Want to see your OC in Puyo Puyo or lineless vector style? Want a logo for your VTuber, indie game, or just a fictional company for your fanfic? Want a font to be in Cyrillic, Shavian, or another writing system?
Now you can get it! While supporting a trans artist from across the seas!
Contact me on Bluesky DMs, Discord DMs, or Tumblr DMs if you’re interested.
My previous or current projects include:
Dollphone Icon Pack (everything but the code)
StyleStar, the freeform dance game (logo, logo font, and mascot)
Demonic Rebellion sticker pack
You Don’t Know Jack: the Re-Ride (some Season 1 sponsor logos, including The Electric Armchair [text only], Ice Hypercube Dispenser, Unforbidden Snacks, Barry’s Historical Beard Balm, Myth World, Pretend2Care.com, The Algorithm [text only], The Dark Void, Act Like a Normal Person Acting Coach, House Keeping, The Ministry of Bread and Games, Climate Cola [label design only], Reverse Psychiatry, Wine-1-1 [label design only])
Important note: While I am a bisexual trans woman, I have never been, am not, and will never be “q***r”, and request not to be referred as “a q***r artist”, “part of the q***r community”, or “q***r” in any other way.
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one of the really vile things about generative ai which i feel like we don’t talk about enough is that for like 90% of the cases where it’s used to generate text, image, video etc. THE EXPLICIT INTENT is to deceive the viewer/reader into thinking it’s NOT ai. what this does is to create an extra level of ambient distrust when viewing any kind of media not created by yourself and when you do notice that something is ai-generated, there is the implicit understanding that whoever “made” the ai-generated thing was trying to deceive you or take advantage of you. thus a kind of ambient paranoia is spread across society where everyone feels like everyone else is out to get them and that nothing is real.
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
this is your Pride Month reminder that war is 20% battles, 80% diplomacy
too many of you have romanticized the Stonewall Riots so much, that it seems like you have internalized the bigotry that LGBT people didn’t exist before them, and that being LGBT is, or necessitates, antagonizing random strangers instead of criticizing power structures.
LGBT pride should necessitate neither cishet shame nor compulsory q***rness.
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I hate the "I hate labels" crowd. A "label" is just a descriptor. You use the word to quickly and efficiently describe what/who you are, rather than needing to tell an entire life story. If you want to be label-less/unknowable that's great, but don't be surprised when people don't immediately understand you. My labels are not a box they're a method of communication.
IBM Accidentally Designed Turkmenistan’s Alphabet (maybe)
I claim that the 1993 Turkmen alphabet contained 4 currency symbols and 1 mystery glyph, because of IBM. Yes, I will elaborate.
by Haley Walker, published 2026 May 31
This is a mirror of my Substack blog post. The full text is reproduced below with minimal changes.
This blog post is in response to the article The Currency Symbol-Like Letters of the Turkmen Alphabet from Chris Shares. To summarize its contents:
Wikipedia states that the 1993–1999 version of the Turkmen alphabet contained four currency symbols as letters: ⟨£⟩, ⟨$⟩, ⟨¢⟩, and ⟨¥⟩.
Its author Christian expressed doubts about it, citing Rewriting the “Nation”: Turkmen Literacy, Language, and Power, Dr. Victoria Clement’s dissertation in 2005.
The dissertation states that ⟨$ ¢⟩ was replaced with ⟨Ş ş⟩ by 1995, with other currency symbols being phased out by 1996.
Upon traveling to Turkmenistan, Christian saw instances of old ⟨Ñ ñ⟩ instead of the current ⟨Ň ň⟩, datable to 2004 and 2006.
Upon further online image-searching, Christian found banknotes and postage stamps using ⟨$⟩ and ⟨¥⟩.
He also found a Turkmen alphabet table using all four currency symbols, but concluded from its letterforms that ⟨$⟩ and ⟨¢⟩ were intended to be ⟨Ş⟩ and ⟨ç⟩ with an upside-down cedilla above, and ⟨¥⟩ was intended to be the Kazakh Cyrillic letter ⟨Ұ⟩.
