Every queer person I know over the age of 30 is fucking appalled by the state of the queer community, and I have heard some absolutely stellar anti-gatekeeping tirades from queer grandparents. I had a long conversation with a 43 year old pansexual who told me the infighting is almost certainly because we’ve collectively forgotten our joint history and have become more interested in individual social clout than actually advancing the movement for across the board queer equality.
So this is a reminder, I guess, that our elders are on our side. The gatekeeping and the exclusionary behavior is crap.
Stop👏calling👏us👏queer
If you don’t identify as queer then I’m not fucking talking about you, am I.
This TERFy “stop saying queer!” horse shit is exactly one of those appalling things, by the fucking way.
Every queer person I know over the age of 30 is fucking appalled by the state of the queer community, and I have heard some absolutely stellar anti-gatekeeping tirades from queer grandparents. I had a long conversation with a 43 year old pansexual who told me the infighting is almost certainly because we’ve collectively forgotten our joint history and have become more interested in individual social clout than actually advancing the movement for across the board queer equality.
So this is a reminder, I guess, that our elders are on our side. The gatekeeping and the exclusionary behavior is crap.
Since telling my Mum that I considered myself ace, I already noticed that she was a bit… too interested, if you want to say it like that. Asking for “signs”, or how being ace feels like… I tried to answer her to the best of my ability, giving her links to websites that would explain better as I ever could.
Today she said, very quietly, “Do you think I could be ace, too?”
And I said very carefully “If you think it suits you, I don’t see why not”
And my Mum, my strong, self-confident Mum, who never once has ever felt uncomfortable in her own skin as far as I know, beamed in relief. Relief.
Because she never knew. Because getting married young and bearing children for her husband (meaning sex) was expected of her. Because everyone gave her the feeling as if something would be wrong or broken about her if she didn’t want, didn’t do that.
Because her whole life long, she thought there was something wrong with her.
I’m honestly torn between feeling happy and relieved for her, and angry that humanity has such trouble with showing some understanding to those who don’t fit in the boxes society has designed for all of us.
Update: My
Mum was getting ready for bed when I noticed her humming loudly around her
toothbrush and I asked her what the good mood was about.
She beamed
around a mouth-full of toothpaste and said, very proudly and deliberately, “I
think I like that, being ace.”
And continued
on with her brushing, humming a bit louder.
(Or in
other words, I’m more than a little bit teary eyed.)
I had almost the exact same conversation with my Mom. We were talking about the LGBT acronym and explained that it’s LGBTQ and that some people add the PIA at the end as well. And she asked me “What’s the a?” So when I explained it she said immediately “Me. That’s like me.”
This is why I get so mad at people who think this is all just trendy bs, people just don’t have the vocabulary or permission to describe their lived experience.
A little louder people just don’t have the vocabulary or permission to describe their lived experience.
I see a lot of people on this site bending what Asexuality means so that it can benefit their toxic agenda, but I’ve also noticed that people who are sucked into that agenda often have zero clue what Asexuality actually is besides what they see on tumblr. So, mark your calendar folks because this is the day we set it straight. By the new year we will all have our eyes open on the word Asexuality.
I will first get into the history of the term asexuality (in terms of sexuality) and then I’ll get into it’s proper and improper uses/definitions often seen on the internet. I’ve made a post before about AVEN and it’s intense battle for the rights to the word asexual before (in response to another post from a well known aphobe) and I’ll sorta just be restating the same things here.
