so something that’s been bothering me about the whole “you’re forcing the term queer on us” thing…I might not have the right words, but here it goes…
I hate the f slur. I don’t want to be called it. bUT, here’s the thing, if a man who identifies as such decides to refer to his community (mlm) as “us f*gs” or something, I’m not gonna be mad because there is ENORMOUS difference between a self identified person using a word they’ve reclaimed on the community it and they belong to, than a bigot hurling a slur.
and that’s WITHOUT the long and weighty history of reclaiming and political relevance and sense of specific community or even it existing as a separate identity.
and like, there is a fundamental difference between people who use their words (slurs or not,) to describe their communities, and then coming face to face with an individual and calling you a term even though you’ve asked them not to.
and it’s like…frighteningly transparent where that difference disappeared (looking at the terf’s anti queer startup) but the fact that no one critically examines that obvious difference before they attack a young teen on the internet for calling their own community a term it’s been identifying with for decades is deeply unsettling.
when people use their reclaimed words to refer to their own communities, they really aren’t “forcing” that term on people who haven’t reclaimed it; they’re simply using their own language to talk about their community, same as anyone else. It’s not an insistence that everyone in the community identify with it, it’s saying that they do and are thus going to use the term for their community.
I also despise the exclusionist reclaimed “sga” but the principles still apply and every one of them uses “sga community” just as liberally as anyone uses “queer community” and yet the hypocrisy isn’t called out.
double standards for queer identifying people need to be dropped, like, yesterday.
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