gravityeyelids | Entries tagged with queer

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vaspider:

ayo-tofu:

vaspider:

vaspider:

I have no intention of tagging my identity or referring to it as ‘the q slur’ or tagging posts where I use my identity term as such. If my identity term is not good for you, that’s fine. You don’t have to follow me. You can, in fact, even block me.

But I’m not going to stop calling myself queer, or referring to the queer community - that is, the community of people who identify as queer, which doesn’t include you if you don’t identify as queer, so get the fuck over yourself, I don’t ask people to stop talking about ‘the gay community’ just because I’m not gay - and if that’s a problem for you, then there’s a simple solution:

Tumblr Savior the word queer. No posts including the word queer will show up on your dash. None! In the body of the post or in the tags.

See how easy that is? It doesn’t make me refer to my identity as a slur, and you don’t have to see it. Or, if you need to, don’t follow me, or block me. In fact, if you have a problem with my identity, please block me. I’d rather not accidentally reblog something from someone who thinks my identity is something I should hide.

Look, here you go:

Tumblr Savior for Chrome

Tumblr Savior for Opera

Tumblr Savior for Firefox

http://ift.tt/1gTuOwx

Install Tumblr Savior. Add ‘queer’ to your blacklisted words. And leave the rest of us alone about our identity words. For fuck’s sake.

Xkit also has blacklist :)

I didn’t know that! That’s great.

Here’s the thing I need to make perfectly clear: if you don’t want to be called queer, I’m not gonna call you queer. I am, however, not going to call my identity a slur at your request. I don’t make people tag things ‘g slur’ even though my abuse and trauma had much more to do with the word ‘gay.’

There are a couple of reasons for that.

One: gay is a legitimate identity. (So is queer. Sorry, I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it.) I’m not going to shame someone for their identity, even if the word was used by a third party against me.

Two: asking someone to re-slur their identity degrades their reclaiming work every time it’s insisted that this is a slur and must be a slur. It reinforces that this identity is bad even among the people who should treat your identity with respect.

Three: if I have a problem with the word ‘gay,’ or for that matter, the word ‘cupcake’ or, let’s say, ‘dove,’ I can tell Tumblr Savior or Xkit to blacklist every instance of that word. There is absolutely no NEED for someone to tag a post ‘cupcake content’ unless they describe cupcakes without using the word, or describe doves without using the word. Any filtering software will pick up the word *in text or tags*.

So really, the only real reason to insist “tag your identity as a slur” is to control the narrative over that word, and to force people, over and over, to call their identities an essentially bad thing. To insist “you need to call this a slur, because I say so, or you’re an asshole,” when tagging does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to keep you from having to see the word, because *blacklisting the word itself accomplishes the same thing and is much more effective,* is nothing but a power play. A means of controlling the conversation and the narrative about the word. A means of making sure the word is continually thought of primarily as a slur, even by the people whose identities are primarily linked to that word and that concept.

And you know what? Fuck that. You can feel free to say I’m trying to shame you or whatever, but anyone who’s trying to tell me that I should tag my identity as a slur *when doing so serves no purpose in helping anyone to avoid seeing posts with the word in it* should be ashamed of that kind of manipulative behavior.

That’s my last word on the matter: blacklist the word queer if it bothers you, block me if my identity is a problem, and stop trying to shame us queers for not being ashamed of our identity.
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lupinatic:

rhodanum:

alarajrogers:

intersex-ionality:

So I’m going to be bitter and old here for a minute.

The absolute refusal to allow anyone to use queer as an umbrella is both novel and regressive (I know, I know). For decades, queer was an accepted and neutral way to concisely refer to a coalition of loosely connected communities and identities. Queer theory, queer film, queer spaces, queer history.

This use came after another few decades of committed work in reclaiming the word from oppressors who flat out stole it from us.

It took a lot of effort to wrestle it back out of their hands, and now I’m expected to just give it over to them because decades of unity and collective action and shared experience don’t matter because a handful of (usually white, almost exclusively american) kids on this godawful website have deicded it’s illegal for me to “force it on others” and that I should instead just let them for LGBT or gay or whatever else on me.

Like, fuck off?

Fuck off.

I am going to refer to my community in the way that I have been doing for an entire lifetime. Not just my specific identity, which is queer as fuck, but the whole fucking shebang.

And I will not hand the word back over to straight people with a nice little ribbon and a coat of polish and say “here, some kids decided it was cool if I let you stab them with this word so here you go” like

Fucking, why would I ever.