The 2000’s era was pretty big for asexual people as there were finally communities for them to talk about their experiences and find other people just like them. These communities, The Official Asexual Society and AVEN (Asexual Visibility and Education Network), while both working to bring visibility to asexual people, had some VERY different takes on what it meant to be Asexual. Many people do not know this, but the asexual community has had its own internal turmoil (even now as we speak). The Official Asexual Society argued that to be asexual one had to have an aversion to sex (anti-sexual is the term) and have no libido (nonlibidoist is the term), and thus heavily screened people to grant them membership to the community. AVEN argued that asexuality was simply the lack of sexual attraction and allowed all people of all varying degrees of asexuality within the community. As you can imagine, since they both used the word Asexuality for their conflicting websites, a battle of ‘So what is the truth’ struck up between these two communities. The Official Asexual Society claimed that real asexuals don’t have or want sex, and real asexuals have no urge to have sex (rhetoric that I’m sure many asexual people have seen even now within our own communities). The Official Asexual Society thus became a haven for asexual elitist that refused to acknowledge asexuals who weren’t like them. This drew away a lot of people looking for a place to be comfortable with their sexuality. So they went to AVEN instead. Because AVEN was inclusive to asexual people of all kinds, those deterred by The Official Asexual Society went to AVEN instead, thus building AVEN’s asexual population faster and greater than The Official Asexual Society. And because The Official Asexual Society didn’t get as much outreach as it did before, it gradually crumbled to renaming itself The Official Nonlibidoist Society, to eventually collapsing completely. The people themselves had spoken on what the definition of asexuality was and “The lack of sexual attraction to any gender” won. Source
All that being said, I will take no slander on how because the definition changed, asexuality has no real definition. The definition of the word ‘Democrat’ changed but nobody debates on what a democrat is. The popular definition of the word ‘Pure’ changed but nobody debates on what pure means. Definitions to words fucking change all the time. That’s why linguistics is a thing people study.
Now let’s get into the proper and improper uses/definitions of the word asexuality.
Since asexuality is defined as “The lack of sexual attraction to any gender” Then asexuality can’t be defined as:
uwu No Sex (yes that is shade). Asexual people should be able to state that they are sex repulsed and they don’t have sex without someone suddenly claiming that to be the definition of asexuality. Asexual people can have sex (one reason being to have a child). To say that Asexuality means ‘no sex’ would be ignoring the fact that there are many people who don’t have sex who are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual and etc. Are those people suddenly asexual? The answer is no, they are as they identify themselves to be.
Celibacy. Celibacy is a choice whereas Asexuality is not a choice (I will keep saying that until people listen).
TMI (too much information). I see this argument a lot where people will say ‘Only your partner should know your asexual’. And I have a few problems with this. When dating (you know that thing people do to find a partner) the conversation about sex will come up (unless you are dating within celibate and asexual circles). In those circumstances should we not mention our asexuality? And within a circle of new friends when someone asks ‘Hey, what’s everyone’s sexuality’ should we just not say anything? Stating you are asexual has NOTHING to do with your sexual activities. Read again: NOTHING. You see people who think asexuality is TMI, look at it as a modifier for other sexualities and not a sexuality. But asexuality can not be a modifier, which I’ll get into…
Here. A modifier. Since asexuality is defined as ‘The lack of sexual attraction to any gender’ then it can not function as a modifier for another sexuality that describes sexual attraction to a gender. It is not possible. Asexual people can, however, identify as homoromantic, heteroromantic, biromantic, panromantic, and etc. and thus can call themselves an ace lesbian, or a bi ace, or pan ace or het ace. But not all asexual people use the SAM to identify themselves. So if asexuality is a modifier for other sexualities, what about people who are aroace? What’s it modifying then?
Practically Straight. This one is typically in response to heteroromantic aces, but I’ve seen it in reference to all aces. Let’s make this clear right now, you can not be a straight asexual person. A straight person is a person who is sexually attracted to the opposite binary gender and pursues romantic relationships with people of the opposite binary gender. Because asexuality is defined as (and I repeat) the lack of sexual attraction to any gender, they literally can’t be sexually attracted to the opposite binary gender. Stop trying to redefine the word straight to benefit your aphobe agenda.
Since asexuality is defined as “The lack of sexual attraction to any gender” Then asexuality can be defined as:
The lack of sexual attraction to any gender. That’s literally it. And this definition includes (but is not limited to)
Demisexual people
Grey Aces
Aroaces
Heteroromantic Aces
Homoromantic Aces
Biromantic Aces
Panromantic Aces
Sex Repulsed Aces
Sex Neutral Aces
Sex Positive Aces
Kinky Aces (yes they exist)
Cisgender Aces
Transgender Aces
Intersex Aces
Autistic Aces
Aces with no sex drive
Aces with a normal sex drive
Aces with a high sex drive
Aces who have been through the trauma of sexual assault
White people who are aces
POC who are aces
Ace Women
Ace Men
I hope that someone out there learned something today. And if you didn’t and you are still gonna misuse the word asexuality, I can’t help you at this point. Happy New Years Eve. I hope that everyone has a good 2018. Let’s start off right.