▲ A printed Turkmen alphabet table showing all the weird glyphs of the original proposal. Image retrieved from Christian’s blog post.
However, Christian did not address two oddities with the original 1993 proposal. Firstly, where did the lowercase ⟨£⟩ come from? It has never been used in any Latin or Cyrillic alphabet before, that I know of. Secondly, why was uppercase ⟨ÿ⟩ was chosen to be ⟨¥⟩, or in Christian’s hypothesis, ⟨Ұ⟩? ⟨Ұ⟩ has a lowercase in Kazakh, doesn’t it?
My hypothesis is that these letters are indeed currency symbols, and that the original 1993 Turkmen alphabet was designed for compatibility with IBM Code Page 437 first, and aesthetics second. It explains the weird letter casing correspondences and changes, though just as Christian, I couldn’t find primary sources to corroborate this online.
The full Code Page 437 character set. ASCII Latin characters are in green, except for Q, V, and X, which are not in the Turkmen alphabet and are in purple. Non-ASCII letters and symbols are in orange. Other characters, including numbers and punctuation, are grayed out. Original image.
Hi, I’m Haley, a computer science graduate fluent in Japanese and English (but not at all in Turkmen), and here’s my retrocomputing-informed educated guess as to why the 1993 Turkmen alphabet was so weird.
The Turkmen National Alphabet’s goals, besides nationalism
Then-President Nyýazow, the spearhead of the Turkmen National Alphabet project, stated that the goals of the Turkmen Latin alphabet (besides symbolizing a new Turkmen culture) included access to information technology:
However, in the end, Turkmenistan pursued an alphabet “based on its own unique letters in order to mark every single [Turkmen] phoneme. (Clement 2005, p150) [...] Moreover, in every speech [President Nyýazow] gave in 1993 [about the 1993 Turkmen alphabet], he mentioned the importance of information technology as the “number two” reason for pursuing a Latin-based script; the “number one” reason was cultural pride. (p151)
Clue 1: the Mystery Glyph
But in that case, why the mystery glyph for the lowercase ⟨£⟩? Wikipedia, citing the alphabet table image, says it looked like ⟨ſ⟩ but placed lower, having a descender. That has never been a letter in any Latin alphabet that I know of, nor an “internationally recognized sign”—although it coincidentally looks like the letter for /v/ in the Shavian alphabet for English ⟨𐑝⟩.
Methinks that the lowercase ⟨£⟩ is the smoking gun that this alphabet was designed for an IBM PC or compatible. All the letters (and currency symbols) of the original 1993 Turkmen alphabet are representable in Code Page 437, the default character set for IBM PCs which supported a range of mathematical symbols, except for that lowercase ⟨£⟩. I think that lowercase ⟨£⟩ was originally “top half integral” ⟨⌠⟩. It fits the bill: it looks like ⟨ſ⟩ but descends below the baseline.
The lack of a serif at the bottom of the mystery glyph also corroborates that this is a top half integral. The integral parts are designed as extensible symbols, with ⟨⌠⟩ and ⟨⌡⟩ being the top and bottom halves of the integral symbol, and with ⟨⎮⟩ extending the integral if more height is needed. As such, they end in a bare stroke with no adornments.
However, the long S ⟨ſ⟩ is intended as its own letter, so in serif fonts, it ends in a serif as does ⟨f⟩. (A serif is a decorative line, at the end of the strokes of a letter.) When we look at the printed alphabet table from before, we can see that the mystery glyph has no serif at the end, indicating that it’s not a long S, but a top half integral.
Comparison of “long S” ⟨ſ⟩ and “top half integral” ⟨⌠⟩ in the font Century Schoolbook, demonstrating that the bottom of the “long S” has a serif, but not the bottom of the “top half integral”. Original image.
The typesetter either must have already had a sort (or a phototypesetting glyph, given the era and presence of the Cyrillic cursive equivalent) for the top half integral; or lacking one, must have made one, looking at a printout and noticing that it didn’t have a serif on the descender.
