#q-slur

I can’t handle queer or cripple or faggot or hermaphrodite (all slurs I may technically be able to reclaim). They hurt to read and they hurt to type. They evoke the names I’ve been called even if I’ve never been shouted them in the street or at events (though I generally have been).

Maybe it’s an internet bias scenario where the ones who reclaim are the loud ones but… I never heard the quiet ones and I feel like I’m alone. I feel like they’re being reclaimed for the community without us (which is why I am so adamant in telling people that you can only ever reclaim for yourself).

- “You just hate it because it’s too inclusive!”

- “Actually it’s been reclaimed by the whole community since the 60s”

- “It’s my identity and you’re invalidating that!”

- “Gay and lesbian were slurs too!”

- And the newest one “actually it was our word first and it was turned into a slur so we’re just taking it back.”

Those same people when Blaire calls herself the t-slur:

It's been over a decade since I went through that. But I'll never forget the way those students made me feel, and I carried that shame with me for a long time. The shame of feeling othered, weird, bizarre, freakish. That's how they treated me.

And so no, I don't like to be called "queer." I don't want to be called anything that means weird, strange, peculiar, or bizarre—and make no mistake, that is absolutely what the word originally meant, and it still carries that connotation in a lot of circles—because it makes me remember the way those students made me feel all those years ago.