Frankly, and I know how people are going to react to this but, frankly?

I damned well will use queer to refer to my community as well as myself, and anyone who wants to take it away from me can take it over my COLD DEAD QUEER LITTLE FINGERS.

I will not sit by and let antsy, nervous kids who don’t know a damn thing about our history talk down to me about how “well, actually” when they can’t even recognize the fact that trans people were still being policed out of here literally three fucking years ago.

The presumption and the ignorance are staggering.

So yeah.

Queer as in fuck you people in particular.

And, to my followers who are made uncomfortable by this, well. I will regret losing you on some level, but not enough to stop.

I fully intend to use queer as the umbrella term it has been for my entire life. LGBT never did my intersex, pansexual ass any favours anyway.

My point is, I’m not going to be referring to the “LGBT” community at all, anymore. It’s going to be 100% queer here, in a more conscious and consistent way than it has been before. Because, you see, even people who do use queer as an identity unashamedly have gotten into this pattern of being apologetic or conditional about it, with a constant, overbearing tone that even when we do use queer as a community term with have to hedge it and gentle it because it’s so dangerous.

but it’s fuckign not.

We spent decades pulling the danger out of it.

And ‘m not going to let it sneak back in.

Every time someone says “queer is a slur, you shouldn’t use it” I feel like they’re trying to fucking gaslight me. Like, I was there when it got reclaimed. I read “Queer Science”, I saw the “Queer Studies Departments” in college and the majors in Queer Theory. Kids do not get to invalidate my life out of ignorance. And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with, because how would the kids who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about know to invalidate that word?

You go. Reclaim that reclamation. I’ll probably use LGBT+ and queer interchangeably, like I always have, and if some kid tries to lecture my 47-year-old ass on the matter I’m just going to have to look at them over my imaginary librarian glasses and tell them “no. you’re wrong. Go back to school, kid, you need to remember you’re sharing the world with adults and there is a consensual reality you have entered into. You don’t get to make it up from scratch any more than I did.”

@alarajrogers hit the nail on the head with this:

And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with

Because it’s absolutely surreal to see someone who is fifteen years old speak as if queer’s been used to constantly attack and smear and belittle and insult them, when they’re about twenty years too late, at the very least, to have gone through that as a teenager. I’ve seen it happen so many times, with so many teenagers on here, that it reads honestly like a script – like a Discourse Point someone’s taught them that they need to trot out as an argument, always and forever, amen. I made this connection over a year ago, when the screaming against ‘queer’ started in earnest on here and thought about it more in-depth when a number of very young activists both here and on Twitter told me unironically and with a straight face that they took all of their discourse points from the likes of leftbians and other exclusionists, starting with your garden-variety aphobes and biphobes and ending with outright radfems / TWERFs / SWERFs.

That was the lightbulb moment for me. Question:

what group has managed to spread their posts and their ideas far and wide on Tumblr, because people reblog without checking the source or reading between the lines?

and what group has had a vicious ideological axe to grind against ‘queer’ as both a self-descriptor and an umbrella-term for decades now?

The answer to both is radfems. I was there ten years ago when they were absolutely driving themselves into a frothing lather over the fact that a very large number of LGBTQIAP+ youth were describing ourselves and our communities as queer uncontroversially – seriously, this was so common on the English-speaking queer youth forums I used to frequent back then that no one batted an eyelash, specifically because the work of reclamation had already been done for decades and if, asked, the vast majority of people answered that they preferred queer because it was INCLUSIVE (which is and has always been the kryptonite for groups of people whose ideas revolved around gatekeeping the community and their precious selves being the arbiters of who gets in and who stays out), Radfems quickly realized that they weren’t going to be able to demonize the word in the eyes of Gen Xers or people at the older end of the Gen Y generation in the community, because we’d either contributed to the work of reclamation or spent our whole fucking lives in communities where queer was a badge of pride.

So, in what is honestly an absolutely brilliant move and which I’d be almost tempted to admire, if I didn’t want to spit everyone involved right between the eyes, radfems and other exclusionists targeted much younger LGBTQIAP+ people, leapfrogging a generation. Tumblr, in this sense, has been absolutely vital, both in giving them access to very young people who were just discovering themselves and whose knowledge of community history was nonexistent and in being built in such a way that radfems could make their posts go viral and attract tens of thousands of reblogs, if not more, if they knew to word them in just the right way (I’ve lost count of the number of what, at a shallow glance, seem like very decent PSAs on consent, but that at a closer reading were actually anti-BDSM screeds, easy to see for anyone who knows the dogwhistles).