Clue 2: the Uppercase ⟨ÿ⟩
Other casing choices also support my hypothesis. Why was capital ⟨ÿ⟩ ⟨¥⟩? If there were no problem with putting a dieresis on a lowercase ⟨y⟩, there should be no problem with putting a dieresis on a capital ⟨Y⟩, right? And if the alphabet is supposed to borrow the Kazakh capital letter ⟨Ұ⟩, why didn’t it borrow its lowercase ⟨ұ⟩? Was it just Nýyazow’s random fancy?
No, this weirdness must have had a reason. Look at CP437 again, and notice that it contains the lowercase ⟨ÿ⟩, but it lacks a capital ⟨Ÿ⟩. The team who designed CP437 (and ISO 8859-1, and Unicode) included the lowercase ⟨ÿ⟩ for French, but they left out the capital ⟨Ÿ⟩ because it only occurred in all-caps text. But the team had included the currency symbol ⟨¥⟩, anticipating dealing with Japanese companies using the Japanese yen, and with Chinese companies using the Chinese yuan.
The full IBM Code Page 437 character set. You can find ⟨ÿ⟩ below ⟨x⟩, but the capital ⟨Ÿ⟩ is nowhere to be found.
Since ⟨ÿ⟩ was the only ⟨y⟩-like character with diacritics in CP437, and it did not have an uppercase version in the code page, the designers of the alphabet were forced to use ⟨¥⟩ as its uppercase equivalent.
Impetus for Changes
With the spread of other text encodings, including ISO-8859-2, its IBM implementation Code Page 912, and eventually Unicode, these idiosyncrasies stopped having a practical purpose. I think that is why the weirdnesses were gradually ironed out. ⟨Ş ş⟩ for Turkish and ⟨Ý ý Ž ž⟩ for Czech were supported in CP912, so as soon as font support rolled out for them, Turkmen started to use them instead. Same with ⟨Ň ň⟩ for Czech instead of ⟨Ñ ñ⟩ for Spanish, though as Christian notes, this transition still isn’t complete.
All characters in Code Page 912. Original image, using the font recreation by VileR.
While this code page also contained the dollar/escudo ⟨$⟩, cent ⟨¢⟩, and yen/yuan ⟨¥⟩ signs, it left out the libra/pound ⟨£⟩, the top half integral ⟨⌠⟩, eñe/N with tilde ⟨Ñ ñ⟩, or y with dieresis ⟨ÿ⟩. I hypothesize that targeting this code page instead of CP437 further hastened the move away from the 1993 original proposal towards the current-day alphabet.
The most probable reason why some signs and inscriptions still used ⟨ñ⟩ with tilde instead of ⟨ň⟩ with háček after the 1995 revision(s) is lack of font support, followed by Unicode making both ⟨ñ⟩ and ⟨ň⟩ available at the same time, and the designer or user’s ignorance/apathy since the two diacritics look so similar, especially at small sizes.
One oddity in this timeline is that ISO-8859-2, the parent standard of CP912, was first published in 1989. Even though I can’t find direct confirmation, github.com/unicode-org/icu-data calls Code Page 912 “ibm-912_P100-1995”, so I’m pretty sure that CP912 was first published in 1995, the same year that the weirdnesses of the Turkmen alphabet started being ironed out.
Discrepancies in the Printed Alphabet Table
I think the differences in letterform that Christian notes in his article can be explained as aesthetic or practical choices, and because—and this is purely my speculation—the typesetter that printed it had suitable Cyrillic letters lying around.
The Serifless Lowercase ⟨£⟩
As stated above, the lack of a serif at the bottom of lowercase ⟨£⟩ suggests that the glyph was originally intended for “top half integral” rather than “long S”.
