#that by opting into one of these alphabet soup identities it forces the person to play a role that's so insincere in the social scripts it

[femmesandhoney]

i think queer identity makes people boring and not the other way around. i come across so many women who are insightful and smart and funny who identify as some flavor of nonbinary or queer and its like once they remember "oh yeah i identify as those things" in the middle of a conversation it comes across as insincere and random and dull to whatever we were previously talking about. like when they're being themselves they're complex individuals, but once they remember they have to push an identify complex on themselves and have to make sure you know they don't feel like a woman 100% of the time or something all their personality suddenly tanks as they try to artificially craft themselves to you.

#i know many of us joke that these people collect identities bc they're boring but like have we considered the opposite is also occuring #that by opting into one of these alphabet soup identities it forces the person to play a role that's so insincere in the social scripts it #requires that they become a boring shell of a person as they follow the scripts? #and once they stop following the scripts they return to being a normal interesting person #radical feminism #radical feminist #radfem

[freedom-of-fanfic]

Hello! I've noticed you've been reblogging a lot of stuff about "queer as a slur" lately, and I had a question. Is it okay for someone to be totally cool with queer as a word used by and for others, but uncomfortable with being called it on a personal level? I don't feel comfortable asking people to not call me queer because I'm scared they'll get angry at me for not wanting to personally reclaim the word. Thank you!

of course it’s okay to not want ‘queer’ applied to you while being okay with other people calling themselves ‘queer’. 

furthermore: you absolutely do not need the permission of queer people - me or anyone else - to feel that way.

there are people who no doubt get angry that not everyone who could ‘count’ as queer doesn’t want to be considered ‘queer’, because there are assholes in every community. but i’m going to say it outright, right now: they’re assholes. you don’t have to listen to them.

‘queer’ is an opt-in identity.

if you don’t identify as ‘queer’, you’re not queer. anyone who tells you otherwise is being a jerk.

I have heard of 1 (out of thousands) of queer-identified people trying to demand everyone who is non-cis &/or non-straight reclaim the word ‘queer’. that’s it. (seriously: i feel safe saying ‘probably like 97% of queer people won’t resent your choice or get angry at you over it.’)

where things get complicated is:

exclusionists/radfems(especially TERFs) using the ‘not everyone wants to reclaim the word ‘queer’’ argument to trample on those of us who do choose to reclaim ‘queer’ - constantly coming into our spaces to remind us that not everybody is reclaiming the word & therefore our reclaiming the word is somehow hurtful. 

that’s bigotry exploiting your position, anon - not your fault, but good to be aware of.

the resulting backlash from exclus & radfems exploiting the experiences of people who don’t reclaim the word ‘queer’ can create hostility towards people like you, anon. 

that hostility comes from people who assume you’re telling people like me that you don’t want to reclaim ‘queer’ for yourself specifically to spite me. which, of course, makes people like you you want to apologize and get permission to not reclaim ‘queer’ even more, which makes ppl resent your need for permission, etc etc. … it’s a negative feedback loop.

the tl;dr is: 

because you don’t need permission to not reclaim ‘queer’, you never need to tell people who do reclaim ‘queer’ that you’re not reclaiming it (unless they’re trying to force their reclamation on you).

you can just ignore posts reclaiming ‘queer’ if you want and know that literally 97% of queer people will not resent you for it.

there’s definitely a difference between queer people calling themselves queer and straight cis ppl (or exclus/radfems) calling them ‘qu**r’ or ‘the qu**rs’.

just because we’ve reclaimed the word ‘queer’ doesn’t mean we’re okay with people sneering it at us to hurt us, or using the word ‘queer’ as a noun (’qu**rs’) rather than an adjective (’queer community’).

when straight cis people refer to all of us as ‘the queer community’ on the news or whatever, that’s not fair to the part of Pride that identifies as queer or to the part that doesn’t. (I wish ‘MOGAI’ hadn’t been successfully disparaged by exclusionists for this reason.) 

we’re not all ‘queer’ (and we don’t have to be). that’s why ‘Q’ is a letter in the alphabet soup acronym version of our communal ‘name’.

finally: 

‘queer’ has a political & academic meaning beyond identifying as ‘queer’.  i.e.; to advocate for queerness is to advocate for putting a nonbinary lens on the world.

instead of assuming binary states - boy or girl, straight or gay, cis or trans, white or not, abled or disabled, nt or nd, etc - queer theory proposes looking at everything as existing on a spectrum, and people as having infinite existences on various spectrums. the goal is to see how that creates a more realistic - & therefore more effective - approach to real life problems.

when people talk about ‘queerness’ from an academic or political position, it often addresses problems that face the wider Pride community, whether they identify as ‘queer’ or not. however, because we use the same word for both the academic study & identity (’queer’), that can get confusing & hurtful to people who don’t identify as queer.

tl;dr: queer does have more than one form of applicability, which means that even if you don’t identify as queer you may encounter the word being applied to your experiences without intended malice. I don’t have any suggestions for rectifying that right now, but I hope it helps to know that in that context, it’s not intended to ‘other’ you. :(

–

thanks for giving me a good opportunity to address some of the issues that rise up for not-queer-identified members of Pride who get caught in the middle of this nasty exclu/radfem(TERF) ‘anti-queer’ attack & the resulting backlash. you don’t deserve to get slammed because of bigots who use your experiences as shields to hide their bigotry behind.

PS - added tags to clearly note this is an americentric take on the word ‘queer’! thank you @asynca for the note on that

#queer is a reclaimed slur #this is an americentric post #this is a us centric post #exclusionists and radfems is the same #terf rhetoric #the ones who get left behind #intracommunal identity politics #identity politics #respectability politics #queer theory #Anonymous