Spirals, Trees and Cups of Tea...

Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -

And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”

And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.

Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.

The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.

I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.

I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.

I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.

And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.    

Felice never played a trick on me again.

Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed. 

So, Australians go to the polls after a barely endurable six weeks of electioneering. (That’s sarcasm, for the Americans.)

Ladies and gentlemen 

The moment you’ve been waiting for

The pride of the Resistance 

If a healthy person overspends by $5, she is $5 in the hole, an amount she can pay back with a little rest. But if someone with CFS or FM overdoes it a little, say by spending $30 in a day, that puts them at -$5, but they also get charged a $30 PEM “overdraft fee,” putting them at $35 in the hole. They have to deposit $35 to get back to zero.]

This tends to play out for people who’ve only recently gotten cfs (fibro too, I think) as booms and busts: they struggle to adjust to their limited energy so they keep pushing themselves. Eventually they get so in debt they crash completely and are unable to do ANYTHING for a while, and may well have made their condition permanently worse. While they’re doing nothing, extra tasks build up (as does their guilt about being ”lazy”), so when they’ve rested enough to start to do things again there’s EVEN MORE to do than when they pushed themselves too far the first time, and they have even less energy to do it with. Cue more overspending, another crash, etc. Getting past this is a matter of carefully balanced schedules, massively restrictive limitations, and ignoring other people, and your own brain, when they say you can do it if you just try.

Artist Paints the Universe and Nature into Black Women’s Hair

Not when used as a self-identification, and not when used as an umbrella term within the community, at least.

See, here’s the thing: The most common identifier used by bi, pan, and trans people to describe their sexuality? Queer.

Given that multiple studies have shown that bi people alone comprise about half the community, that makes it by far the most common term we use to describe ourselves.

What’s more, it’s not just an identifier: it’s a rallying cry. It’s a banner the whole community has assembled under forever. “We’re here, we’re queer” is a cliché for a reason. It’s a statement of power, and of pride - yes, we’re weird. We don’t fit into the “acceptable” categories cisheteronormative society gives us. And that’s a good thing. It’s a call to demolish those “acceptable” boxes, to build a world we’re all part of.

Its rejection is a relatively recent move by the same homonationalism that brought us “Bi people don’t belong,” the thrilling sequel “Trans people don’t belong,” and the stunning conclusion “Ace people don’t belong.” It’s a deliberate strategy employed by respectability politicians seeking a seat at the table - taking the work we’ve put in and distancing themselves from us so they can tell the straights “We deserve your respect because we’re just like you! We even hate queers!”

(And don’t think it’s a coincidence that the community suddenly forgot the massive, massive overlap between “queer” and “poly” when building the very self-conscious image of two clean-cut upper-middle-class smiling young professional men or women either. Anything that wasn’t “respectable” enough had to go. My deepest thanks to the person who pointed this out.)

In the rush for our place in an oppressive hell, we’ve lost our revolutionary edge, lost our fire, and lost a lot of what drove us in the first place. Fuck. That.

I’ve never seen “q slur” used before Tumblr, and even that only in the last maybe two years. I’m not playing the whole “you kids turn everything into a trigger” game, that’s not the point. My point is that almost uniformly older LGBTQ+ people on this website associate “queer” with empowerment, and it’s teenagers and early 20-somethings (who are almost the same age group as me, I’m 27) constructing this idea that it has always only been a slur, that it’s more prevalent than any other slurs still in use, and that this is somehow the “historically correct” view of the term and everyone using queer is ignorant of history. Which is just not true.

So anyway, here are some great functions of “queer” that aren’t replicated by any other term:

1) Wide relevance. Queer can be related to gender, sexuality, or both.

2) Opacity. It can be a stand-in for some other term (gay, bisexual, trans, etc), or it can actually mean something else altogether! Something that isn’t fully covered by any of those categories!

3) Queer could, therefore, actually function as an umbrella term (yeah, I know I can’t get away with that in the present climate, thanks for that). Calling everything gay, as has become the norm on Tumblr, isn’t only sticking it to The Straights ™; it’s also sticking it to all the LGBTQ+ people who don’t identify as gay specifically (not to mention straight trans people), and who never see ourselves brought up in casual conversation anymore. It’s back to “gay rights” style language.

And you know what, of course it is, because “LGBTQ+” and other versions of the abbreviation aren’t catchy. “Gay” is catchy. “Queer” is catchy. But for some reason, gee I wonder why it could be, “the community” has decided to eliminate precisely the term that does actually by default encompass a wide range of identities. And replace it with one that again gives primacy to “gay” as the default descriptor, as if the rest of us just don’t matter or should be happy with being “obliquely included” (that is to say, erased). We’ve come up with all this specialized terminology for gender and sexuality, but when it comes to being actually talked about aside from specifically describing yourself in an intro to your blog, it’s underused.