The “Double-Cedilla” Hypothesis is Unlikely
Christian says that lowercase ⟨$⟩ is “a ⟨ç⟩ with another cedilla on the top”, but I find that unlikely. The “double cedilla” form of ⟨$⟩ and ⟨¢⟩ can be chalked up to a stylistic preference to make them look like letters consistent with ⟨Ç ç⟩ instead of currency symbols. After all, many fonts, including the IBM PC font, have the bars missing in the middle as well.
Besides, the Bashkir, Chuvash, and Enets alphabets have a Cyrillic letter called “the”, better known as “es (⟨С с⟩) with descender”. Unlike in Latin C with cedilla ⟨Ç ç⟩, where the stroke below must at least curl towards the left, the stroke at the bottom of es with descender ⟨Ҫ ҫ⟩ could go straight down, or even curl to the right like the ogonek in Polish and Lithuanian (⟨ą ę į ų⟩). I hypothesize that the letter table uses the glyphs originally intended for Cyrillic ⟨Ҫ ҫ⟩ instead of Latin ⟨Ç ç⟩, and uses a newly-struck metal type for ⟨$⟩ and ⟨¢⟩ that fits the design of the Cyrillic ⟨Ҫ ҫ⟩.
The Kazakh-like Yen/Yuan Sign
And speaking of Cyrillic letters used in minority languages of the former USSR, since the typesetter had a Cyrillic Straight U with Stroke ⟨Ұ⟩ lying around for Kazakh text, they used it instead of ⟨¥⟩.
The Reverse-Engineered Alphabet Table
I don’t know if any “text mode” software was produced that supported the Turkmen alphabet, but here is a mock-up of what the alphabet may have looked like on a contemporary computer. Here is a table of the letters of the Turkmen alphabet using the default VGA font. Below it is Article 1 of the UNHRC translated into Turkmen, which happens to contain the rare letter ⟨ž⟩.
The original 1993-1995 proposal, represented as VGA Text Mode Art in Code Page 437.
The current version (in my timeline, proposed in 1995) represented as VGA Text Mode Art in Code Page 912.
Animated GIF comparing the two versions. The affected letters blink 4 times before switching over to the other standard.
Conclusion
My hypothesis is that the original 1993 proposal for the Turkmen National Alphabet does indeed contain four currency symbols (⟨£⟩, ⟨$⟩, ⟨¢⟩, and ⟨¥⟩), as well as one mathematical symbol ⟨⌠⟩, and it is specifically a compromise caused by the limitations of the default text encoding of the IBM PC. And as computers became more capable of representing a larger number of distinct letters, those limitations were lifted, and in 1995 with the release of IBM Code Page 912, those compromises were replaced with characters that make more sense (⟨Ž⟩ ⟨Ş⟩ ⟨ş⟩ ⟨Ý⟩ ⟨ž⟩).
Again, I can’t find primary sources for this hypothesis, nor can I even understand Turkmen. But at least, the timeline makes sense to me, and explains the weirdnesses of the 1993 Turkmen alphabet. What do you think?
Update: Daniel Bunčić
I’ve discovered that at least one serious academic has stated that Code Page 437 compatibility was a design constraint of the 1993 Turkmen alphabet before me, almost a decade ago! His name is Dr. Daniel Bunčić, and he is a professor of Slavic linguistics at the University of Cologne. (Turkmen is not Slavic but Turkic, but since Turkmen wanted a new alphabet to distance itself from its Soviet past, I think he counts as a relevant academic authority.)
