Ready Edy

Slight hyperbole to grab your attention aside, it’s because most of us are not q***r, do not resonate with q***rness, and are actively harmed by q***r culture and/or ideology.

The Q-slur, at face value, is a word for othering. The literal meaning was “odd” or “abnormal”. It was first applied to SOGIs as an insult. It continues to be used as a slur today, to express the ideology that SOGIs are inherently incompatible with society, and there is no place for us to be understood and live as just another neighbor.

The “Q***r Movement” is no better at all. Rather than refuting these bigots who “smear the q***r”, community leaders forced all SOGIs to internalize this alienation: to be out, loud, proud, visible, provocative, bashable, punchable, perverted, genderfucky. And instead of fighting to turn social norms less rigid, they fight to vilify those of us SOGIs who naturally fit social norms as “not q***r enough”, scapegoat us as somehow complicit to the oppressive rigidity of these norms, and exile us from the “q***r spaces” that used to be LGBT spaces.

If your “identity” is based on othering, whether to others or to yourself, of course we’re disinclined from being chummy with you.

Another problem is that “q***r” is such a non-word. It has no agreed-upon definition, no agreed-upon boundaries, no agreed-upon meaning. “Not straight”? Excludes straight trans people. “Not cishet”? Excludes cis and heterosexual intersex people and/or polyamorous people, whom I assume that someone who uses the Q-slur would want to include. “Didn’t have the default cishet experience & script”? Dangerously close to validating pedophilia as a form of q***rness.

And don’t get me started on Spicy Cishets co-opting the label supposedly meaning “not cishets”, like Tilda Swinton.

“Valid” is just another axis of privilege and oppression, privileging cissexual-transgender people who just want to play with gender, and oppressing cisgender-transsexual people who need (or had needed) transition healthcare to treat their dysphoria and truly thrive. “You don’t need to transition to be valid” — Is the goal of transition to “be valid”, or to suffer less from gender incongruity?

On a related note, practically speaking, “truscum” is not much different from a slur made up by cissexual-transgender people to oppress transsexual-cisgender women. It’s a reversal of privilege. Those of us who are most tangibly gender-incongruous, and who must take steps to being less so, are the most directly victimized by transphobia. And yet, we’re vilified as somehow being “more privileged” than those who have done little more than claim a xenogender and exploit informed consent. Or more infuriatingly, we’re pitied and infantilized as “internally transphobic”, which makes no sense; all internal transphobia accusations are like “if you don’t act all ‘being trans makes me quirky!! teehee skirt go spinny’ you’re Being Trans Wrong”.

So yeah: we become transmedicalists and anti-q***r, because q***r trans discourse actively erases the needs and voices of us transsexuals.

"By censoring the Q-slur, I break the most cherished religious symbol of the Queer Orthodoxy" you sound like a right-wing transphobe.