heterosexual society so as to minimize the glaring differences between us and them….The myth of assimilation must be shattered…Let's make families which promote sexual choices and liberation rather than sexual oppression. (Cohen, 1997)
Intersectional identity politics enables visibility of proximity to privilege across multiple dimensions, and dismantles monolithic ideas of power, status and privilege.
our multiple identities work to limit the entitlement and status some receive from obeying a heterosexual imperative. (Cohen, 1997)
It highlights the inclusion of those who do not necessarily benefit from their pre-existing proximity to state-sanctioned identities, and validates the choice-based membership of persons to their own gendered maps without appealing to the dominant rhetoric for acceptance. Such constitutes transformational politics.
By transformational, again, I mean a politics that does not search for opportunities to integrate into dominant institutions and normative social relationships, but instead pursues a political agenda that seeks to change values, definitions, and laws which make these institutions and relationships oppressive. (Cohen, 1997)
Conclusively
Identity politics has focused primarily on Anglospheric politics so much so it has failed to see how the Anglosphere’s rhetoric has pervaded and dominated international cultures. How international persons and other marginalised groups such as immigrants and ethnic minorities, have co-opted such terms to interact within the Anglosphere and the global sphere. How it has impacted identity politics to queer theory and politics. Prompting inquisitions into the autonomies of individuals in their gender identities that may otherwise remain invisible and overshadowed by the Anglosphere’s intra-discourse.
Deterministic approaches to identity politics excludes queer experiences that do not align with local language and cultural models, overlooks autonomy in identity politics, and reduces the effectiveness of transformational identity politics.
Erasure of diverse experiences, silencing and attacks against publicising these and the liberation of choice, should not be reasoned with appeal to the hegemony.
Genuine transformational politics should not depend on exclusionist rhetoric that establishes monolithic identities and a privileged class upon its proximity to normative identities.
Choice, the autonomy of people in their identification, should be central to discourse. If the cisheteronormative society weaponise against queer persons the liberty to choose one’s gender, then the solution isn’t to deny we have choice or autonomy, but to question why that, to them, is a harmful thing.
The fight has always been about autonomy in identity. Not the removal of autonomy.
REFS
There is no such thing as ‘women’s representation’: intersectionality and second-generation gender and politics scholarship. By Ashlee Christoffersen & Orly Siow. (Christoffersen et al, 2024)
“Black and other feminists of colour have long argued that the category of ‘women’ is not neutral; indeed, it is ‘always already raced as white’ (Lewis, 2017: 117).”
“As part of the process of racially minoritised women’s exclusion from the category ‘women’, white women parliamentarians (including those advocating for gender equality) have been shown to have actively constructed the category in their own image (Christoffersen, 2024a). Contemporary examples of this process also abound within the rhetoric of female right-wing populist anti-gender politicians in Europe (see, among others, Farris, 2017; Sager and Mulinari, 2018; Bader and Mottier, 2020). Thus, the category of ‘women’ fails to encompass all ‘women’, even when it is qualified with references to diversity: ‘once you understand that embedded in the idea of “woman” are the normative values of white, bourgeois cisheteronormativity, then the entire fiction of “woman” is exposed’ (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023: 635). Therefore, despite best intentions, the term remains problematic as a starting point for gender and politics scholarship.”
“For example, in the field of political representation, not only do both white and certain racially minoritised women benefit from white supremacy, but they have also actively sought to maintain racial privileges by policing the borders of ‘womanhood’ and upholding the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ minority ethnic groups through processes of ‘post-racial gatekeeping’ (Saini et al, 2023). It is not therefore self-evident that ‘women’s’ or ‘diverse women’s’ inclusion should be the priority of efforts towards equitable representation. Gender as a social marker is always interlocking with others that change its qualities, meaning that neither ‘women’ nor ‘men’ are an inherently oppressed group. Gender is also not a binary category, as the burgeoning political scholarship on non-binary gender shows (see, for example, Solevid et al, 2021).”