*I went back and edited the bullet point on straightness just a tad
I’m a qpoc, This is what I’m talking about when white people straight wash POC.
@hijabby may I hop on this post to make a point? You’re quite a bit younger than me, which isn’t a problem or a bad thing, it just means you will have still been in kindergarten or not even born yet when the events I am about to discuss took place and given the nature of queer history, it’s totally possible I learned stuff that’s faded into ephemera for your generation.
QUEER WAS THE ACCEPTABLE, ACADEMIC TERM FOR “LGBTQIA” IN THE EARLY-TO-MID 2000s.
I took classes in Queer Literature. We discussed Queer History. Some of my professors–who were themselves gay, lesbian, and bisexual, mind you–referred to historical figures as queer on the basis that those figures did not exist in societies that had a modern-day understanding of sexuality, and so trying to box them into modern labels is an exercise in futility. I went to marches where we screamed “we’re here, we’re queer, we want our civil rights.”
All of this, by the way, spawns out of the Genderqueer and ACT UP movements of the 1990s; they’re the ones who invented the chant on which the above chant was based, the one you may have heard elsewhere: “we’re here, we’re queer, get over it.” I’m proud of my own part in queer history, but those people, the ones who created the AIDS quilt and the die-ins and the fierce demands for same-sex marriage so they could visit partners dying in the hospital, they’re the real heroes. And they called themselves queer.
And?
Most of them were not white.
I am. The radical activism of my generation looks very different from generations past because, I’m sorry to say, white queer folks sat back and let queer folks of color do the hard part, and then we grabbed the baton and charged over the first big finish line while the sportscasters talked about the stunning race we’d run. I’m not sorry to be an activist or to be working in my own generation, but I’m very deeply sorry that queer activism en masse has widely ignored the nonwhite, noncis people who got us where we are.
“Queer” has more uses than just being a slur that was reclaimed 30+ years ago. Queer is a useful term if, say, you’re 15 and you’re not sure if you’re asexual or a late bloomer, but you don’t want to just say “oh yeah, I’m gay/straight.” Queer is a useful term if, like me, you escaped a fundamentalist church and your whole life has been defined by strict labels, and you just want out. Queer is a useful term if you’re from a country where gender doesn’t fit a Western binary but you want a quick term to describe yourself to Western people.
And do you know what else queer is?
Queer is hated by TERFs because it encompasses trans people.
Because it embraces aroace people.
Because it says “you are here, you are welcome, you belong” to people who say “I know I’m not straight, but I don’t know what I AM.” What you are is queer, and queer is enough. Queer is the place you can sit, rest, and figure it out at your own pace.
TERFs started the narrative of “queer is only a slur, has never been anything else, and was never reclaimed and you should never ever say it ever” in order to gatekeep our community. When you try to deny this term, YOU ARE DOING THE WORK OF TERFS.
Queer is not a slur. Queer is a reclaimed word that is of huge help to people across the community, but most especially to our fellows who aren’t “just” LGB, and to the nonwhite members of our community who do not fit into the gender binary.
Stop. STOP. Stop listening to TERFs who pretend nothing of queer rights existed between 1880 and 2015. Stop being ahistorical and disenfranchising.
We’re here, we’re queer, get the fuck over it.
In addition to all of this, The Bi community in the 80s and 90s used Queer a lot as well because the word Bisexual was less tolerable so to still feel a part of the community they rightfully were a part of, they used Queer. Granted, this was when they were rallying and making sure people saw “Bisexual” on posters and pins but it made gay people uncomfortable and not every Bisexual could handle that.
So when I see things like “Q Slur” what it looks like is the active invalidation of lgbt+ people who find safe haven in a word that is all-encompassing without specification. When I was confused and having panic attacks over the fact no label fit me – Queer saved me.
I think people have a right to choose not to use a reclaimed word for themselves, marginalized people get that choice. But to demand NO one use it often comes with the implication of an unawareness to the history behind it and how our community fought tooth and nail for that word to be reclaimed for us to use – decades ago.
Tossing in a bit of my own knowledge here: queer was also used as a positive self-identifying term as early as the 1930s interchangeably with gay (which was used by all genders).
We’re here, we’re queer, go fuck yourselves.
Pardon me, Gay New York by George Chauncey pushes this date back to 1910. My bad.