Here’s an extract of his paper Factors Influencing the Success and Failure of Writing Reforms (2017), page 35, submitted to Studi Slavistici XIV (2017). (Bold emphasis is mine.) He also cites Dr. Victoria Clement like Christian did. Unfortunately, he doesn’t cite a primary source stating that Nyýazov targeted Code Page 437. Maybe I—or better, a serious academic—could inquire Dr. Clement whether she has such a direct source. (The full paper is available on Open Access, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
The Latin alphabet for Turkmen created by authoritarian president Saparmyrat Nyýazow rather quickly in 1991 and obviously without competent linguistic advice, is a case in point: with a view to circumventing technical problems with non-standard characters, he designed an alphabet consisting exclusively of characters available in codepage 437, which at the time was the standard on American configurations of ibm compatible computers. For this reason, apart from a few special letters like 〈ç〉 for /t͜ʃ/, 〈ä〉 for /æ/, or 〈ñ〉 for /ŋ/, which happened to be present in the codepage, the new Turkmen alphabet contained several non-alphabetic characters reinterpreted as letters: The phoneme /ʃ/ was represented by 〈¢〉 as a small and 〈$〉 as a capital letter; /ʒ/ by small 〈⌠〉 and capital 〈£〉; and /j/ by small 〈ÿ〉 and capital 〈¥〉*. When it turned out that this alphabet would not be accepted by the population, a public debate ensued, which resulted in its revision in 1995, replacing 〈$¢〉 with 〈Şş〉, 〈£⌠〉 with 〈Žž〉, and 〈¥ÿ〉 with 〈Ýý〉 (and 〈ñ〉 was also changed to 〈ň〉; cfr. Clement 2008: 178-181). This second attempt at Latinization was rather successful (ibid.: 182).
* Note that 〈ÿ〉 is included as a letter in codepage 437, but capital 〈Ÿ〉 is missing (just as in ISO 8859-1), probably because in French this letter never occurs word-initially. The character 〈⌠〉 might have been chosen because of its similarity to long s 〈ſ〉; however, it is the top half of the integral symbol (position f4 in codepage 437, u+2320 in Unicode; both are followed by the bottom half 〈⌡〉).
I feel as if some people treat and believe that the intersex community is The Genitalia Fandom and not a group of marginalized people who are systemically oppressed for their innate sex characteristics who deserve respect and rights— outside of how their genitals might look, atypical or not.
Yes!! (Sorry to hijack your post to make it about being trans but) I feel as if the same thing happened with “trans communities” being The Genderfucking Fandom and not a group of people societally marginalized and medically neglected for being transsexual, outside of how their sex characteristics might look, atypical or not.
The name of the problem here is compulsory q***rness, or as I call it, q***rnormativity.
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its probably a normal sign for the economy that all of my adulthood fantasies are like "imagine having your own kitchen living room and bathroom to decorate" "what if i could get on a train" "maybe one day i could purchase a sturdy pair of shoes" "i should save and invest in a single bicycle"
I will vote for any candidate who promises to go scorched fucking earth on every tech company. Break every single one of them up into companies based around a single product and then split those in thirds. Weaponize existing antitrust laws to the hilt and pass the most draconian versions of them ever seen on this planet. Nationalize google search specifically. Pass consumer privacy protections strict enough to kill the data harvesting industry for good. Make all of these fuckers go bankrupt for this rent-seeking shit
this might piss some people off but I don’t think some of you actually ever tried to unlearn your hatefulness. you just came out as queer and decided your new targets really truly deserve it this time.
Prev ( @ooooooh ) did not fucking get the fucking assignment
mf really was like:
“we are the same in the eyes of cishet people” Who the fuck cares about how cishets (supposedly) see gay people the same as pedophiles? As freaks who practise fetishes in public in broad daylight? As cishets who call themselves the Q-slur and absolve themselves of cishet status, the exact people that @donniehaspronouns decried in the original post? Who else do you think “just came out as q***r and decided your new targets really deserve it this time”?
The three big problems with the Q-slur are that 1) it’s a slur, 2) it has ideological baggage incompatible with normalization of LGBT people/identities, and 3) it flattens the diversity of LGBT people and experiences under a label that we don’t even necessary consent being called.
Problem 1 hopefully needs no explanation. But in case you’ve been living under a rock or in a white family’s child room decorated wall to wall in garish Pride Merch, here’s a quick executive summary. Before the 19th century, “q***r” meant “odd”, “abnormal”, or “alien”, and was used in slang to mean “fake” or “low quality”. Then some British noble called gay people “snob q***rs like Roseberry”, and now the Q-slur is a slur that calls LGBT people inexorably and incurably “other” just for being who we are. It should be understandable, even if you personally feel some perverse attachment to the Q-slur, that some of us don’t want to be labeled as that cursed slur that changes its meaning to the least uncharitable reading every time it’s used.