Punks, Bulldaggers & Welfare Queens by Cathy J. Cohen (Cohen, 1997)
By transformational, again, I mean a politics that does not search for opportunities to integrate into dominant institutions and normative social relationships, but instead pursues a political agenda that seeks to change values, definitions, and laws which make these institutions and relationships oppressive.
Assimilation is killing us. We are falling into a trap. Some of us adopt an apologetic stance, stating "that's just the way I am" (read: "I'd be straight if I could."). Others pattern their behavior in such a way as to mimic heterosexual society so as to minimize the glaring differences between us and them….The myth of assimilation must be shattered…Let's make families which promote sexual choices and liberation rather than sexual oppression.
our multiple identities work to limit the entitlement and status some receive from obeying a heterosexual imperative.
(P9) rebuff what they deem the assimilationist practices and policies of more established lesbian and gay organizations. These organizers and activists reject cultural norms of acceptable sexual behavior and identification and instead embrace political strategies which promote self-definition and full expression.
communication is categorizing though?? how do we see each other if we can’t categorize each other?? youll probably get mad if I dont automatically know you see yourself as feminine and expect to be seen as that by strangers when im just going by standards of my “white culture and language”
Communication may involve but isn’t always about categorising things. Sometimes it’s about complicating things beyond categories and norms.
The whole point of that post is to refrain from assumptions of what is OK vs what isn’t for a whole ethnicity/culture, typically based on how one looks.
Instead I encourage yall to rely on asking questions to the individual BIPOC about their personal relationship to gender, as what is feminine or masculine to one, may not be the same to another. What is comfortable and appreciated by one, may not be by another.
I’d encourage even to expect that it isn’t the same. We aren’t generalisable and interchangeable beings.
We are each permitted our own standards, culture and language and unique individual relationships with gender. But if you prioritise being considerate of multiculturalism and genderdiversity, then any interaction with another person should defer with respect to how they see and refer to themselves.
Assumptions will always be exclusionist as one cannot expect to capture all individuals with a single general statement.
If you habitually stereotype gender then it wouldn’t surprise me if you do so for other things such as race, too. It is a type of reductive, unipolar, discriminatory thinking that has to be undone across all intersections.
Does any other BIPOC find it hilarious that when we post something like this that challenges what white people believed was polite, upstanding behaviour—white fragility will always emerge? Their fear of offense and social niceties taking precedence over sincere listening.
Here, by my lovely femme friend @essiebitssie
if you're still centering your white semantics in 'categorizing' BIPOCs, then you're still centering whiteness. Learn to communicate instead of just assuming things.
Autonomous Self-Identification is not just a “Queer” struggle.
TW: Racism, Body Mutilation, Death, Racialised Violence, Sexual Slavery, C/SA -> Context
And you know what I’m not afraid to say it.
Most BIPOC queers have had to stand up for something at a young age and carve out our own spaces in areas where we have been the ethnic minorities.
Some of us have fought with our fists, others with our words, just to be visible and to demand fairer treatment on the basis of race, religion, immigrant status/citizenship, socioeconomic class, disability, sexuality and gender; all of which are inseparable from racialised inequalities.
You want to talk about being visible, safe and comfortable in your body? Gender euphoria? Gender affirming care?
Many BIPOC have been targeted, tortured and tormented for having “weird” eyes, noses, mouths, teeth, jawlines, skin colour, hyperpigmentation, wrinkles and folds, torsos, limbs—right down to our genitalia. Sexualised, exoticised, subject to hatred, ostracism, harassment.
Our clothes, food, music, spirituality, culture, technology and knowledge appropriated by others. They demand access to it (out of courtesy) but would take it anyways, by force and violence. They wear our skin and hair like costumes. Accessories and features to pick and choose and stitch into their blank slates. Our heritage and its imbued history becomes mere aesthetic, an influencer trend. Our suffering and stories are a buffet for their guilt-ridden consumption and performative activism. But we are harassed for being “backwards” and “inappropriate”, while they are marvelled at as “cultured” and “progressive”.
