#queering lgbt

[star-anise]

I recently saw your post about lgbt+ language with the history of queer and stuff, and is the phrase “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” also a result of a response towards those radical lesbians you were talking about, as well as society as a whole? I have no idea how or where I even saw that phrase and I don’t even think I’ve seen or heard it in over a decade, but it has that prolific sort of protest-y feeling and I’m curious

Ah, no. That one's not from conflict within the LGBTQ+ world, it's from our struggle with the world around us. It's the battle cry of a community trying to convince the world around them that LGBTQ+ people were:

A real and non-trivial part of the population, and could not be made to disappear

Human beings who deserved to live, even if they kept participating in "the homosexual lifestyle"

Dying at horrific rates of a disease nobody understood or had treatments for, and

Going to fight like HELL for their survival.

On a previous post of mine people got talking about the AIDS crisis, and the contributions made it better than anything I could do alone. I think it's very worth reading. But one thing I want to highlight is:

The Die-In. It was a tactic ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) used in the late 1980s and early 1990s to push AIDS into the public consciousness. Activists would rush into a public place like a traffic intersection, a busy train station, or the entrance to a government building, and "die", laying down and bringing things to a grinding halt. They held up signs and tombstones airing their grievances; they chanted slogans aimed to bring about the very particular political point they wanted to drive forward.

[Image description: ACT UP protesters outside the FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland on October 11, 1988. They demanded the release of experimental medication for those living with HIV/AIDS with slogans reading: 'Never Had A Chance.' 'I Got the Placebo' and 'I Died for the Sins of the FDA.' Source. End image description.]

AIDS deaths involved so much stigma and isolation. Fear of contamination meant that hospitals were reluctant to treat patients with HIV/AIDS, medical staff hesitant to touch them, and ordinary people afraid of so much as using the same toilet seat or water fountain as them.

And then, like the post I reblogged a couple days ago, severe illness and death meant that many people's estranged families suddenly re-entered their lives, because they were often the only ones with the legal rights to visit them in hospital or dispose of their effects, and wanted to hush up their queerness. Bury trans people under their deadnames, write obituaries of gays and lesbians that failed to mention their significant others or cause of death.

So that's... the context in which Queer Nation arose, and the environment in which "queer" was reclaimed. "Queer" was useful because it was inclusive and easy to put in a chant, and also because straight people did use it as a pejorative.

Mainstream liberals would literaly argue that sure, they guessed gay people had the right to exist, but did they have to be so blatant about it? Did they have to be such fucking queers? And sure, AIDS was terrible, but those activists were so unpleasant, and anyway, it's a totally preventable disease: Just don't have gay sex ever! Problem solved! (Spoiler: Gay people will not stop being gay; nobody deserves to die for having sex; and straight people can get HIV too.)

So ACT UP also staged "kiss-ins", which also involved occupying a public space, but this time to prove that people can be gay in public and the world will not end and society will just have to DEAL with its inherent disgust or moral outrage or whatever.

That's where the chant came from. It's stepping out defiantly into public space in a marginalized position, and warning the world that we are not going away. We refuse to go away. If, as many claimed, God himself designed AIDS as a punishment for the sin of homosexuality, and meant it to wipe gays from the face of the Earth? He must feel pretty sheepish right now, because it didn't work.

We're here. We're queer. Get used to it.

[st-dionysus]

How can you use d*ke if you’re not a lesbian?

Because I am a part of the dyke community. I spend most of my time around other dykes. Butch Dykes, Femme Dykes, Bi Dykes, Transfem Dykes, Trans Masc Dykes, FTM Dykes, Dykes, Dykes, Dykes that's what I am and who I love.

And it is a term that I reclaim. For some reason, Tumblr seems to be under the impression that only queer people belonging to certain groups can reclaim certain slurs, when that's not how reclamation works at all. As a trans man, the slur people use most against me is "dyke", it's the word that has been shouted at me on the streets and when I was in school what people referred to me as, I was quite literally stripped of my clothes in middle school in the girl's bathroom and the word "dyke" and "tranny" were sharpied across my body. When people want to misgender me as a trans man, guess what they call me? Dyke. When people assume I'm a lesbian, guess what they call me? Dyke. When people know I'm a trans man, guess what they call me? Dyke. Reclaiming that word means taking that power back and being able to say "Yes I am a dyke, that doesn't mean I'm not a man, I contain multitudes beyond your monosexual binary perception of gender and sexuality.

Dyke is also an identity that many many trans men use, both currently and historically. It's a way of clarifying that just because we are trans men that doesn't mean our sexuality is the equivalent of that of a heterosexual cis male, and that our love of women is just as queer as it was when we were lesbians and/or part of the lesbian community and used that label to describe ourselves. We might no longer be lesbians but many of us reamin dykes.

I'd also like to point you to this post from an ask "if youre a trans man "lesbian" does that mean youre a straight trans man or? sorry, genuine question"

As well as this post, on the history of Butch and Dyke as terms used by trans men. (Please note that this is a very long post, but also a very important one that will likely answer many of your questions, also it has one of my favorite zine covers, which I've attached below)

The fact is, trans men are allowed to have complex relationships with our gender and sexuality and the terminology we personally use to label or define ourselves by. Queerness does not conform to "You must be x to be x" and "you have to choose this if you are this", it's an exhausting binary form of thinking that actively hurts many people in the queer community, especially those of whom are trans.