Problem 2 deals with the—in my opinion, forced—“reclamation” of the Q-slur. Reclaiming slurs is a personal decision. Nobody else owes you to reclaim a slur for themself, just as nobody else can force you to reclaim a slur for yourself.
There are 2 notable turning points for the Q-slur: the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling and the 1990 manifesto Q***rs Read This. The 2015 federal legalization of same-sex marriage in the US forced funding to divest from organizations aiming for same-sex marriage, and for those organizations to seek different goals. Unfortunately for LGBT people, the organizations that received funding were those descended from q***r activism, kicked off by Q***r Nation in 1990. After the ruling, the Q-slur, which had been taboo and in the background in places other than Tumblr, exploded into the mainstream to describe LGBT people plus cishets with “spicy” sex and gender attributes, without the consent of LGBT people.
The worst part is that these Q-slur activists did nothing to “dull the knife” of the slur, like what happened to idiot. They leaned into the homophobic and transphobic “logic” that “we are the same in the eyes of cishet people”, instead of laughing in the face of it. They forced the rest of the community to, ironically, conform to their nonconformist hegemony, or else be ousted as somehow furthering the other hegemony, because nuance is dead. “Bi woman in hetero relationship? COMPHET FAKE LESBIAN!!!” “Gay man not dressing/acting flamboyantly? Q***RPHOBIC HETERONORMATIVE TRAITOR!!!” “Trans woman identifies fully within the binary? CISNORMATIVE INTERNALLY TRANSPHOBIC TRUSCUM!!!”
In an ironic turn of events that would have been hilarious if it weren’t so harmful, q***r activism, supposedly originally a culture of pride in diversity, turned into a culture of compulsory otherness. I call this “q***rnormativity”, and it deprives LGBT people of their voice, community, and resources.
This leads directly into problem 3: flattening diversity. Even staying firmly within LGBT, there is a great deal of difference between LGBT people and their identities. Being trans is about what gender you are, unlike being LGB which is about what gender you love. Being bisexual is about loving more than one gender, unlike being homosexual which is about loving the same gender. Being lesbian is about being a woman—the less privileged sex—on top of being homosexual, unlike being gay. Sure, “LGBT” is four syllables long, but it’s four syllables long for a reason. Bundling in a Q for “q***r” after it ruins everything by introducing a category that does not work as a category because it has no definition. Calling us all “q***r”, “q***r people”, and “q***r community” flattens nuance and forces us into an ill-fitting box, instead of working intersectionally to make sure that none of us are unaccounted for.
@ooooooh, this post was directly aimed at you, and you missed the point. Shame on you.
Of course @ooooooh blocked me without even engaging. Self-identified Q-slur users are the most stubborn bigots against sexual minorities, and they are entirely unaware that they are.
this might piss some people off but I don’t think some of you actually ever tried to unlearn your hatefulness. you just came out as queer and decided your new targets really truly deserve it this time.
Prev ( @ooooooh ) did not fucking get the fucking assignment
mf really was like:
“we are the same in the eyes of cishet people” Who the fuck cares about how cishets (supposedly) see gay people the same as pedophiles? As freaks who practise fetishes in public in broad daylight? As cishets who call themselves the Q-slur and absolve themselves of cishet status, the exact people that @donniehaspronouns decried in the original post? Who else do you think “just came out as q***r and decided your new targets really deserve it this time”?
The three big problems with the Q-slur are that 1) it’s a slur, 2) it has ideological baggage incompatible with normalization of LGBT people/identities, and 3) it flattens the diversity of LGBT people and experiences under a label that we don’t even necessary consent being called.