When we go into public spaces we are aware of the eyes that follow us—or we hope we are sufficiently alert to them anyhow.
When we are at work or school, we aren’t new to being treated differently, paid lower and recognised as inferior, spoken to differently, by colleagues and clients alike.
We know we are gossiped about, excluded, shamed, told to “go back to where [we] come from”, and our presence is allowed only by white mercies and how useful our labour is to them.
When we seek services and aid, we know we are less likely to receive the same level of care and benefit as our white counterparts. And we are criticised for needing medical care, education, food and shelter. “Basic human rights” to a white person, but “privileges” for the rest of us. And we must behave, tuck our lip over our teeth and implore from white superiors in a sweet soft tone, to be granted access to it at all.
We are told we leech off the system. We are dishonest but also overly appealing infestations to capitalistic systems. We don’t pay our taxes, yet hoard wealth, employment and public amenities.
When they say a body has been found anywhere in the world, we typically expect the article to document a BIPOC victim with some form of body mutilation and SA. That is also considering that violence against BIPOC are less likely to be publicised by main news channels, compared to violence against white people.
When riots and protests and wars happen, we know very well who will be more likely to receive aid, and who will be forced to survive on their own, often against targeted violence.
We’ve always known that authorities and law enforcement are more likely to be responsible for our deaths than our survival. We’ve always known that our allies on a good day, are more likely to sell us out on a bad one, than to stand with us.
We’ve always known that while our religions and spiritualities are condemned, that white Christianity and Catholicism will justify their reigns of colonisation, imperialism, invasion, erasure, terror, violence, destruction, torn families, sexual slavery and CSA against BIPOC.
We have heard these stories at family dinners from our elders, when the night grows long and grim. It is told in warning, but also in vindication over the odds stacked against us. And in spite of the endless mourning, we persistently hope for and work towards better futures and those of our children.
This isn’t to say that white queers haven’t had their own strife, or that it’s any less valid, but if you have had the misfortune of knowing what it’s like to fight for your visibility as a queer person, then you should be able to form some preconsciousness about what it’s like to fight to manage the hypervisibility of race as an ethnocultural minority.
You should, at your ripe old age, know that BIPOC are scrutinised to the bone and have every microscopic trait about us attributed without our control—to race, gender, sexuality and class. That policies and atrocities are performed and justified on such rhetoric and propagandised stereotypes.
But no. White queers will argue that queer rights are getting taken from them, and therefore punish BIPOC who are fighting for the liberty to self-identify and to have proper autonomy and visibility in queer history.
As if “queer rights” and the fight for it, isn’t predominantly led by BIPOC communities and the most vulnerable amongst us.
As if self-identification is a privilege saved for white people when times befit them.
As if white people haven’t celebrated for centuries often at the expense and the neglect of BIPOC.
As if white people haven’t written and spoken over BIPOC stories, nor puppeteered and exploited BIPOC bodies enough.
Meanwhile BIPOC still are being denied not only rights to self-identify, but also rights concurrent with multi-oppression models. Most of us wait for the day that more is taken and the truth is behind our outrage, we aren’t even surprised. Yeah. This is dystopian. It is a such a stark contrast between privileged and underprivileged mindsets.
“You are playing with labels while real people are having their rights taken away and are dying.” Listen up alabaster disasters, most BIPOC have lived that reality since the day we were born. Likely are more acquainted with said reality than you are.
Autonomous self-identification has always been an ongoing war. White people who have forgone their culture and heritage save for white Christian nationalism, unfortunately believe this struggle unique to queerness.
The fact is self-identification in the right to engage without harassment in our own heritage & ethnocultural practices, especially in advocating for multiculturalism in white-dominant spaces, still is a constant battle for BIPOC ethnic minorities since the dawn of time.
Welcome to a fraction of our reality I guess. Take a damn queue number if you intend to whitesplain oppression to us.
For those tending towards feminism and equality in gender and sex-based rights, be made aware that “traditional” femininity and masculinity, submissiveness and dominance, asymmetrical power, and the visibility and sexualisation thereof, were never the problems in and of themselves.