‘Queer’ was reclaimed as an umbrella term for people identifying as not-heterosexual and/or not-cisgender in the early 1980s, but being queer is more than just being non-straight/non-cis; it’s a political and ideological statement, a label asserting an identity distinct from gay and/or traditional gender identities.
People identifying as queer are typically not cis gays or cis lesbians, but bi, pan, ace, trans, nonbinary, intersex, etc.: we’re the silent/ced letters. We’re the marginalised majority within the LGBTQIA+ community, and
‘queer’ is our rallying cry.
And that’s equally pissing off and terrifying terfs and cis LGs.
There’s absolutely no historical or sociolinguistic reason why ‘queer’ should be a worse slur than ‘gay.’ Remember how we had all those campaigns to make people stop using ‘gay’ as a synonym for ‘bad’?
Yet nobody is suggesting we should abolish ‘gay’ as a label. We accept that even though ‘gay’ sometimes is and historically frequently was used in a derogatory manner, mlm individuals have the right to use that word. We have ad campaigns, twitter hashtags, and viral Facebook posts defending ‘gay’ as an identity label and asking people to stop using it as a slur.
Whereas ‘queer’ is treated exactly opposite: a small but vocal group of people within feminist and LGBTQIA+ circles insists that it’s a slur and demands that others to stop using it as a personal, self-chosen identity label.
Why?
Because “queer is a slur” was invented by terfs specifically to exclude trans, nonbinary, and
intersex people from feminist and non-heterosexual discourse, and was
subsequently adopted by cis gays and cis lesbians to exclude bi/pan and ace
people.
It’s classic divide-and-conquer tactics: when our umbrella term is redefined as a slur and we’re harassed into silence for using it, we no longer have a word for what we are allowing us to organise for social/political/economic support; we are denied the opportunity to influence or shape the spaces we inhabit; we can’t challenge existing community power structures; we’re erased from our own history.
Pro tip: when you alter historical evidence to deny a marginalised group empowerment, you’re one of the bad guys.
“Queer is a slur” is used by terfs and cis gays/lesbians to silence the voices of trans/nonbinary/intersex/bi/pan/ace people in society and even within our own communities, to isolate us and shame us for existing.
“Queer is a slur” is saying “I am offended by people who do not conform to traditional gender or sexual identities because they are not sexually available to me or validate my personal identity.”
“Queer is a slur” is defending heteronormativity.
“Queer is a slur” is frankly embarrassing. It’s an admission of ignorance and prejudice. It’s an insidious discriminatory discourse parroted uncritically in support of a divisive us-vs-them mentality targeting the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQIA+ community for lack of courage to confront the white cis straight men who pose an actual danger to us as individuals and as a community.
Tl;dr:
I’m here, I’m queer, and I’m too old for this shit.
I know I keep reblogging posts like this, but it matters to me. “Queer is a slur” is a TERF dogwhistle, and a lot of the younger generation is falling for it. Please pay attention to history and ask questions about who’s behind social media campaigns that undermine the inclusivity of your community.
I rarely see anyone in the ~discourse point out that “gay” is a reclaimed slur itself. Somehow everyone is aware that it used to mean “happy, chipper, festive, sociable, flashy, lighthearted, etc,” yet no one stops to realize how utterly offensive it is to use that word as a euphemism for mlm. It requires zero additional context to see the blatant effemiphobia and realize it’s entwined with the STILL PERVASIVE stereotype of mlm as frivolous, loud, carefree dandies (see also: nancy boy, nelly, sissy, light in the loafers, and about a hundred other slurs that are still recognizable as such). It’s considerably worse if you do add some context – before it came to specifically mean “homosexual,” it was also used more broadly to mean “sexual deviant” (mlm, literal prostitutes, figurative sluts).
This isn’t petty hair-splitting about ancient history, either. It was aggressively reclaimed circa the 1950s, and frankly, the fact that it had already lost its venom by the time YOU popped into existence just proves how successfully a term can be reappropriated by the people it’s meant to marginalize. The reclaiming of “queer” has already happened, too – the only people debating its merits at this point are either screaming into the void that is Tumblr, or taking an edgy stance in a classroom discussion at the college where they’re majoring in, you know, QUEER STUDIES. Trying to give the term back to bigots is as misguided and pointless as trying to get a “gay is a slur” movement off the ground. Yes, it is; that’s the point; welcome to the twenty-first century.
