Salty Beach

- I love this mess -

by Pedro Gabriel

Lol

OMG

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Dysphoric trans girl cheering herself up with a greyscale filter, 2018 (colorized)

Joan the savior. Commission!

Gravity is a theory. Language is a social construct.

My point is that while social construct may not mean ‘not real’ or ‘lacking impact’, it also doesn’t mean that it makes a suitable one-size-fits-all explanation for concepts like gender. It’s overly simplistic, is what I’m saying.

Some social constructs are based on the idea of something that’s real, whereas some are not. Language is based on something real, the ability for the human brain to interpret complex forms of communication. Another example might be the status of being a refugee. It’s a social construct because it’s just another way human beings differentiate themselves socially, in this case by constructing conventions around the idea of national borders and what sort of status changes occur when you move through a world dominated by those concepts. By comparison, while money is a social construct, it’s not based in something real. It’s just an abstraction of value that allows us to easily trade with one another for resources that we might need or want.

There’s also a few simple tests that you can use to gauge whether or not you’re looking at something that’s just a social construct, and this is where I think the whole ‘ignore the traffic light and get hit’ argument can be seen most plainly to be a fallacy.

First, you can deny a social construct, change how you interact with it, or even replace it with a completely different one. A few examples:

You can ignore money. It sucks and it’s likely to cause you long term harm, but you can deny it in your life. You can replace it with another system of trade.

A traffic light isn’t a social construct, it’s actually traffic and traffic laws that are the social constructs in this case, but you can ignore the entire system. As a society we consider it so important to obey this social construct that we will use force to make you comply with it, but ultimately there’s nothing that requires you to obey those laws.

Similarly, when it comes to gender roles, you can choose to completely change the role that you’re inhabiting. Queer women can present themselves as butch but decide that they’re going to present as femme. A man beset by toxic masculinity can completely redefine his gender role to escape that toxicity by embracing openness and emotional honesty.

In other words, since a social construct is a way that we collectively rationalize our reality, they are highly mutable and can be ignored/overridden/denied/changed as needed. In fact, one of the ways that society evolves is by pruning social constructs in this way. Progressivism can easily be described as the need to change our social constructs to eliminate harmful ones and refine poorly built ones.

This is what I’m getting at when I say that gender isn’t a social construct. Because you can’t ignore/override/deny/change gender. There’s real biology there in the way our brains form identity and if we ignore that biology to describe gender as a social construct then we are also accepting all of the implications that brings.

If gender can be changed, then trans people should be able to change their actual gender to fit their assigned gender. Even though that sounds horrible, I have no doubt that there are some of us who have such problems with dysphoria and transition that we’d choose that path if it was offered if only to make the pain stop. And yet this doesn’t happen. You might also know this process by another name, conversion therapy.

If gender can be denied, then it should be possible for a trans person to repress their own identity their entire lives. You just don’t have to engage with it if you don’t want to. And yet we know that this is one of the things that kills us, because that kind of repression is intensely harmful to our well-being.Finally, if gender is a social construct then there should be societies that don’t have gender or have a radically different interpretation of gender. While there are societies throughout history that have respected the existence of trans people and non-binary genders, we’ve never had a human society that’s lacked gender or has reinterpreted it so radically that gender becomes unrecognizable.

This is what I mean when I say that gender is not a social construct. There’s actual biology there, biology in the brain that gives us fundamental aspects of our identity. While you can explore your gender and your understanding of it can change, it’s not something we can just change or override because it’s not a shared understanding, it’s a part of our sense of self. Gender informs our social constructs, not the other way around.

TL;DR

The thing I’m railing against is the idea that if gender has socially constructed elements then it cannot have any basis in biology. That’s what I think is unsupported and is ultimately harmful to understanding gender.

And yes, I completely agree that biological sex is a social construct, it’s literally just a way to organize people on the basis of genitals and doesn’t actually tell you someone’s underlying biology.

