#intracommunity things

[fu-si-un]

PSA for cis bi & pan ppl, on discussions of bisexuality and pansexuality

(am posting these w/ permission from @televisionwatcher​)

[eeee-lye]

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?

[fu-si-un]

Wrt conversations about bisexuality & pansexuality, trans ppl clearly have a different stake in them than cis ppl do. I can only speak for myself as one tme nonbinary bi person—other trans / nonbinary bi ppl have had different experiences than me & may approach this topic from different directions.

Generally my feeling is that, considering that trans ppl are more likely than cis members of lgbtq+ communities to id as pan, rhetoric positioning pansexuality as being unnecessary terminology, inherently & irredeemably ignorant, etc. has served to alienate a significant number of trans / nonbinary ppl in our communities. I also feel like it’s worrisome when—whether in conversations abt bisexuality & pansexuality, or otherwise—bi history, cis bi history included, gets positioned as having always been trans-inclusive.

There's definitely conversations to be had around bisexuality, pansexuality, and transness. One often-discussed (as too many ppl are still uninformed of the implications / history around it) aspect of the topic is that ppl need to stop acting like etymology, prefixes, etc. have the final say over actual bi ppl—trans bi ppl, ofc, have a different stake in this than cis bi ppl do—and bi communities. We get to define ourselves, and this matters.

In light of seeing a continued rise in anti-pan sentiment from other lgbtq+ ppl on this site, I feel it matters for us to consider that other ppl get to define themselves as well. I feel like ppl too often approach this topic in ways that are dismissive to pan ppl, who clearly—trans pan ppl, ofc, have a different stake in this than cis pan ppl do—find pansexuality to be an important or otherwise useful descriptor.

It’s harmful when ppl use etymology, prefixes, etc. as a basis to speak over bi ppl about our identities. I don’t feel it’s wrong for anyone to consider things like that wrt their own self-definition, though. I guess I’m pretty convinced of the opposite, in that I feel like telling people they can’t care about those things when it comes to the words they’re using for themselves, to communicate something highly personal, is in itself harmful.

[fu-si-un]

i think to say that within wlw contexts, the butch/femme labels have always only been for lesbians—in the sense of the current understanding of “lesbian” as a fixed internal identity—suggests ppl are missing a lot of information abt bi/pan/etc. women’s history, our perspectives on said history, and generally, how shared our history as wlw is.

i think there are large positives to the fixed identity understanding. but when it’s not widely understood that this language evolved to specify fixed identities as opposed to describing what relationships ppl were in, bi/pan/etc. women end up effectively written out of our own history.

i think this is quite harmful and sad.

i definitely don’t wish to devalue the significance of lesbian specificity. i also don’t think a wider acknowledgment of wlw’s shared history under the term “lesbian”—again, before evolution/clarification to that language—needs to detract from a discussion of said specificity. to me, it seems like it’d be reasonable to use “butch lesbianism” or “femme lesbianism” to demarcate the specificity of said identities/experiences, w/o necessitating the claim that lesbianism is the only legitimate context in which to understand butchness or femmeness.

(i largely find understanding for & common ground w/ other lgbtq+ ppl more important than terminology arguments of this nature, so i’m open to hearing differing perspectives from those who also prioritize common ground over said disagreement.)

[eeee-lye]

Tag your “q-slur”, please.

I’m queer. This is the word that encompasses all the ways in which I am not cishet. This is the word that has given me identity even when I wasn’t sure if I was bi or pan, trans masc or NB. It is a word that gives me some degree of safety, because I can be openly not cishet without having to out myself as trans/agender, pan or a-spec. It’s a word I can tell strangers with less hesitation and fear than any other word that applies to me. It’s my identity, something I’ve been now for over ten years. I’m queer.

I am not a q-slur.

I know your arguments. I know you say that you’re doing this to protect people. We have differing opinions on that, but at this point, neither side is going to convince the other. I’ll take your argument as a given: you’re using the term “q-slur” to protect people hurt by it. I can accept that to a degree, even as I disagree with the the lack of consistency in applying this across all reclaimed words: you want to protect people. You want to stop people being hurt.

So listen to me when I tell you: having my identity reduced to the word “q-slur” hurts me.

I’ve had “queer” thrown at me as a slur. Also “gay”, “homosexual” and “bi”. “Q-slur” hurts me worse than all of those things. It hurts me worse than having to tell people that being pansexual isn’t the same thing as bestiality, and that’s one of the most awful conversations I’ve ever had! It feels like a punch to the gut, a slap to the face. I feel like I can’t breathe when I see it. It kills me that my identity, a word I’ve used for more than ten years, is now deemed too ugly to speak aloud. It kills me that my identity now must be called “slur” every time one references it. It makes me feel isolated in spaces that once accepted me. It makes me feel afraid to speak a word that is mine.

But, I get it. You want to stop people being hurt. You replace queer with “q-slur”, you warn for “q-slur”. You do what you can to stop people from having to read the word “queer” and be hurt by that reading.

So I am asking you to protect me, too.

I am asking you to tag your posts that contain the word “q-slur”.

I’m not even asking you to use another word. I’m not even asking you to stop using it. (At this stage in the conversation, that’s a waste of our time.) I’m just asking you to acknowledge my pain the way you’re acknowledging the pain of those hurt by “queer”. I’m asking you, at the very least, to tag your posts containing the word “q-slur” so I don’t have to see it. I’m asking you to consider that I am being hurt by this term and would like to navigate Tumblr without the punch to the face I feel every time I see my identity referred to as “q-slur”.

Surely you can understand how it would feel to see your identity reduced to “letter-slur”? I’m not here to start up a debate about what words are sufficiently slurs in your eyes; I’m not here to talk about the history of words. I’m just asking you to imagine how it must feel to see your identity rendered so unspeakable it must only and forever be referred to as a slur. I’m asking you to try and understand how much this hurts me.

