#lgbt gatekeeping

[thebadchoicemachine]

“You’re ____. Just say you’re ____. You don’t need to be more specific. You don’t need all these crazy labels.”

You’re absolutely right. You know what else? Purple is just a shade of blue. It doesn’t really need a special label. We can just say it’s blue. We don’t NEED to be any more specific.

The label blue included violet for hundreds and hundreds of years. There’s even timeless poems encapsulating it (violets, purple flowers, are blue). We really didn’t need to be so specific. 

But... there IS a distinction. Nowadays if you call something purple blue people will correct you. And you know what? No one cares. because they’re right. Labels evolve. It’s at most a minor inconvenience where you have to look something up and learn something new about something you didn’t understand. Why are people so angry about it.

[seandarling]

An Unpopular Opinion, from me, I guess.

Allo people can be in qprs. Allo people can, in fact, understand queerplatonic attraction. It isn't just aromantic people who can be in a queerplatonic relationship. I say this as someone in a qpr. I say this as someone who is both asexual and not aromantic. I say this as someone who has been in this qpr for a while. I say this as someone who is happily in a qpr. I know multiple people who are also allo who are happily in qprs.

Yes, this is in response to someone. No, I will not tag them. I debated responding to them directly. Decided it would be best not to.

I just want people to know.

Queerplatonic attraction and queerplatonic relationships are not exclusive to aromantic people.

Please stop trying to gatekeep the LGBT community. You know who you are, although I doubt you'll see this.

Sincerely, someone who's really fucking tired of people telling me what I do and do not understand and what I can and cannot talk about without ever even trying to see if I do, in fact, know anything about anything.

[risingphoenix87]

Great video from AgitPropTV!

[welcometonightgayle]

LGBT gatekeepers deadass scare me...y’all are really out here saying shit like “you’re just a special snowflake who made up a label for attention” as if that isn’t a concept started by homophobes. Y’all are literally spitting out the most basic transphobic and generally LGBTphobic things like “special snowflake” and “looking for attention” and “it’s a phase” and you don’t see the problem with it and that’s scary!!

[hockpock]

it's good to change meanings and use of terms, but i'm worried that "freaky abnormal weirdo" will be used to justify people with 'kinks' in being a part of the lgbt+ community

I don’t have the counter-argument to this discourse pre-loaded so i’m not gonna get too much into it.

Do i believe that ‘coming out kinky’ is a Thing on the same level as ‘coming out’? No.

Do i believe that all humans have kinks in one way or another and that there’s a lot of crossover between kinksters and the LGBQT community?

hell to the yes. there’s a certain amount of ‘i’m already one thing that on the whole isn’t approved of, lemme check out this bdsm thing that’s supposed to be so nasty’ or ‘this pagan thing that’s gonna send me to hell’. As long as kinksters are doing their thing consensually, it’s not any of my damn business; just as it’s no one else’s business if my queer afab ass decided to take a male romantic interest to pride.

personally, I’m a biromantic asexual neurodivergent in a relationship with a nonbinary lesbian with an anxiety disorder. I’m also a giant anime nerd. Many of these things are not on the same level if we’re gonna play oppression olympics, but they are also ALL things that various people would consider me a “freaky abnormal weirdo” for, and in some cases actively try to harm me in an attempt to ‘fix’.

I will 99% of the time lean on the side of inclusivity vs exclusivity. Life is more interesting that way.

also, not my post, not my monkeys.

[dancinbutterfly]

Representation and Toxic Queer Gatekeeping

So this post about Willow and the representation of categories of queerness got me thinking, again, about queer gatekeeping and how destructive it is. So I want to share something with you guys. 

A few months after I came out, I told my mid-20s cishet sister that things had gotten a lot better for me because I fit better into the queer community now that I knew what I was. She was fucking BAFFLED by that. “What did that change? I mean, you weren’t out before? Haven’t you always been? I mean, you liked girls before. You knew, I knew. Why does it matter what you are if you’re not, you know, straight?”” When I explained to her that there was more to it than that, that people were more complex than gay, straight, bi, and trans, she stared at me, confused and said, “But I thought the LGBT community was all...accepting of everybody.” I broke down gatekeeping and categorizations She sorta sat there just desperately confused and the deeper I got the more confused she got and in the end she was like, “That’s fucking stupid. The point’s supposed to be that you are who you are. Why does what you call it matter?” It doesn’t, sis. It doesn’t.  Congrats, it took you 20 minutes to figure out what I had to stew on for about 15 years. Well done, lady.

SHADES OF THIS NITPICKY GATEKEEPING SHIT STOPPED ME FROM COMING OUT UNTIL I WAS 29 EVEN THOUGH I’D BEEN SLEEPING WITH BOTH WOMEN AND MEN FOR ~ 5 YEARS AND WANTING TO FOR LONGER BECAUSE I WAS SO FUCKING SCARED AND CONFUSED THAT I WAS DOING IT WRONG BECAUSE GATEKEEPING CULTURE AND MEDIA WAS TELLING ME THAT THERE WAS ONLY 1 QUEER FEMALE SEX ACT [it's oral btw, which I hate no matter who I'm fucking. I'm only sharing because i feel like people need to know this stuff so they don't get trapped like I did - oral is not the only F/F sex act and if you don’t like an act don’t you don’t have to do it]. AND SINCE I DIDN’T LIKE IT I COULDN’T BE BI/PAN. TURNS OUT? THAT’S A GODDAMN FALLACY. I HAD TO TALK TO A BI GUY ABOUT NOT LIKING GETTING FUCKED TO FIGURE OUT THAT OUT.

Turns out, you are who you are and if you’re not 100% straight? You’re queer. The goddamn end. 

Representation and in-community gatekeeping is dangerous. It hurts people. It makes us afraid to come out of the closet because well if we we’re only A, B, and C we can’t be X because to be X we have to be A, B, C, and D. So we must be Y but Y is straight and we’re not fucking straight. So we call ourselves allies while dying to be part of the community. That shit does lasting damage and keeps us on the outside of a group that we belong to. So watch yourself and open that gate up wider so that people who need to be inside can enter. 

Queer people don’t want to be in boxes so why are we building them?

IF A FUCKING STRAIGHT GIRL CAN GET IT, WHY CAN’T WE?

[profeminist]

Source

[bi-sapphics]

labels are indeed very weird and complex.

i, by definition, could qualify for “sapphillean”, but it just doesn’t feel right or fitting to me personally.

i’m a (partially) masc-aligned nblm and even non-men-aligned nonbinary people can be achellian/veldian, but that’s just not me. it doesn’t connect the way sapphic does.

i honestly think i would consider myself straight before considering myself fully mlm (I’m nowhere near that, of course, especially since my attraction to men feels pretty insignificant to the point where i’m closer to lesbian, but this is all hypothetical).

the point is: let people use whichever labels they think suit them best. yeah there are certain qualifications necessary ig because words each have some sort of definitive meaning somewhere but they know themselves better than you do. also don’t gatekeep labels either that’s bad (or so i’ve recently learned lol).