Recently, we have observed the surge of tradwife content, child-centric and family-centric aesthetics and glorified narratives, from art to social media to the news. This accompanies the promotion of and enactment of violence and suppression to LGBTQ rights and voices, sex & gender-based rights, reproductive rights, and—the removal of safe reporting, services and aid for domestic abuse and sexual abuse survivors.
The defunding of education and health sectors, the safety nets and aid for the disadvantaged (incl. unhoused, lower income and resource insecure), places vulnerable demographics in even greater danger by increasing competitiveness for security, inaccessibility to basic rights, overworked and overloaded health sectors, rehabilitation facilities and housing aid—all of which increases neglect, malpractice and abusive risks. In “moving along homeless people” campaigns, and defunding education, this removes community and isolates people, taking away tools and strategies of survival, empowerment & class mobility, and incapacitates the already-vulnerable from being able to fight against future government control.
Yes, this has unnerved many, and the reaction is to try to pinpoint the perpetrators, and tar & feather those who we see as betraying or upholding these structures… often, with misattributed blame, fearmongering, moral policing, collateral and neglect of vulnerable persons.
Largely, there has been pushback by some left-leaning parties against being sexual, cute, “girly feminine”, “baby” infantilisation, ageplay, petplay, asymmetrical power in sexual or romantic relationships, Total Power Exchange relationships, D/S dynamics, “traditional” domestic house-partners, and hetero-gender relationships (incl. heterosexual and fem/masc pairings).
Much of this pushback however, recycles the dangers of the 2nd wave feminist movement. For example, separatism, SWERF & TERFism, suppressing voices on intersectionality, victim blaming, demonising marginalised persons and promoted harm while stripping support from them. A lot of this pushback is indivisible from being White, Eurocentric, Anglocenteic (US, UK, Canada, Australia) which denies the multicultural and international differences in what is progressive, safe, or resistance for other communities.
Not to mention a lot of this also provides strawman ammunition for the counterreactions from conservative and patriarchal parties, who believe the left see domestic hobbies, cute pink things and choice-based bliss as harmful.
People have come under attack for engaging in kink, or “traditional/conservative-style” relationships between a fem-aligned participant and a masc-aligned participant. Some have faced separatists who criticise those having any “proximity to dick” such as bisexuals, intersex and trans persons—while denying that biphobia, exorsexism, and transphobia (transmisogyny and transandrophobia) is rampant even in the LGBTQ community. Amatonormativity has even shamed AroAcespec persons for not partaking in sex or romance, with being seen as advocates for purity culture or in some way broken.
All of these people are seen as “harmful” to the “sex-positive but vanilla, fem4fem or radfem way only!” culture that is being promoted as “The Solution™️” to the world’s issues.
But why, when the dynamic and aesthetics were shared across relationships between people of different sexualities and genders (such as fem4fem), doing so was instead seen as radical, subversive and empowering?
Some would answer that it’s because it didn’t involve masculinity, men or symbols of masculinity at all. Many participants embodied femininity and masculinity; the difference is that they constructed their gender. However, missing from this conversation is the crux of how this can be radical if it still possessed some form of interdependency or asymmetrical power?
We must identify that the solution was rooted in upholding autonomy, bodily integrity, and choice. Even in their least radical form, these were focused on free & informed consent, risk-aware pleasure, as well as enjoyment, while being aware of the risk of systemic exploitation.
The participants are not doing anything condemnable, unlike how the typical commentary skewers people for such. This derails from the issue and dilutes it, obscuring when something is truly harmful, versus when its other enacted forms are not.
The Risks & Harms:
The fact that for some people, they are forced or pressured to participate in these dynamics and practices, which voids consent. From sexual slavery to abuse, to even systemic and environmental factors that pushes someone to participate reluctantly. For those we frequently observe posting content about these, they usually entered these dynamics by choice. Whether they did or did not have the privilege to choose it before, they now are, and are exercising it in ways that benefit them.