Like, gay is a slur. I constantly heard it used as a slur in high school—I’m 23, so I graduated only 6 years ago, this coming spring. I’ve heard it a lot less since then, partly due to campaigns for people to stop using it negatively, partly due to where I went to college, and partly due to how it’s an age-marked thing, so young adults generally don’t use it when they’re trying to fit in with older adults (for example, in a workplace). But I’ve still heard it, in the last 6 or 8 months. “That’s so gay.” I had a panic attack.
So by rights I should be perfectly fine writing it as g*y or g slur, right? (Though the last also refers to something else.) And I understand that there are people who identify as g*y, but it is a slur and they should only use it for themselves, not for the entire community.
…
Yeah, right. I’m not actually going to do that, except as performance art. It’s offensive and ridiculous. But “gay” is if anything more of a slur than “queer” is these days, so you either have to censor both or censor neither. You can tell that doing it to “gay” would be offensive, so don’t do it to “queer.”
While you’re at it, you should censor autistic and disabled too! Because people using peoples identities as an insult is what makes them a slur, right?
I think you are proving my point and not the one you were trying to make.
People aren’t born queer. Queer is an adjective that can mean a multitude of things, and was used to describe gay and trans people as a SLUR.
We chose gay. We picked the word. A playground insult isn’t the same as a slur. You think that being bullied in high school while being called gay is compatible to being killed while being called queer?
There is so much suffering behind the word queer, but your feelings about it being written as qu**r are way more important than the people who face violence and oppression associated with the word, right?
#ITS NOT OFFENSIVE TO STAR A SLUR
Bless that fucking tag.
We chose “queer” too. We chose “queer.” We chose it because we wanted to take the word back. And like people have never been murdered while being called gay? Please. Nothing’s ever just a “playground insult.” Where something is a “playground insult,” you know there are beatings and even murders happening as well, in smaller numbers.
And you’re going to act like people have to be individually murdered to be able to have a say in how things should be done? How convenient, that the only people allowed to disagree with you are dead.
And on that note, a lot of people who were the original ones choosing to call themselves “queer” are in fact dead, because the US government took over a decade to bother to fund AIDS research because they wanted all the queers and druggies dead anyway and decided it was free eugenics. And a lot of the reason that any of that changed is that a bunch of people in ACT UP and Queer Nation called themselves “queer” and were like “Hey you, we’re exactly the undesirables you think we are, and we still deserve medical care and a chance to live anyway. We’re here, we’re queer, and you’re not fucking getting rid of us.” And a lot of them didn’t survive to see antiretrovirals come out, but some of them did, and the point is that they got the process started even if they didn’t live to see the end result. And the ones who are still alive are usually like “????” if they’re on tumblr, and the ones who are dead would be pretty fucking pissed that you’re walking over their memory like that, if there’s an afterlife, which is up for debate.
So, yeah, you don’t know your history, and you have no idea why your little asterisks are so offensive. And maybe you don’t want to learn, but when someone says something is offensive, at least listen to their reasons instead of completely misstating the entire situation. (As I have listened to yours, and found them completely detached from anything that exists in reality.)
That whole “gay isn’t a slur but queer is” is just plain old fashioned gaslighting and it really, really needs to stop.
Queer is powerful.
Queer is “I don’t fit in your tidy boxes and you just have to deal with that.”
Queer is “I don’t owe you an explanation.”
Queer is “I don’t have it all figured out yet, I just know I’m not completely straight and/or completely cis.”
Queer people are the ones who started talking about queer film and queer literature and began the queer studies departments in universities and queer resource centers and queer youth centers.
Bisexual and pan people and trans people and intersex people and ace and aro people–plenty of us aren’t gay. Using “gay” as the umbrella term erases a hell of a lot of identities, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
My identity is queer first and foremost. I don’t need to reveal to everyone at every occasion that I’m a demisexual kinky married genderqueer polyamorous pansexual. Queer pretty much covers it.
A friend snapped me these photos and it made me so incredibly happy. there are a lot of people trying to keep bisexuals and asexuals out of LGBTQ+ spaces and it warms my heart to see The Stonewall Inn including these groups in the community.
Can you please reblog if your blog is a safe place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, asexual, aromantic, pansexual, non binary, demisexual or any other kind of queer or questioning people? Because mine is.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 