To come at this from a different perspective in the hopes that it will make my point clearer, the root of a social construct is behavior within a society. That’s the source of authority for this particular attribute. Your social constructs are not defined purely by you, they are defined by you and everyone around you, language being a perfect example. By comparison, there are traits by which you are the only source of authority, namely those that describe your identity as a person, gender being a perfect example.

“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella - gay rights, gay marriage, gay community - when discussing the entire community.

Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.

Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.

Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.

It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.

The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”

There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.

Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.” 

This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet. 

Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it. 

Queer is full of the types of people who don’t make good poster children for the middle class assimilationist cis gay couple just looking to get married and have some kids. Queer forces us to realize the fight didn’t end with gay marriage, and cis gays are gonna have to step out of the spotlight sometimes, and realize cis gays have privilege, and fight for someone with less. Trans people, nonbinary people, people in nontraditional relationship structures, aromantics, asexuals, sex workers. Heck more and more bisexual people these days are switching over to queer because the amount of biphobia in the so-called lgBt community is so alienating, and also because so many of us feel the term bisexual reinforces a false gender dichotomy and we’re too tired of jokes about kitchenware to use pansexual.

Text of a manifesto originally passed out by people marching with the ACT UP contingent in the New York Gay Pride Day parade, 1990. -

An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred. (We have been carefully taught to hate ourselves.) And now of course it means fighting a virus as well, and all those homo-haters who are using AIDS to wipe us off the face of the earth. Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it’s about gender-f— and secrets, what’s beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it’s about the night. Being queer is “grass roots” because we know that everyone of us, every body, every c—, every heart and a– and d— is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored. Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility. We are an army because we have to be. We are an army because we are so powerful. (We have so much to fight for; we are the most precious of endangered species.) And we are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is. Desire and lust, too. We invented them. We come out of the closet, face the rejection of society, face firing squads, just to love each other! Every time we f—, we win. We must fight for ourselves (no else is going to do it) and if in that process we bring greater freedom to the world at large then great. (We’ve given so much to that world: democracy, all the arts, the concepts of love, philosophy and the soul, to name just a few of the gifts from our ancient Greek Dykes, Fags.) Let’s make every space a Lesbian and Gay space. Every street a part of our sexual geography. A city of yearning and then total satisfaction. A city and a country where we can be safe and free and more. We must look at our lives and see what’s best in them, see what is queer and what is straight and let that straight chaff fall away! Remember there is so, so little time. And I want to be a lover of each and every one of you. Next year, we march naked.

I came of age after they discovered HIV and before they discovered how to treat it.   THAT is how old I am.

I worked and marched with friends and loved ones and the banner that brought everyone together was “Queer.”   The word doesn’t need to be reclaimed.  It has been reclaimed.  Before a lot of y’all were ever born. 

The word gay by the 1890s had an overall tinge of promiscuity – a gay house was a brothel. The suggestion of immorality in the word can be traced back at least to the 1630s, if not to Chaucer:

But in oure bed he was so fressh and gay

Which, y'know, FUCK THAT

QUEER AS IN FUCK YOU

It makes me so sad to see all these young kids being tricked into TERF ideology. My heart breaks for children who are free(er) to discover who they are, but tear down the history of what gave them that freedom. The world didn’t begin at marriage equality. We’ve always been here, and we’ve always been fucking queer.

one that starts off screencaps of a Twitter thread by Sigrid Ellis

this one also goes into how bizarrely ahistorical and new this “q-slur” nonsense is

and here’s where I quote a TERF-written article which specifically creates a straw tran of queer folks using “queer” against transmisogynistic cis lesbians

And I say, again:

Queer is a reclaimed word. It’s an umbrella term. It’s a point of pride, not shame, and I’d really encourage you to become familiar with the history of both the word queer and this recent bullshit about trying to make us ashamed for using it. Again.

Where my liches at?

I haven’t painted in, like, over a month