If radfems have managed to mire this place in their ideas intensely enough that they’ve turned their anti-kink crusade into an omnipresent thing in certain progressive communities on Tumblr, it’s not impossible to make the logical leap that they’ve managed to do so with their decades-long anti-queer crusade as well.

I’d laugh and clap at the ingeniousness of it all, if it didn’t involve obliterating decades of community history, solidarity and reclamation efforts.

#oh ABSOLUTELY#queer things#the SUDDEN BACKLASH against queer again is 100% from terfs#even back in like 2014 people were using queer on here without anybody batting an eyelash#and then one day all of a sudden in 2015 if you called yourself queer#suddenly you were getting a fucking 15 year old calling you ‘violently lgbtphobic’ like. lol what the fuck#(real thing that happened)#and yeah 100% on the ‘I feel like I’m being gaslit’#I TOOK QUEER THEORY COURSES IN COLLEGE#THEY DON’T FUCKING PUT SLURS IN THE NAMES OF COLLEGE COURSES#THEY PUT ACCEPTABLE COMMUNITY TERMS IN THE NAMES OF COLLEGE COURSES#like#oh my god#the rise of ‘q slur’ is honestly gaslighting that originated in the terf/radfem corners and spread until people thought it was the norm#it’s not

Please note this. Regardless of how you personally feel about the word, this backlash against it happened much more recently than many people seem to think. And it’s worth pointing out who benefits from the backlash, and it sure as hell isn’t the people who gave decades of their lives to make the word a sign of inclusivity and acceptance.
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blinktumble:

ddatrw:

x-cetra:

oudeteron:

wetwareproblem:

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’m queer, and you will never take that away from me.

It’s nice being Tumblr Old and having some recollection of the self-identifiers we used before this website. The slogans alone should tell you the motivators behind using “queer” as opposed to other terms. There was “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” There was “queer rage”. There was “not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.” That last one especially shows rejection of any neat essentialist boxes – go away with your binaries, your easy categorization, and last but not least your respectability politics.

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.

TL;DR: You can’t just take away a term that many, many people in the community have been actively using for decades before your latest iteration of SGA discourse and expect no meaning to be lost or broken.

This. Learn your history.

I was at the 1993 March on Washington, where we had over a million signatures to prove how many of us there were and the national park service still “estimated” we were 500,000. I can remember chanting until we were hoarse: “We’re here, we’re queer!” (What do we want?) “We’re here, we’re queer!” (Equal rights now!) And that was at the height of the AIDs epidemic, when being out could lose you your job, and when a woman I’d met was murdered by her ex-husband after she came out.

Being queer was a matter of life and death. Yet lately I’ve seen some posts dismissing the term as “cute.” I find that attitude mildly insulting, not to mention clueless.

Only within the last year have I started seeing young people on Tumblr policing our language, telling us we shouldn’t use it because it’s a slur. But it was no more and no less a slur than gay. You’ve reclaimed that, right? Even though it’s still used perjoratively. Why?

For the same reason we wore pink and black triangles (Google it) to denote gay and lesbian, before the rainbow flag caught on: they were a symbol that had meant death for us, for being what we were, and we claimed and took them back in defiance. We were standing up to be counted: “You can’t smear all of us. You can’t kill all of us. WE ARE HERE.”

I’ve tried to be patient with those who say they dislike the term. But attacking us for using it really is problematic, for all the reasons the posts above mine have explained. Now, more than ever, we need to hang onto our history, our insistence that we are here and we’re not going away.

Don’t erase us. Don’t take that away from generations who marched before some of you were born. Don’t exclude those of us who are queer but not gay.

@blinktumble

ALL OF THIS. Thank you all for the smart, brave words.

I’ve written about it before, partly because the penchant for chanting “queer is a slur” kind of blindsided me on tumblr. Really not something I’m used to or have come across elsewhere. I tried to think through the logic of it, and honestly, I can’t come up with any good reasons for using that mantra. None. It’s bullshit.

If you want to deprive homophobia of its power over you, then don’t ever grant it any power to hurt you. As my nerdkru homie said, “It’s only a slur if you think it’s a slur”

Queer is a way of transforming the world around you. It’s powerful rainbow science.