I’m asking you, who are taking actions to protect others, to protect me, too.

Please. Tag your use of q-slur. Just like I tag for my use of queer.

Then you can do what feels right to you, and I can do what feels right to me. We can disagree with each other’s viewpoint and still navigate this space we share with our preferred language, without slapping each other in the face, just by the use of a tag.

Tag posts containing “q-slur” as just that: “q-slur”. Please.

[eeee-lye]

You know, I see people talking all the time about how “non-binary” as an umbrella term is a less controversial replacement for “genderqueer” as an umbrella term, and I won’t say that isn’t true. It is.

But I never see anyone talking about how “non-binary” as an umbrella term doesn’t exclude or erase agender folk by framing our identities in terms of a gender that’s queered the way “genderqueer” as an umbrella term does ... and I think people really fucking should talk about this, just a little bit.

Because I’m not genderqueer. I can’t be genderqueer. I have no gender to queer, so I’m just queer. Specifically ... queer without gender, which is why I named my website just that, because that’s exactly what I am. All queer, including my absence of gender - not having something society takes for granted as a norm makes me as queer as anybody else - but zero gender to queer in the first place. I’m queer because I don’t have gender, not because I have multiple genders, shifting genders or genders that don’t map to limited Western binary gender norms. Genderqueer doesn’t include me. Not at all.

Yes, the idea that “genderqueer” is in any way controversial so fucked up I don’t even. It shouldn’t be. At the very, very least, we need to stop policing an individual’s chosen identity!

But “non-binary” doesn’t exclude me, erase me or speak about me in specific reference to gender. It has space for my agender self that positions me outside the gender binary (because I am, by virtue of being genderless) without applying the word “gender”, lacking the prefix “a” or the suffix “less”, to my identity.

I’d be grateful, as an agender person with no sense of gender whatsoever, if people stopped to include this in their conversations about the use of “non-binary” as an umbrella term.

[eeee-lye]

No. Not a joke.

I’m getting really tired of all the posts that begin “Let’s talk about the Discourse” and end up discussing broccoli versus Brussels sprouts or pineapple on pizza. And, yes, while I expect this shit from haters and allosexist fucks because that’s another weapon in their armoury, this is intolerable from folk who claim to be allies or inclusionists.

For fuck’s sake, people are using the word “discourse” to justify and sanitise open hatred. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read a “discourse” post by someone who hates aces and aros for that post to mimic language used by the fucking cishet Christian right-wing to hurt, repress and silence GLBP people, I’d be able to live quite happily for the next month.

(All that crap about sexualising kids if they learn about asexuality, so we must silence asexual adults and teens from expressing their identity in order to protect the children? Where do you fucking think that comes from if not from the alt-right? How is it not the very bullshit the alt-Christian-right spews about how LGBP identities are inherently sexual and we need to protect the kids from this unwanted sexualisation? It’s the same argument pointed at a new target by people who should know better, people hiding behind a flimsy shield of what about the children. A tired shield haters have retreated behind since day dot. Just the same as a-spec hate is regurgitated monosexism, exorsexism and transmisogyny, there’s nothing new here save the appropriate target!)

This is hate. Discourse is sanitising hate.

When you try to make active and vindictive hate into something you can mock, you’re telling the victims of this hate that their hurt and fear doesn’t matter.

You’re telling a-spec folk who are too afraid to talk about who they are or defend their right to be part of our community that our struggles and fears right now on this website are a fucking joke so you can talk about fucking pineapple on pizza.

You’re a terrible fucking ally and you need to stop.

Discourse isn’t funny. Discourse isn’t something we get to mock because it’s a minor intracommunity spat. Discourse is vindictive hate. Discourse is or will be contributing to mental illness, self-harm and suicide amongst a-specs. Discourse is silencing a-specs by teaching us it is shameful to be who we are and wrong to expect community inclusion because of it, even though this entire discourse proves that we too are very much targets of hate. When I see the word “discourse”, I don’t laugh. I sigh and shudder because here we go again: I’m once again reminded that by daring to voice where I am on the asexual and aromantic spectra here on Tumblr, I’m seen as less queer, less deserving of being my whole self in the community, less safe, less assured of not being misgendered. Doesn’t matter that I’ve been in this community for ten years; I’m now less deserving. I sigh and shudder because I wonder what this is going to do, if it goes on much longer, to a whole generation of a-specs, and that breaks my heart, it truly does. How the fuck have we not learnt from all the hate we have experienced, the hate that has killed us? How the fuck is this funny?

Talk about broccoli versus sprouts, sure.

But don’t you fucking dare label it discourse.

[eeee-lye]

Because I keep seeing this

An ace-spec person can be gay/lesbian/bi/pan/poly without being gay/lesbian/bi/pan/poly romantic.

An aro-spec person can be gay/lesbian/bi/pan/poly without being gay/lesbian/bi/pan/poly sexual.

Demi/grey-ace and demi/grey-aro identities exist.

(Not to mention alterous attraction and platonic relationships! Are we really going to say that an aro-ace woman in a QPR with another woman and only interested in QPRs with other women isn’t a lesbian if that’s how she identifies herself?*)

Can we please stop only validating one’s gay/lesbian/bi/pan/poly-ness in ace-spec and aro-spec people by assuming it must only belong to the other side of the split attraction model? Because it invalidates greys, demis and other ace-spec/aro-spec people, especially those of us with different relationships to our sexual and romantic identities or alterous attraction, and I’m pretty tired of that. We need validation too!

Signed,

Your local grey-ace aro pan, who isn’t panromantic, is grey-ace and is still pan.

* Well, knowing Tumblr and its rampant allosexism, probably. Sigh.