You'll aslo want to note that MANY trans women and transfem folk ID as "Tranfags" or "fags" in general (many of my friends do in fact) Most people will agree that telling trans women they can't refer to themselves as fags or reclaim that slur is a form of transmisogyny, since it polices trans women's language and ignores that "fag" is one of the most frequent slurs used to attack them. So why is it that people don't regonize the fact that it's transandrophobic to police the langague that trans men use and ignore the fact that "dyke" is one of the most frequent slurs thrown at us?

(also, another fun fact is that many butch AFAB lesbians ID as "Faggot Dykes" since this is a term used to refer to some butch4butch couples ((as well as gay trans men who are t4t)), there is a very nice poem that talks about this, that I sadly can't find right now.)

I hope this helps <3

[strange-as-it-may-seem]

Identities can be opressive and divisive when one doesn’t have autonomy over it - when people are policing identities and terms, when there are rigid definitions and gatekeepers.

When you practice radical self-identification, when you believe in the person’s right to self-identify, when you respect other people’s identities and what terms that person can use, identities can be extremely useful, liberating, uniting (and fun!).

[star-anise]

It's honestly a relief when "queer is a slur" people just straight-up admit they don't like the word because it's inclusive to groups they don't like (eg. asexuals, pansexuals, aromantics, bisexuals, nonbinary and trans people)

(For people who are genuinely triggered by it: Blacklist the word. Just add the word "queer" to your filter list. Learn to recognize and avoid your PTSD triggers until you can handle that reaction in therapy. I sympathize, I've been there, the bigots during my youth used "gay" really hatefully and violently, I get it. May I recommend EMDR.)

Whereas for the people who honestly admit "I just don't want to be grouped in with THEM" it's like, thank you for not leaving me in suspense. Farewell forever, or at least until you've learned that no amount of "normalcy" will make the bigots actually stop hating you. "Gay" is also a slur to them. I hope this lesson isn't too painful to learn.

"Queer is a slur" is quitter talk. It says you think some people ARE freaks who SHOULDN'T be defended. It means you want to keep "queer" as a social category of people it's okay to despise. And that means I want nothing to do with you.

(Don't even try it on this post. DON'T. EVEN. TRY.)

[star-anise]

My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”

[star-anise]

There is no Central LGBTQ+ Identity Validation Committee, and there should not be.

All this questioning about “Is this identity valid?” or “Can these people use this word?” and sometimes I’m afraid that I’ve played into it by using historical examples or sociological surveys to prove that it is valid, because the more important thing is:

YOU DON’T GET TO POLICE SOMEONE ELSE’S IDENTITY. EVER.

If we’re afraid a certain identity will lead to murder, mayhem, predators, or assault, we need to combat that. If you’d only consider a certain behaviour bad or weird or creepy if a cishet man did it... you need to think really hard about why you think that. (And then, to be crystal clear, revise your rules to stop letting shit pass from LGBT people you think ~*magically cannot*~ be problematic or harmful, because honey, they totally can.)

If we allow our fellow LGBTQ+ to police our identities--to say whose gender or sexuality or anything else is valid--then we have not actually moved much further from the days we let cishet people do it. You still have to submit your application to the Central Validation Committee, which tells you what clothing you’re allowed to wear or who you’re supposed to fuck.  All that’s changed is who the committee members are.

If we allow these structures of identity policing to continue to exist, the system will reabsorb them in time. You’ll still need someone to sign off on whether you’re validly allowed surgery, but instead of a cisgender psychiatrist, it’ll be a trans psychiatrist. You’ll still get shamed and ostracized for sleeping with the wrong person, but instead of straight church elders, it’ll be your LGBT friends. Before too long, cishets will learn to enforce the LGBT community’s established norms. “You don’t qualify as a woman, so that isn’t really sexism.” “You’re not actually gay, so you can’t be in our club.” “In the Court’s judgment, this identity does not qualify as a protected class under anti-discrimination law.”

Don’t you see how much this still harms us? We cannot reshape society’s tools for our own purposes without living under the constant risk that they will be used on us again as soon as it’s convenient. These tools are too dangerous to leave lying around. We need to destroy them permanently.

[star-anise]

So “queer” isn’t just an identity that’s broadly inclusive because, I don’t know, we like big parties. There’s actually an underlying ethic, a queer theory, that has political implications.

Its name reclaims a slur because the point is to say, “I am different, but that’s not a bad thing.” The queer movement is about upholding the right of all people to deviate from an oppressive cisgender, heterosexual, patriarchal norm. Broadening the spectrum of acceptable diversity; questioning and dismantling the social pressures that police and punish deviance. Changing not just our own lives, but how our entire society thinks about sex and gender.

That’s why “queer” embraces so many different groups. It’s not trying to erase their differences, but to try to coherently understand the complex overlapping pressures that affect each of them, and to extend our reach beyond the LGBT+ community. It’s about the right of lesbians to live without men and the right of trans and nonbinary people to be who they are, the right of asexuals to define for themselves what’s significant in their lives, the right of straight men to be vulnerable and emotional and nonviolent. When the great queering project is done, you will see the changes everywhere, not just in small LGBT+ enclaves.

It’s recognizing that something that harms or oppresses one of us is pretty likely to harm all of us, so we all benefit from taking it down together.