#intersex-ionality

[aflyingcontradiction]

@intersex-ionality: I know your inbox is closed at the moment and you might not see this with all the bullshit happening on your dash at the moment, but thank you so much for the first take on atheism and religion I’ve seen on tumblr that hasn’t managed to send me into a week-long existential crisis. I really, really appreciate knowing there’s people out there with opinions as nuanced as yours.

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

When I was still in school, I wrote a term paper about the somewhat unique community struggle of queer or MOGAI or LGBT youth constantly having to reinvent the wheel because of lack of access to elders. I noticed a lot of different pieces to it. On the one (and most brutal) hand, we have the AIDS crisis that nearly wiped out entire generations of our communities prior to the 1980s and even into the 90s. Youth who came of age or came out after the AIDS crisis was at it's peak we're coming into a community immediately following a genocide, and so many writings and speeches were lost during those years because there was no one well enough to keep them, because people's possessions were burned after their death to prevent spread, because Straight society took the opportunity to rewrite our histories for us when we were too weak as a community to fight back. Much of pre-AIDS coalition knowledge is gone or only exists in a few spare minds whose parents were a part of the community, but distant enough to survive and to produce lineage. And then, even outside of the AIDS crisis you have huge portions of every young generation being born in families and communities that actively or passively discourage access to inter-generational knowledge. Places where parents, supportive or otherwise, just are not part of the community and have no knowledge to pass on. Because we're not exactly a heritage based community, young people born outside the community have to find older mentors, often outside their families and towns, if they want to hear anything about their own history. And of course, the age-old trope of the "predatory queer" means that these relationships are often actively criminalizes and prevented, leaving so many young people to literally reinvent the wheel of our culture and our history. This is starting to change a little with tech advances. We've got safe and somewhat accessible IVF that lets couples who might not otherwise have had children become parents, increasing the rate of children being born literally into the community, no matter where there orientation or gender or sex turns out. We've also got the Internet, enabling vast networks even in towns where previously kids would have been shit out of luck, or families that would in the past have been too abusive to allow physical outings. Kids are able to mask their tracks and network online in ways our community has never really had access to. It's not all fixed of course. We're the first generation to even have a pretense of access to our intergenerational stories, and the ongoing marginalization and intra-community issues means that often you need to already know what you're looking for online in order to find safe and healthy networks among a sea of conservative propaganda, which of course still leaves those networks largely inaccessible by anyone who does not have a sponsor or mentor or community already serving as an invitation or guide. And relationships, healthy or otherwise, platonic or otherwise, between older and younger members are still often met with suspicion, accusations of abuse, or punishment by abusive families. Just as in the 90s when all the budding queer and LGBT+ youth programs started getting targeted by conservative groups, our online spaces get slammed with accusations of child abuse and grooming, making young community victims of abuse and grooming much harder to protect because members of the community are afraid to speak out in case it's seen as validation of stereotypes, siding with oppressors, or placing blame on their own shoulders. The way in which our culture, history, stories, and ideologies are most typically not passed down through families means that it is more difficult to preserve and perpetuate and improve than some identities which can be consistently and readily passed down from child to child. Many "queer of color critique" writers in queer theory conflate the fragmentation and inter-generational loss to the way that first-generation citizens or mixed children of color or transracially adopted children of color might find themselves cut off from the cultures and histories of their race and ethnicity. This kind of inter-generational loss of knowledge is it's own form of state and cultural violence against marginalized communities, and the non-hereditary nature of our community means that this violence is the norm for us even under circumstances where some other communities might typically be able to expect to pass on their history. In some ways, this can be beneficial. The way that each generation must reinvent their community ideologies and language means that we are constantly examining and innovating within our own communities and selves. But it also means that we have to work far harder than we should to figure out where to start. I have hopes that this first generation with access to the internet will be able to start resolving these problems, but to be honest, it will take time, and even then we will likely never recover all that has been lost. And that means that, to some extent, our community will always exist in a state of grieving ourselves and our losses. That can be devastating for young people just coming out of up. So to older members of the community, remember to never stop reaching out. Our minds and memories are valuable in ways we might never have fathomed and you have the chance to be the mentor you probably didn't have. You have a chance to learn more than you ever dreamed might be available to you. To young people, whether you're just starting out or have been here a while, remember that however invisible the world has tried to make us from you, there have been generations before you and they have survived as a community against incredible odds. They have much to give you and deserve to be acknowledged both as people and as the living history that you may become someday. Just because we have to work so hard for our generations to connect and share, doesn't mean we should stop trying.