Despite the disparity between their privileged lives compared to those without the same privileges, the two are conflated and indistinguishable when observed from afar. This conflation does often contribute to the silencing and erasure of activism and visibility of those who are forced into these.
The misinformation on these dynamics from all sides. This can come from those who glorify the aesthetics of it without talking about the hardships and risks of these relationships (which ALL relationships have), as well as those who demonise it often from a moral policing and kink-ignorant standpoint.
Unsafe practices surrounding kink, non-risk-awareness, isolation from kink communities which often educates its members and provides a safety net of witnesses and help in the event of abusive dynamics.
The exploitation and decontextualisation of kink when the lines are blurred between the underground kink and vanilla society.
The consumerism of content around these, often to the benefit of capitalism. This opens up conversations around how capitalism and capitalists have continuously benefitted from commodifying bodies and sex, upholding and normalising systems of oppression. Some of these include violence against marginalised groups, the patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, and also the exploitation of children and child-like symbols.
Solutions?
Distinguish relationships NOT from their outwardly appearances, but on the signs that it is devolving into something that violates consent, dilutes risk-awareness, bodily integrity & autonomy.
Instead of demonising those within these relationships or subcultures, figure out how to identify those who seek to exploit it.
Don’t kink shame. Promote safe practices. Teach safe kink (SSC vs. RACK), NUANCED consent. Encourage joining kink communities for communal support, education and protection. Remember, the more we reduce risk and create safer dynamics, the less risk and unsafe exploitations can occur.
Those who build platforms and publicity off specific content, to speak up for those who aren’t benefitting from these. Whether you have a whole cult, a moderate following base, or you’re just someone openly declaring your love for this content and receiving visibility for it. Raise awareness and build community especially with demographics at risk/greater risk of falling prey to the way these could be abused.
Provide material support, communal solidarity and protection for those who engage in these but experienced abusive forms of it. Refrain from victim blaming, shaming, or deflecting the blame onto those who practice this safely. Always make sure your impact does not get twisted or confused into supporting perpetrators of abuse.
Prevent the capitalisation and commercialisation that often decontextualises lived experiences and turns it into misinformation and superficial aesthetics—which increases risk.
We should be normalising understanding that the relationships we enter into with safety and security, and benefit from, is not the universal experience for all. Acknowledge the risks of all relationship dynamics and understand how quickly things can change for anyone—this could not only help others in raising awareness, but it also could one day help you.
Is it that crazy to believe that the cisheterosexual person who constructs their own relationship with their embodiment of gender despite the gender roles and norms of their culture, has more in common with queerness than with straightness?
Bonus points if they have in any way experimented with non-cisheterosexuality in a genuine manner.
Straightness is not a just “cisheterosexuality”. This is especially in consideration of the many LGBTQIA+ and non-LGBTQIA+ groups oppressed and marginalised beneath the hegemony—even if they are cisgendered or heterosexual, or both.
To designating “queer” and “straight” has so much more potential than to segregate LGBTQ people from the rest of society. It addresses a general group of people who do not benefit from hegemonic institutions that exploit gender-based and sexual-orientation-based marginalisation and invisibility.
The solution to this is to ensure queerness is visible, and visibility doesn’t just rely on strict lines or creating a minority class. Instead, disempowering dominant norms can be done by complicating it with new perspectives and intersectional resistances. Intersectional queer and race theorists have argued this for decades.
“Straight” is a hegemonic sociocultural class, that upholds gender normativity.
This inadvertently intersects with the hegemonies of race, class, disability, immigrant status and many more. Often, it exploits multiple of these groups, and renders struggles unique to these intersections, invisible.
Straightness is a set of rules. Rules that have not always been static nor consistent, but are certainly rigid impositions that disregard individual autonomy.
And yes, with this I believe some people who identify as non-cisheterosexual ARE recreating “straightness”, and recycling “straight strategies” by monolithizing identities and communities. We should address anti-queer behaviours such as weaponising normativity, exclusionist and bigoted behaviours, and the “straightifying” of queerness.
