Start your day Basic

We’re all having “hard conversations” about racism, police brutality, and #BlackLivesMatter I hope. 

You’ve probably noticed that detractors often use the same “racist talking points” in response. Here’s a researched and sourced guide to help you answer, for the times you may get stuck.

Feel free to save these images and share them!

UNDERCOVER COPS ARE BEING CAUGHT PLANTING CARS/BRICKS, SETTING FIRES AND BREAKING STORE WINDOWS TO MAKE PROTESTS LOOK VIOLENT

DON’T BELIEVE THE MEDIA

#STAYWOKE 

because they’re 1/3rd filled with people who actually think it’s porn

1/3rd filled with people whose parents/grandparents watch the show and are like “EMMERDALE? ON MY TUMBLR?”

so, in honor of pride month: please remember that ‘queer’ has been a fully reclaimed, non-slur identity for decades now, and queer studies is a legitimate academic term, and it’s only been in the last decade that TERFs have pushed to reclassify it as a ‘slur’ starting in online spaces. 

because ‘queer’ is such a broad and flexible term, it’s much harder for bigoted, trans-exclusive, bi-phobic, a-phobic people to interrogate the queer community and try to divide it into who deserves respect and who deserves to be expelled. the queer community is extremely diverse, extremely accepting, and it’s entirely opt-in. no one can say you’re not really queer, because if you say you’re queer, you are. 

this is extremely frustrating to terfs, who want a very narrow and rigidly policed LGB community (minus the T, A, and Q+, of course), so they have been working to reclassify queer as a slur. they target young isolated girls online, and take advantage of their earnest desire to be helpful and unproblematic, and they get them to repeat ‘queer is a slur’, and it’s incredibly sad and frustrating for us queers to deal with.

lesbian, gay, and queer are all slurs. they’ve all been used to insult us. and they’re all reclaimed. people that don’t want to be called queer don’t have to be, but tagging posts with q*slur is an insult to everyone who identifies as queer. breaking into posts where queer people call themselves and each other queer and refer to the queer community of queers who call themselves that to let us know that ‘queer is a slur’ is itself bigoted, TERF-aligned behavior. 

if someone asks me not to call them queer, absolutely 100% i will not do so. i would never call someone queer before i knew that was their preferred identity. that would be disrespectful. 

but if someone tells me not to call myself queer where they can hear it, because they’re uncomfortable with the word i use to identify myself, then i will tell them to get the fuck out of earshot. 

demanding other people change who they are and how they present and what words they use to describe themselves, just because you don’t like what you’re looking at or hearing, is the very height of disrespect. 

queer people don’t need to exist in a perpetual state of apology for being something that makes people uncomfortable. if that’s the only way to be polite, then fuck polite. if that’s the only way to be acceptable, then fuck acceptable. why is it on us to be accommodating of everyone else’s desire for us to shut up and play nice? the world is full of personal trauma and a hell of a lot of queer people’s personal trauma is in being told, over and over and over, to stop being queer.