Reading through a argument around “is queer a self defined thing or is it something where you have to check off at least one specific named identity and tell people what that is thing?” And there’s a 17 year old who expressed concerns about the idea of queer being a self identifier thing getting his ass handed to him. Which, I have to say, my initial reaction (safely saved to drafts) also involved a lot of swear words, and not colorful background swearwords either.
Fuck off. My initial reaction was to tell him to fuck off. And that, never mind about hypothetical straight fakers, I didn’t want him at my queer events.
But...I can understand, being young, probably being new to the community, possibly not having any offline community at all, how someone might find themselves arguing that position.
I mean, we got a lot of gatekeeping of various types on this site and in online queer spaces in general. It’s a thing someone could pick up without really questioning it, just because other queer people are saying it. And, you’re new, you’re unsure of yourself, you want to fit in. I can see it.
So, the kind gentle explanation, for anyone who needs less fuck off and more patiently explaining. (If I get replies/asks about this I’ll attempt to continue with the patient version.)
The acronym isn’t fixed. It’s fluid, and the categories within it are fluid.
For example: Marsha P Johnson in her life didn’t call herself a transgender woman. She called herself a transvestite and a gay man, even though she used she/her pronouns. Now, we look back on that and think “well, the language changed over time, someone who lived the way she did would almost certainly call herself a trans woman now, and the modern queers who identify with her most tend to be trans women.” Categories are fluid, in that now we’re inclined to see “trans woman, cross dresser, gay man” as entirely separate categories that aren’t especially related to each other (and het crossdressers might not be seen as queer at all) but they used to have much more overlap.
As another example, “non-binary” wasn’t really a thing when I hit adulthood. There were people who would now call themselves nonbinary, but they used different terms, like genderqueer. Stone Butch Blues talks about “he-she’s”, a term that straddled “butch lesbian” and the modern “transmasculine”, and which definitely isn’t in common use any more.
And that’s just in recent American history! If you look at how queerness is conceptualized across time and across cultures, it varies so much. Some cultures have more than two genders that are universally recognized within that culture. Some times/cultures see homosexuality as being dependent on whether you’re topping or bottoming or about gender roles: a guy who bottoms or takes on feminine gender roles is gay, while one who tops is just a normal straight guy. Sometimes a culture has fairly set gender roles, but people who are biologically male or female taking on the opposite role and having a same-sex partner is completely normal and unremarkable.
The alternative to “a queer person is someone who says they are queer” is to have a fixed definition. You are queer if you check at least one: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, (asexual, intersex, two spirit, whatever else we want to explicitly include on the list.) But that would require “queer” to have a fixed definition and for all the sub-types of queer to be fixed.
What about when people don’t know for sure: a woman who knows she’s lesbian or bisexual but not which, a person who might be trans but isn’t quite sure, someone who might be asexual but again isn’t quite sure, but perhaps is quite sure they don’t feel comfortable when straight people talk about sex and romance. (And then there’s what happens when you’ve always thought of yourself as gay, but your partner is transitioning so what does that make you?) Hanging out in queer spaces with people who are queer makes sense for all of those people, even ones who might eventually decide they’re not actually queer after all.
And I’ve been writing paragraphs and paragraphs, but I think I missed the main point, which is: the alternative to “queer is self-defined” is “someone else gets to tell you whether you’re queer or not.” Which gives strangers permission to ask all sorts of invasive questions. (Especially if the given reason for defining queer is to keep people who aren’t queer out of queer spaces! That can only happen if you actually ask people coming into a space what they are!) There’s no way to define queer other than “someone who says they’re queer” or “someone who thinks they fit in with other queer people” that doesn’t open the door to those sorts of challenges.
And, in turn, to gatekeeping out people who might not be “queer enough” (ie, close enough to exclusively gay or lesbian) — in practice, trying to define queer leads to defining queer in a way that excludes aces or some trans people or all trans people or bi/pan people with opposite sex partners, or all of the above.
(Not entirely happy with how I’m using the term “sex” here, because I get “biological sex” can be a complex and very loaded concept for many trans people. If someone sees something they’re uncomfortable with and can suggest a better alt phrasing let me know.)
So, people tend to react to “queer shouldn’t be self-defined” in exactly the same way they’d respond to ace exclusionism or terf talk. Because...in practice, insisting queer has to have a fixed definition (or telling people to not use the word) tends to be round one of a game that ends with exactly those things. Even if you personally didn’t mean it that way, the rest of us don’t know that. We react to it like anti-racist activists respond to “All Lives Matter” — maybe it could be innocuous confusion, but it comes from a place of malice often enough that people do tend to assume malice.
Because the idea of fakers who are really straight infiltrating the community...that’s a terf idea and an exclusionist idea, and it doesn’t really fit with any robust and self-consistent understanding of queerness other than those ideologies.