Problem 1 hopefully needs no explanation. But in case you’ve been living under a rock or in a white family’s child room decorated wall to wall in garish Pride Merch, here’s a quick executive summary. Before the 19th century, “q***r” meant “odd”, “abnormal”, or “alien”, and was used in slang to mean “fake” or “low quality”. Then some British noble called gay people “snob q***rs like Roseberry”, and now the Q-slur is a slur that calls LGBT people inexorably and incurably “other” just for being who we are. It should be understandable, even if you personally feel some perverse attachment to the Q-slur, that some of us don’t want to be labeled as that cursed slur that changes its meaning to the least charitable reading every time it’s used.
Problem 2 deals with the—in my opinion, forced—“reclamation” of the Q-slur. Reclaiming slurs is a personal decision. Nobody else owes you to reclaim a slur for themself, just as nobody else can force you to reclaim a slur for yourself.
There are 2 notable turning points for the Q-slur: the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling and the 1990 manifesto Q***rs Read This. The 2015 federal legalization of same-sex marriage in the US forced funding to divest from organizations aiming for same-sex marriage, and for those organizations to seek different goals. Unfortunately for LGBT people, the organizations that received funding were those descended from q***r activism, kicked off by Q***r Nation in 1990. After the ruling, the Q-slur, which had been taboo and in the background in places other than Tumblr, exploded into the mainstream to describe LGBT people plus cishets with “spicy” sex and gender attributes, without the consent of LGBT people.
The worst part is that these Q-slur activists did nothing to “dull the knife” of the slur, like what happened to idiot. They leaned into the homophobic and transphobic “logic” that “we are the same in the eyes of cishet people”, instead of laughing in the face of it. They forced the rest of the community to, ironically, conform to their nonconformist hegemony, or else be ousted as somehow furthering the other hegemony, because nuance is dead. “Bi woman in hetero relationship? COMPHET FAKE LESBIAN!!!” “Gay man not dressing/acting flamboyantly? Q***RPHOBIC HETERONORMATIVE TRAITOR!!!” “Trans woman identifies fully within the binary? CISNORMATIVE INTERNALLY TRANSPHOBIC TRUSCUM!!!”
In an ironic turn of events that would have been hilarious if it weren’t so harmful, q***r activism, supposedly originally a culture of pride in diversity, turned into a culture of compulsory otherness. I call this “q***rnormativity”, and it deprives LGBT people of their voice, community, and resources.
This leads directly into problem 3: flattening diversity. Even staying firmly within LGBT, there is a great deal of difference between LGBT people and their identities. Being trans is about what gender you are, unlike being LGB which is about what gender you love. Being bisexual is about loving more than one gender, unlike being homosexual which is about loving the same gender. Being lesbian is about being a woman—the less privileged sex—on top of being homosexual, unlike being gay. Sure, “LGBT” is four syllables long, but it’s four syllables long for a reason. Bundling in a Q for “q***r” after it ruins everything by introducing a category that does not work as a category because it has no definition. Calling us all “q***r”, “q***r people”, and “q***r community” flattens nuance and forces us into an ill-fitting box, instead of working intersectionally to make sure that none of us are unaccounted for.
@ooooooh, this post was directly aimed at you, and you missed the point. Shame on you.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
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this might piss some people off but I don’t think some of you actually ever tried to unlearn your hatefulness. you just came out as queer and decided your new targets really truly deserve it this time.
You and I have completely different experiences with the Q-slur and those who identify with it. I have experienced just as much hatred for who I am from self-identified Q-slurs as from cishets.
Being q***r does not “mean that you’ve spent time unlearning bigotry in all its forms”. It means that you’ve internalized the cisheteronormative hegemony’s bigotry that we sexual minorities are inherently abnormal and alien to society, and that you’re forcing LGBT people to “admit” that we’re the exact same freaks that homophobes and transphobes think we are.
That’s not libration. That’s the same axis of oppression pressuring from a different direction.
this might piss some people off but I don’t think some of you actually ever tried to unlearn your hatefulness. you just came out as queer and decided your new targets really truly deserve it this time.