So, I had the enormous privilege of actually listening to the private recording of a girl who bullied me in high school, as in a recording she made of herself saying things she assumed no one but herself and her friends would hear*. And in this video, she goes into how terrible me and my friends are, how ugly we are, blah blah blah.
And she specifies various things (my one friend with dyed hair looks like a troll doll, a different friend has bad teeth), but at the end of the video, she says, “Anyway, they’re all lesbians.” And it’s not that she hates us because we’re lesbians – it’s an afterthought, like she just tacks it on at the end there – it’s just a catchall term. It’s not specific, like our appearances, it’s generic. Everyone would understand what she meant, and it wasn’t “they all date women, therefore I don’t like them,” it was, “I don’t like them, therefore they date women.”
This is why I’m never going to be on board with the “queer is a slur” thing (outside of it just being TERF rhetoric). Because I’ve actually literally had “gay” and “lesbian” used against me, personally, as a slur, but I’d never demand that people tag those terms or stop using them to describe themselves or their communities.
*how I got this recording is a long story, but I rewatched it multiple times and it is indelibly in my memory, even though it’s been ten years.
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