This was an info post on instagram and a thread on threads, here it'll be a text post.
On the exclusivity and harm that non-men vs non-women language does.
Have you heard someone say "non-man", or maybe "non-woman"? Maybe you yourself use these terms as descriptive words or to describe queer terminology, but have you ever thought about the effects of these terms and what they promote - whether intentional or not?
With the goal of making queer identities easier to describe and overall more digestible, two terms have been seen more and more often - non-man and non-woman. But these terms aren't living up to the intention, in fact they're promoting what they seek to destroy - harm towards queer people, exclusion and misinformation.
The idea of these new terms is easier description for terms like lesbian, transfem, gay, transmasc and other terms. But in reality, using these terms to define queer people excludes many, many queer people from their own community!! Nuance and complicated identities have always, and will always exist, and gender diverse people are often the victim when this fact is forgotten.
Bigender, genderfluid, genderqueer... many queer people have heard these terms, many even personally know folks who use them, yet they're forgotten and excluded in even the most basic definitions, conversations and queer language. They exist outside of the non-men/non-women binary created, and therefore don't fit under the common definitions of their genders, sexualities, etc.
Even some of the most historically important queer folks are excluded in this language. Butch lesbians can be men and still lesbians, drag queens often had a complicated relationship with gender and existed as men and women, people have bent and broken the binary for centuries!! When we ignore them, we ignore their strength and contribution to the fight for queer liberation, all in the name of digestibility for non-queers.
Queerness was never meant to be digestible, or sanitised, or easily defined. Queerness exists outside of clear defined boxes, and outside of binaries, where blending and blurring the lines is more common then existing within them. Queer language should never squish out hard to define queerness for the sake of a quick definition. We erase queerness itself when we erase weird queers.
