Aravo Celta

there are queer cultureS plural, in different places. Right now, a lot of what people call trans culture is the tastes and interests of white trans women in the united states, canada, UK, and Australia who are very very on the internet. What people think of as gay mens culture is mostly defined by quite wealthy white gay men mostly in new york city or san francisco and san diego.

and once economic conditions change or history occurs or simply time marches on, the gay mens culture of san francisco will be cataloged as best it can and labled as a particular scene with a start and end date and a set of characteristics to look for in photos and historical documents, much like how we describe things like the Mod scene.

Because queer culture doesn't exist. it's an ongoing activity. We do not pass it on because we cannot pass it on because we are defined as a sexual minority by our present conditions.

I think it is perfectly understandable to find the whole "miss programmer socks" trans culture of white women consumerism to be incredibly grating and demoralizing. Similarly, I think a lot of people in the 70s and 80s probably found it demoralizing that gay culture seemed to feature a lot of sexual coercion of alarmingly young men at establishments which encouraged binge drinking and party drugs. Like ah fuck man is this all we are? Is this our "culture?" christs sake...

because it's not the same thing as being Bhutanese or Gullah or Alsatian or Catholic. Queer cultureS definitionally cannot be the same type of thing. We do not have children and we do not invent rituals for perpetuating a culture. There is no higher calling of god or the bloodline or what have you that compells us to pass on the stuff we are doing right now to future generations.

I would say that perhaps rather than trying to forge some permanent separate identity to compete with the hegemonic sexual majority, we accept queerness as something defined by its impermanence and constant malleability.

In ten years queerness will mean something completely different than it does today.

In twenty years people will look at a blahaj the way people look at gay mens obsession with Judy Garland or the speaking of Polari today. An interesting thing from the past, perhaps we honor it in a cheeky reference, perhaps a few people try to make it make a comeback. but without the obligations of a contiguous culture, and without the specific material conditions that gave rise to it, it is unlikely that the old "tradition" of the transgender womans shark plushee will make a comeback. Same with gay people speaking a type of thieves cant made up of sailor speak and carnival and wrestling slang and classical references. It'd be cute if people revived Polari, but the surrounding context that allowed Polari to exist are long dead. Age of sail mariners and travelling carnivals are not plentiful enough to be a reliable queer jobs program, and they don't use any of those words anymore anyway.

Recently, I've seen a sentiment going Round that "queerness does not orbit heterosexuality!" and I get the sentiment and agree that queerness shouldn't be viewed as a lesser thing to cishet existence.

but it kind of does orbit heterosexuality! We are a sexual minority. It's okay to be a sexual minority! But everything about us is going to in some way be a reflection of broader culture that is inevitably going to be mostly cis het. and because our relationship to that culture will be ever changing, whatever queer cultureS are will naturally change over time quite quickly.

and I say all that to say,

that's how kids younger than me seem to be about trans people, by and large. There are transgender students amongst them. They see these people nearly every day. CLEARLY transgender people are just normal and around and an ordinary function of society. I have spoken to these younger people, they might get like second hand anti trans stuff from their parents or from internet personalities, but for the vast majority of them the animus simply isn't there. It really is a who care situation for a shocking number of anglophone kids. These kids are the only ones who genuinely have the conservative boogeyman problem of somebody is changing name and gender identity too rapidly and it's annoying but for regular interpersonal reasons. Because its happening to trans KIDS and kids are going to be trans but rename themselves after 5 different common nouns in a year. Which is truly great and it is amusing that a kid I was babysitting was just mad their friend couldn't "pick one already."

and now you're going to introduce the fucking genital inspector?

Like the kids who brought in their astroturfed anti gay marriage stickers and we all thought they were massive queers for doing that, every young person in school who was moderately on the fence about transgenderism as a concept will immideately be tipped over to the "pro" column when some weird freak needs them to drop trou before they can play sports or do anything.