#think piece

What Does It Mean to Be LGBT+?

There is a distinction that I think gets lost constantly in conversations about queerness: having an LGBT+ identity and belonging to the LGBT+ community are not inherently the same thing. One is an identity. The other is a social affiliation. Being LGBT+ can describe something about you. Your sexuality. Your gender. Your romantic orientation. Maybe you're bisexual. Maybe you're gay. Maybe you're transgender. Maybe you're aromantic, nonbinary, pansexual, lesbian, queer, or something else entirely. These words can be useful because they give people language for experiences that might otherwise be difficult to articulate. But the LGBT+ community is something different. A community is a collection of people who choose to associate with one another around shared identities, experiences, interests, values, or goals. And communities develop cultures. They develop traditions, inside jokes, aesthetics, celebrities, political positions, social expectations, terminology, spaces, events, and ideas about what being a "real" member looks like. Pride parades become traditions. Certain musicians become gay icons. Certain movies become queer classics. Certain styles of clothing become associated with queerness. Certain online communities develop their own vocabulary and humor. None of these things are inherently bad. But here's the distinction: You can be queer without enjoying queer culture. You can be bisexual without going to Pride. You can be transgender without participating in trans activism. You can be gay without knowing every gay icon. You can be queer without making queerness the center of your personality. And, perhaps most importantly, you can be queer without wanting to belong to a particular community of queer people. Your identity does not come with a mandatory social club membership. I am not saying that communities are useless. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that there is a difference between who I am and who I choose to surround myself with. And I think we're allowed to acknowledge that distinction.

The Benefits and Drawbacks of Community

Communities can be beautiful. For marginalized people especially, finding others who understand something about your experience can be profoundly comforting. There is something powerful about walking into a room and realizing that you don't have to explain yourself from the ground up. Communities can provide friendship, resources, advocacy, protection, education, and political organization. A sense of belonging. Sometimes they can even save someone's life. But community is not automatically synonymous with goodness. A community is made up of people, and people are messy. People bring their prejudices, insecurities, egos, hierarchies, contradictions, and blind spots with them. The moment a community begins treating itself as inherently morally superior because of the identity it represents, problems begin. Because being marginalized does not magically make someone incapable of being misogynistic, racist, classist, transphobic, biphobic, ableist, or religiously intolerant. Being oppressed in one category does not make you incapable of participating in oppression in another. This is where I think communities need to be capable of looking inward. Because sometimes they aren't. Sometimes criticism is treated as betrayal. Sometimes questioning the culture becomes "internalized homophobia." Sometimes leaving becomes "turning your back on your people." Sometimes someone says, "This community has hurt me," and the immediate response is, "Well, you shouldn't generalize." Fair enough. However, if we're allowed to criticize heterosexual culture, religious culture, racial communities, political movements, fandoms, workplaces, families, and literally every other social institution humans have created, why does LGBT+ community suddenly become untouchable? It shouldn't. A community isn't strengthened by pretending it has no problems. It's strengthened by admitting that it does. Let's dive into that, shall we?

Yes, the LGBT+ Community Has Divisions, Too

This is probably where someone is going to accuse me of "making the community look bad."

And honestly? If pointing out problems makes a community look bad, maybe the problem isn't the person pointing. There are serious divisions within LGBT+ spaces that deserve conversations which don't immediately devolve into defensiveness.

For example, intimate partner violence exists in same-sex relationships, just as it exists in heterosexual relationships. Yet conversations surrounding domestic violence can sometimes become disproportionately focused on heterosexual men abusing heterosexual women, leaving LGBT+ survivors feeling invisible.

Gay men can be misogynistic.

That's not a controversial statement. Gay men are men. Being attracted to men does not immunize someone against misogyny. Yet sometimes misogyny from gay men gets dismissed because people are so eager to protect the "gay" part of the identity that they forget to examine the "man" part.

Transphobia exists within queer spaces, too.

There are queer people who still exclude transgender people from LGBT+ spaces entirely. There are people who claim that trans people are somehow "too political," "too extreme," or "not really queer." That's not fair to the dolls who just want to exist. Having the community that was literally built off of black trans-women push them to the wayside is not a community I want to be a part of.

There are lesbians who are biphobic toward bisexual women.

