Your blog is a breath of fresh air. Just saw an irl friend reblog some truscum rhetoric (the mogai tumblr oppresses binary trans people, in their bizarro-world) and I'm feeling pretty bad because of it, it's just healing to see someone be proudly queer regardless of some assholes on the internet. Why are exclusionists of all kinds so hateful :/
Thank you so much.💕
I’m queer as in “I love you”
There’s that saying, “form follows function”? I think exclusionism is so hateful because it fundamentally stems from an unwillingness to be empathetic and compassionate to other people. And it’s so miserable and people get so stuck in it because once you create a world that’s harsh and cruel to acceptable targets, you have to work so hard to make sure no one treats you that way.
Empathy and solidarity really are the keys. For a big complicated coalition like the LGBTQ+ community to work, you’ve got to understand that a lot of other people have very different experiences and interests than you do, and you’ve got to give a shit about them, and then you’ve got to actually change your behaviour so you support them? That is a LOT of work. It’s literally just so much easier to say, “You know what? I don’t give a fuck. They can go choke. I’m only going to care about myself.”
I think I’m really lucky because, like, when I was a teenager I always had my friend @findingfeather, who likes to quote Terry Pratchett’s “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” She would point out EVERY TIME I tried to split people into an artificial Us/Them divide so I could decide the Them were bad and wrong and didn’t deserve to be cared about or treated fairly. Because literally every time you try to split humans up so you can treat some of them like shit, you’re doing a bad thing.
Apparently “it’s always bad to treat people like shit” is REVOLUTIONARY, but if it is, so be it, let’s have a revolution.
And also, I’ve done 6+ years of University training in psychology. We’ve done decades of scientific research, and the science says that you can’t change people very much by treating them like shit. Treating people like shit doesn’t make them better. Violence is useful in very limited doses for keeping yourself safe, but the more you use it, the greater its negative consequences. All positive human change happens after a massive expenditure of time and energy and empathy on somebody’s behalf. Empathy and compassion are difficult and take a lot of resources, but I literally looked at all the alternatives and nothing else works as well as them in the long run.
My pride in myself as a queer person is 100% based on my love for other people, but not romantically. The psychological scars of my childhood mean that I’m not actually that good at standing up for myself as an individual person, and I’m still really ashamed of my own sexual and romantic desires. If I’m isolated, it wouldn’t take much to just convince me I’m a freak and a weirdo and should shut up and not bother anyone.
But it was when I saw how this garbage was hurting other people–was hurting vulnerable kids I saw in my work, was hurting people in my community, was hurting my friends–that I was like, “Okay, fuck it. This is bullshit, and I’m going to fight, because you do not get to hurt them like that.”
And then empathy did that amazing thing empathy does: Loving them made it easier to love myself. Once I knew what they deserved, what was valid and beautiful about them, I could value myself more too.
Audre Lorde has this essay, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, about her experiences as a Black Lesbian woman in a largely white and heterosexual women’s movement. She argues, essentially, that for us to fix any deep societal problem, we cannot keep thinking and feeling about the issue the way our oppressors taught us to; we have to deeply understand and experience who is really affected, and treat all of us as important, not just the people with societal privilege.
I try to remember that saying every time I get caught up in a fight that’s basically lateral violence where we’re all pulling each other down, each trying to grab the master’s tools first to hit the others with. That’s not dismantling the system, that’s perpetuating it.