I could go on about how targeting “queer” disproportionately affects MGA and trans/nb people, including people with multiple marginalizations, who especially are likely to have a problem with all these discrete one-dimensional categories and feel that “queer” expresses something the other terms can’t. But that’s already covered in the OP under good old respectability politics.

yes, queer was central to anti-assimilationist groups like queer nation and act up, and yes, fighting against respectability politics is really important. but like, none of this negates queer’s history. its recent history was empowerment and reclamation in the late 80s/early 90s, but before that it was exclusively a slur, and it’s still used (particularly by and against older people) to dehumanise lgbt+ people.

Who exactly made you the Grand Arbiter of our language? Why do you get to tell people who were in the community before you were born that they can no longer use their language?

Can you tell me another term that can be used in informal day-to-day speech that has never been a slur? Can you show me an “umbrella” term that hasn’t been used by people telling half the community they’re “not gay enough” or “too extreme”  or otherwise not worthy of being One Of Us? (In informal speech, I hear a lot of reversion to “gay” or “gay and lesbian;” hopefully I don’t have to explain what’s wrong here?) Can you show me a term that I can use to include all of us, as a person whose disability includes memory issues that make it very difficult to keep track of the ever-increasing alphabet soup?

A large part of this post is a response to people telling others who are self-identifying as queer “um sweaty :)))) that’s a slur :)))” – the same people who made “LGBT” into a warning sign – coming to tell us that we can’t use that word either, in any capacity.

You say “was” like anti-assimilationism is a footnote in a dusty history volume - to someone who is pushing back against assimilationism and the very real harm it is doing to a lot of the community.

“queer as an umbrella term is ahistorical” Oh, my sweet summer child. The first use of “queer” by people in the community as a broad descriptor was a century ago. The first use of it in the sense that I’m using it here - as a deliberately radical (both “radical politics” and “radically inclusive”) umbrella term applied to the whole community - predates the last major battle of the “who’s queer enough to count?” war and the use of LGBT, let alone the rest of the alphabet soup. I can show you formal scholarly articles about as old as you are that uncontroversially use it. Has it ever been used by the entire community to refer to the entire community? No. But neither has anything else that even pretends to include us all, and it definitely does have a storied history.

I wrote that post in response to a movement I’ve seen a fair amount of lately - the use of “queer is a slur” against people who are using it in a sense it’s had for over a quarter of a century in a deliberate bid to silence those of us who are hurt by supercessionist, assimilationist policies and tactics.

You want ahistorical? There are a lot of people right now trying to redefine the boundaries of the “LGBT” community to exclude folks who have been there all along, and to silence the voices of anybody who isn’t gay enough for their liking. 

You know what else is still used as a slur? Gay. Yet somehow, it’s completely uncontroversial. When people talk about how gay they are* or “gay rights” or “gay marriage,” nobody bats an eye. Nobody gives them the “um sweaty, that’s a slur” speech. Even if they’re straight.

Active slurs are apparently perfectly fine for straight people to use to discuss things that affect all of us. So you’ll pardon me for being extremely fucking skeptical of the singling out of this term, one that sees extremely strong usage by the segments of the community keep being marginalized within the community, as unacceptable or a step too far. I’ve heard “That’s a step too far” way too many times from “LGBT” people and organizations - usually when I, as a trans person, ask them to fight for my rights too, or when I, as a bi person, ask for a face and a voice and maybe some resources.

The only thing that makes “queer” unacceptable where “gay” is uncontroversial is who’s using it.

Am I going to call specific, individual people queer? Not unless I’ve seen them actively claim it. Am I going to talk about the queer community, queer issues, queer rights? Hell yes I am - because the community that wants me as a member, the community I want to be a member of, is queer.

Good. 

Maybe if we scream it loudly enough whitegays will remember the violence they’ve done to the rest of the queer community – the erasure, trivialization, dismissal, and subjugation of “less marketable” identities in pursuit of “Trickle Down Equality.”

LGBT is a slur to me. It shoves B&T identities to the bottom floor of their corporategay tower, and buries all the other queer identities in basement.

Gay is a slur to me. Gay is the brand name for the whitegay corporate powerhouse and we are their branded beasts of burden, carrying out all the hard labor of the movement and enjoying none of the rewards.

Whitegays don’t want a real umbrella term. They want to continue using terms that trivialize, dismiss, and erase the rest of us. Terms that empower them at our expense.