They treat bisexuality as a phase because they're desperate to be picked by the bisexual woman who turned them down. Or they get mad when she breaks up with them and starts dating a man. Suddenly, bisexual women are labeled two-faced and grimy. However, they love the bisexual woman who realizes she is genuinely a lesbian and are quick to celebrate her for, in their eyes, "joining the winning team."

There are gay men who romanticize or normalize pursuing supposedly "straight" men who are already in relationships.

These gay men turn infidelity into some kind of hilarious forbidden fantasy. They're fine with being the fantasy even if it means they'll never be publicly claimed and help ruin a romance or family. These gay men feel like their attractiveness is too powerful that it suspends what's between their legs and draws in the "straight" men. A lot of these gay men want to be in the male gaze as women naturally are, and when they're not, they take it out on women which goes back to the gay misogyny discussed.

Grooming is overlooked in the LGBT community.

No, teaching kids that queer people exist is not grooming. Seeking out significantly younger and less experienced queers is grooming. There are conversations about age gaps where the language of "they're both adults" gets used to shut down every conversation. No, let's have that conversation about power imbalances, maturity, and exploitation. It's growth to admit when the relationship dynamics deserve scrutiny.

And yes, there are also debates surrounding neopronouns.

Some people use coined pronouns as meaningful expressions of identity. Others question their linguistic practicality or whether existing pronouns adequately serve their needs. Neopronouns? Or established pronouns? Whatever side you fall on, disagreement over language does not automatically make someone hateful.

Then there is race.

If this one makes you uncomfortable, then you are the problem. Sometimes queerness gets placed so far in front of every other part of a person's identity that race becomes an afterthought. I've seen white queer people talk about oppression as though being queer automatically gives them a comprehensive understanding of every marginalized experience.

Newsflash for the queer crackers: It doesn't.

Being discriminated against because you're queer does not mean you understand racism. Being queer does not make someone automatically knowledgeable about Black history. Being queer does not make someone immune to racial prejudice. And being queer does not mean every marginalized group experiences oppression in the same way.

Intersectionality matters precisely because people aren't just one thing.

And then there are religious queer people and anti-religious queer people constantly butting heads. Some queer people have religious faith that genuinely brings them comfort, morality, and community. Other queer people have been profoundly harmed by religion and want nothing to do with it. Both experiences can exist. But sometimes neither side wants to acknowledge the other.

And after witnessing and typing all of this, I have to ask: Why am I obligated to call this my community?

And Then There's the Islamophobia

This is the part that makes this personal for me.

I've been in queer spaces where I've felt like I was being looked at as though I wasn't supposed to be there. Not because I was a woman. Not because I was cisgender. But because I was Muslim. I've had queer people make assumptions about me based entirely on Islamophobic stereotypes.

I've had people assume I had strict curfews. That I wasn't allowed to have my hair a certain way. That I somehow had multiple mothers. That I was inherently prone to violence. That I couldn't possibly reconcile my faith with my sexuality.

I've literally been asked: "How are you Muslim and bisexual? Isn't that impossible?"

And that's where I have to laugh a little. Because you cannot spend years telling people that sexuality isn't necessarily a choice and then turn around and interrogate someone about how their sexuality can coexist with a religious identity. You cannot advertise yourself as an "inclusive community" and then make somebody prove that their religion makes them worthy of inclusion. And you definitely cannot tell me that my identity is valid while simultaneously treating another part of my identity like an intellectual contradiction.

That's not inclusion.

That's conditional acceptance, and there's a difference. Sometimes it feels like the LGBT+ community has become so marketable that the radical origins of challenging social norms have been replaced with rainbow capitalism. Buy the shirt. Drink the limited-edition beverage. Change the logo in June. Post the rainbow. And then call it activism.

But queerness was never supposed to mean "corporations discovered a profitable demographic."

It was supposed to challenge established ideas about gender, sexuality, relationships, family, and social conformity. And here's the funny part: If your activism ultimately boils down to consumerism, tribalism, and "my group is morally superior to your group," you might have more in common with the people you spend all day mocking than you'd like to admit. You know, those Trumpies you claim to hate and conservative family that raised you?

I don't mind saying the quiet part aloud, though.

This Is My Choice

So here's where I want to make myself extremely clear: I am not telling anyone else to leave.

If you love the LGBT+ community, wonderful. If Pride changed your life, wonderful. If you found your best friends through queer spaces, wonderful. If queer media, queer fashion, queer activism, queer history, and queer culture make you feel at home, wonderful. There are real benefits to community.

