Saying “Well, the Q is for Questioning!” is not enough to make the community a safe place for questioning people.
It’s great to include them, but it doesn’t mean a lot if in the meantime you constantly joke about people having an oppression fetish, trying to opt-out of their privilege out of guilt, or being silly cishets desperatly wanting to be “kweer” to be cool.
if you want to ask a bisexual or asexual person about their sexual history to verify that they’re queer, but you don’t want them to take it the wrong way, try this useful communication technique:
give them twenty dollars and go away.
As a bi person, I can attest to the beneficiality of this method.
As an ace i second that^
if twenty dollars doesn’t work for you then forty dollars is also fine
People talk about when straight cis people say things about queer people, but nobody ever told me what to do with the straight silence™.
Because I don’t get a lot of purposefully homophobic or transphobic things said to me. I get silence. I bring up an issue and all of a sudden the conversation ends right there. Dead stop. Silence. No comment. No laugh. No expression of discomfort, interest, or anger. No follow up question. Just blank face and silence.
Mention something about my transition that relates to the conversation? Silence. Bring up my cousin’s lesbian ex girlfriend? Silence. Bring up how demonetization is affecting queer YouTubers? Silence. Killed the conversation with a rainbow bullet. One shot to the head.
That’s all I’ve ever gotten. Silence. Did anyone tell me about gay people when I was a kid? No. Did I get my questions answered when I asked about cross dressers? No. Just silence. My entire life. No indication if people are for or against. It’s really starting to piss me off. You can’t continue the conversation? Say you don’t know? Drive us away from the topic? Say you’re uncomfortable or don’t understand? Anything? I’m not allowed to casually bring up queer stuff like any other topic? What?
I’m just sick of the silence. I truly am. I’m sick of just being met with silence. And this silence doesn’t happen with other queer people. It doesn’t. Even if it’s about a topic they know nothing about. Just straight cis people. They’re killing me with their silence. Why do they do that?
words are fake and not real but i’ll trust a whore over a FSSWer and a crip over a PWD and a queer over an LGBT person any day. something about the simplicity of “fuck you that’s us and it’s great” warms the heart
asserting that people are “trying” to reclaim queer, as if it might not stick, is disgustingly misleading. it’s been 25+ years. you can stop talking about it as if it’s “trendy”, or as if we just started yesterday. it’s our word.
yeah idk where you live but people get called queer regularly as a slur RIGHT NOW so excuse me for not wanting to base my whole identity off a slur. if you and anyone else wanna reclaim it that’s 100% fine, it’s your choice, it’s your label, but you don’t speak for everyone.
read the post. it was about something specific, it wasn’t a generic invitation for you to tell me every one of your feelings about the word.
asserting that people are “trying” to reclaim queer, as if it might not stick, is disgustingly misleading. it’s been 25+ years. you can stop talking about it as if it’s “trendy”, or as if we just started yesterday. it’s our word.
i do quite like the chevron flags but largely i think bc i was a star trek kid and they look like they could be the insignias the starfleet queer theory division
mogais keep inventing bullshit homophobic and/or just plain fucking useless terms like “queerphobia” and “homonormativity” when the only similar term i can think of that might actually be useful would be some fuckshit like “queernormativity” since yall love to call every lgbt person “queer” without our consent
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother reblogging a post like this, especially not to this blog. But this post is a perfect example of a major problem that exists on Tumblr. In short, history is being ignored, erased, and rewritten with every new discourse flavor of the week.
The term homonormativity has existed since the 90s. It’s creation is credited to the trans community. In specific, the term is credited to Susan Stryker: a transgender woman and professor of Women’s, Gender, and LGBT Studies.
This is a screengrab from The Sage Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies. But a simple search will show that Stryker has written much on homonormativity and trans history.
The history of the usage of queerphobia has been less easy to track down, but a few pages suggest that its been in use since the 90s as well.
Given the push for the reclaimation of queer during the 90s and the growth of queer theory around the same time, that would be entirely logical. In addition, searches on Google books for “queer-phobic” and “queerphobia” turn up related hits dating back to the late 90s.
But I’m short on time right now. I do intend to keep looking for additional sources on this. And if anyone has any I would be grateful to you for sending them my way.
However, my point is this: even if the term queerphobia had originated on Tumblr, and it did not, it has since spread beyond into wider community and academic usage. Queerphobia has been mentioned in everything from blog posts to academic journals since the mid 2000s at least.
If the existence of the term queerphobia did not benefit or add to discussions of queer oppression, would we use it? Obviously the term has a place and a usage.
I find it interesting and telling that an exclusionist would go out of their way to lie about the origins of terms like homonormativity, so much so as to deny credit to the trans woman who coined it.
And I believe I know why: Homonormativity is a term that helps us to discuss assimilation and respectability politics within the LGBTQ+ communities. Exclusionary discourse on this website has been pro-assimilation since day one.
In any case, the tl:dr is this:
1) Be very careful what you accept as true, because lies intended to push a specific narrative are posted on this website everyday.
2) Learn queer history. When we know our pasts, it will be that much more difficult for people with less than honorable intentions to manipulate us.
3) Just because you’ve never heard something before doesn’t mean it is a new word or concept. *especially* if it sounds like academic or activist jargon it has likely been in use for awhile and you should look it up before brushing it off. (I mean, and the wider: don’t brush things off just because they are new to you thing…)
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