So what Iâve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff theyâre saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, âOh my god, Iâm so sorry, I never meant to say that.â
Like, âqueer is a slurâ: I get the impression that people saying this are like⌠oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as âf*gsâ. Like, âOh wow, thatâs a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?â
So theyâre really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.Â
Thatâs because thereâs a history of âpolitical lesbiansâ, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the âcorrectâ sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that donât contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.Â
When âqueer theoryâ arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like âThe Queer Disappearance of Lesbiansâ, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis âgold star lesbianâ (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, âqueerâ was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didnât know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as âqueerâ were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and âqueerâ was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didnât get chased out of. If someone didnât disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didnât want to be called queer themselves, they could just say âI donât like being called queerâ and that was that. Being âqueerâ was to being LGBT as being a âfeministâ was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isnât evident when these interactions happen. We donât sit down and say, âOkay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, andâŚâ Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, âDO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,â because we cannot find a way to say, âThis word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldnât be alive in the same way if I lost it.â And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But Iâve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, âOh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didnât realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.â
And that? That gives me hope for the future.
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