I established that myself. Community can provide support, friendship, resources, advocacy, and belonging. However, those benefits do not turn community into an obligation. Nobody has to belong to a community simply because they share an identity with its members.

That's like telling me: "You have to sit at our lunch table because you're in theater club, too."

No. I don't. If I want to sit at your table sometimes, I'll sit at your table. If I want to sit with the preps sometimes, I'll sit with the preps. If I want to sit with the nerds sometimes, I'll sit with the nerds. If I want to sit with the jocks sometimes, I'll sit with the jocks. If I want to sit with the popular people sometimes, I'll sit with them, too. And if I want to eat lunch alone while reading a book, I will do that, too.

My membership in one category of humanity does not dictate every social affiliation I have to make.

Being bisexual does not mean I have to belong to the LGBT+ community. Being Muslim does not mean I have to belong to a particular Muslim community. Being a writer doesn't mean I have to join every writing circle. Being a psychology student doesn't mean I have to hang out exclusively with psychology students. Identity tells you something about me. It does not tell you who my friends have to be.

Truth be told, if my decision not to belong to your community makes you angry, ask yourself why.

Because if your community is genuinely secure, accepting, and worthwhile, someone choosing not to participate shouldn't threaten its existence. Not everyone is going to want to be in a group 24/7. You should be able to say: "Okay. You're welcome whenever you want." And leave it at that.

You Don't Have to Belong

There is a strange assumption that marginalized people owe one another automatic allegiance.

Humans don't work that way. You can share a sexuality and have absolutely nothing else in common. You can share a gender and disagree about everything. You can share a religion and have completely different politics. You can share a race and have radically different cultures.

Identity creates possibility for community, not mandatory community.

I can acknowledge the historical importance of LGBT+ activism while criticizing contemporary LGBT+ spaces. I can appreciate my fellow queer people who have fought for my rights while refusing to excuse queer people who mistreat me. I can be proud of being bisexual without making bisexuality my entire social identity. And I can walk into a queer space, decide I don't like it, and walk right back out.

That doesn't make me less queer, confused, or "brainwashed." It means I exercised a choice. The flaws in the LGBT community doesn't prove that the LGBT community is bad. It proves that no community is inherently perfect. Because of that, nobody should have to tolerate mistreatment simply because the people mistreating them share their identity.

So, yes.

I'm queer. I'm bisexual. I'm a woman. I'm muslim. I'm comfortable with that. I don't belong to anyone, I don't belong to the LGBT+ community, and I don't need to.

If you do, then truly good for you.

If you've found your people there, I'm genuinely happy for you. But my identity does not come with a seating assignment. I don't owe anybody my membership. I don't owe anybody my allegiance. I don't owe anybody a rainbow flag. And I certainly don't owe anyone an explanation for why I choose to walk in and out of certain spaces.

I'm queer, which is an identity, whereas community is a choice.

And not belonging to the LGBT community is mine.

The anonymity grants people saftey to say the vile things you couldn’t say to people face to face and I see this a lot on social media. Comment sections act as if the author of the video cannot see them, most of the time the comments address the viewer and not the author (how odd)

When it comes to online disputes you learn very quickly that someone who looks and acts just like you and I, can have opposing views of things.

I saw this today as someone commented that the “girl with the list” (a list of symptoms of pregnancies, ie. Hair falling out postpartum) is kind of used to shame/talk down upon mothers showing things that happened to them during pregnancy.

I never felt well about the idea of calling upon some third party to view a symptom that you could’ve thought was beautiful (like stretch marks) (or smelly farts cus what if your partner/self have a fart fetish lol)

Now I don’t think their cause is entirely bad, historically in the US women do not have as equally studied symptoms for pregnancies/reproductive systems (compared to erectile dysfunction and male hair loss) , which is part of the problem and I do respect creating a place where you can detail the very real issues /complications of pregnancies instead of relying on the general symptoms Google tells you.

But, this just reminds me of the great disconnect between creator and viewer, and not many people seek information for their own selves, they kind of rely on this pack of people to explain it to them? Asking questions is ok but if you can very much do things on your own or find the information on your own it’s ok not to ask everything that pops up into your mind onto the internet.

I see myself do this a lot with my Twitter account I like to tweet on and I’m trying to do less of that becuase X especially had this problem with people saying things they could get sued for, fired from their job, kicked out of places, etc etc.

If you did read this thank you!