welcome to Saturn, Mr. Astor

“#the way misty RUNS NOT WALKS to be near natalie istg” ~ @episode5s

"#they way they’re perfect#what is UP with how nat looks at misty when she does her gay little jog over#are y’all lgbt be honest#and maybe kiss about it” ~ @caligulaquigley​

#literally the whole season being like lol misty is SO obsessed with nat and nat doesnt care#to the last few episodes being like OH??? OH/?????? OH?????????????#and then u look back at How Nat Was Acting and it's like. ok they both had it bad!!! both freaks!!! ~ @chasingfictions

#yeah#scurrying like a little woodland animal#gay people#literally why is nat looking at her LIKE THAT#misty giggling and kicking her feet ~ @mistynxt​

#hdhskfhs love the way misty instantly ditches that dude#also nat in the 4th gif SO TRUE#like ma'am. be louder.  ~ @anyachristinaemmanuellajenkins

#GAY FUCKING FREAKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#mistynat#nat's little shoulder bump up to greet misty fuckin Sprinting over . im fine ~ @puntless

#can't tell me this ain't gay#like nat's serious face and then it changes when she sees misty#and misty just sees her and runs right over ~ @oswinthestrange

Like, “queer is a slur”: 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 “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s 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?”

So they’re 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. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, 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 “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t 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. 

When “queer theory” 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 “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, 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 “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” 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 I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?

And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.

“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.

Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.

(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)

That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..

So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.

are explicitly stated

to be cranberries

‘queer is a slur’ 

is the purposefully deceptive shortening of the radfem/TERF war cry 

‘queer is a slur against lesbians’

yes ‘queer’ was and is used as a mean word to hurt members of the Pride community in America, the UK, & other countries. that’s why there was a concerted & largely successful effort to reclaim the word in the late 80′s/early 90′s.

this post isn’t saying you have to personally reclaim ‘queer’ for yourself.

A lot of people - especially in my little neck of the woods - use queer as a slur freely. The monolith of the Lgbt community apparently didn’t get the memo that it’s okay to call us that because some were too busy getting that insult hurled at us. People are still being hurt by it. It literally means “different” or “weird”. It’s not the same everywhere - most “Queer isn’t a slur” groups aren’t in the southeast and Midwest - and they’re certainly a minority in those areas. 

And lose the guilt tripping of “you don’t have to identify as queer! But if you’re against it then you support terfs”. A lot of people are anti terf and still are hurt by the term.A lot of trans people are called “queers” and really don’t enjoy being called one and then being called a terf for not liking it.

the contested early history of the word ‘queer’ in reference to non-straight-non-cis identities aside*, the word ‘queer’ was used so ubiquitously as a slur in the US that LGBT+ activist group Queer Nation set out to reclaim it from their attackers by proudly taking the word as their identity label. (it defanged the word ‘queer’ so well that by the late 1990′s, US colleges had ‘Queer History’ and ‘Queer Studies’ courses.)

Of course: the reclamation work by Queer Nation was not universal. their activism was limited to the US, for one thing, and not everyone liked what they were doing. Queer Nation reacted to being called ‘queer’ belligerently and angrily, taking the word away from bigots, but this doesn’t delegitimize reacting by never wanting to hear the word ‘queer’ used to reference you again. yes: the word ‘queer’ is still used in a hurtful way, just like ‘gay’ is. And besides all this: it’s a legitimate decision to reject ‘queer’ as your identity for any reason, not just because of bad experiences.

so:

you’re not supporting TERFs by saying ‘I don’t like the word ‘queer’ being applied to me’, or ‘the word ‘queer’ has been used as a slur against me and I don’t like it.’ like other identities in the Pride community (such as ‘gay’ and variants on ‘trans’), ‘queer’ has a history of being used to hurt us. that’s legit. you’re legit.

this post is not aimed at you. It’s not aimed at anyone making a personal statement of their identity and preferred labels.

this post is aimed at the phrase ‘queer is a slur’ and the culture of censorship that sprang up around it, which has been used repeatedly (particularly on Tumblr) to shut down any and all posts that reference the ‘queer community’, anyone who proudly calls themselves ‘queer’, the use of the word ‘queer’ without censoring it to ‘q slur’, and more since 2013-ish.

it’s aimed at the popular nonintersectional radical feminist tumblr bloggers (who are at the very least sympathetic to the TERFs and SWERFs in their ranks) who popularized and spread the belief that ‘queer’ is only a slur, never a legitimate identity, because they hate the queer identity existing. 

(and why do they hate it? because Radfems/TERFs/SWERFs believe the queer identity is a form of violence specifically against (cis) lesbians. In the eyes of radfems, ‘queer’s lack of specificity prevents (cis) lesbians from explicitly identifying as lesbian and lets their ‘oppressors’ (read: men, trans women, non-straight-non-cis ppl with kinks, etc) have access to their ‘safe space’.)

In fact: allowing ‘queer’ to be a legitimate identity makes it difficult to gatekeep the LG(BT)** spaces radfems wish to control & police. But despite being only motivated by the desire to kick out/kick down everyone in Pride who isn’t a (cis) lesbian, radfems/terfs/swerfs sure were (and are!) perfectly happy to make it sound like they believe ‘queer’ is a deeply harmful word to the whole community of Pride - used only as a slur, and claimed as an identity only by ‘cishet invaders’ pretending to be one of the Cool LGs.

thus: radfems on tumblr erase(d) the work of Queer Nation and other activists to reclaim the word ‘queer’ from bigots. and when anyone reminds tumblr of the reclamation work from decades past, black&white-thinking tumblr is quick to react with what amounts to: ‘because some people who could reclaim ‘queer’ for themselves have chosen not to, it has never been reclaimed at all, by anyone - and you cannot reclaim it for yourself.’ because it’s true - there are many people who have chosen to not reclaim ‘queer’ even though they could, for many different reasons. 

but as I said in the OP post: the experiences & statements of people who, like you, have chosen to not id as queer, are being CO-OPTED by radfems/terfs/swerfs.

using the deceptive, easy-to-remember slogan ‘queer is a slur’ as a disseminating agent, radfems/terfs/swerfs have essentially STOLEN your personal story to ‘prove’ their bullshit narrative that ‘queer is a slur and only a slur’ - something you & others who don’t reclaim ‘queer’ are not even close to saying!

tl;dr: 

this post isn’t saying non-straight, non-cis people who don’t claim ‘queer’ are supporting TERFs.

it’s saying that TERFs are STEALING from you to damage the unity of Pride - a community that we are ALL a part of. (and that’s NOT YOUR FAULT, but we should all be aware that’s happening.)

*at a conference I attended recently, an expert historian said gay men called themselves ‘queer’ in the 1910′s, & that’s the first time the word pops up in English in reference to non-straightness. it was turned on non-straight-non-cis people over the following decades.

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

They wear suits, but they don't even know basic etiquette.

does not want to be a dull

husk of a human.

“Asians are very serious, disciplined, and organized.”

Algerian supporters showed up 🇩🇿 !