The big difference between liberal LGBT identity politics and revolutionary queer politics is:
That the goal of liberal LGBT identity politics is to present four (or 5, 6, 7, depending on the acronym) clearly defined LGBT identities with an easily digestable narrative to them to so that LGBT people may be understood, incorporated into societies notions of normalcy and turned into respectable citizens under capitalism.
While the goal of revolutionary queer politics is to complicate identity, to defy definition, to disrupt clear narratives, to continue to be confusing and paradoxical, so that queer people can not be incorporated or turned into respectable citizens and can continue on their struggle to destroy normalcy and respectability, which is a struggle that connects us to all struggles against oppression.
If we seem blatantly sexual or grotesquely unfuckable, if we make polite company uncomfortable, if we seem self-contradicting, if we wear slurs like badges of honor, if we’re bad rolemodels, if we seem weird or dangerous, that’s the point.
This also intersects with neurodiversity. The goal of neurodiversity is not to make autistics fit in neatly into the system where everyone “tolerates” us, it is to dismantle the ableist system entirely.
Cool this post was for and about queer people tho. Please make a new post.
Actually, I was very happy to see the comment by autpunq. It’s valuable to talk about the similarities in our struggles and the choice between assimilation and radical liberation is one many groups face.
Queer neurodiverse people have done a lot to challenge the concept of normal and it’s vital that we keep talking about how our struggles connect and mirror each other.
As a queer neurodiverse person, I still think it would have been more appropriate as a separate post.
As another queer neurodiverse person, I found it a useful addition and I find that always making your own post runs the risk of overlooking the interconnectedness and similarity of our struggles under the same oppressive systems. So I’d love to see more conversations about how radical queer, neurodiverse and mad struggles intersect and interact and if any folks wanna talk about that, I think they can comment on this post.
To add on to this, the history of queer people and neurodivergent people have largely been connected in that the system labeled us as mentally ill or freaks or abnormal. Homosexuality used to be a mental illness and GED/GD (read: transsexuality) still is a mental illness. In order to transition, you still have to go through a ridiculous amount of psychotherapy to make sure that that’s really the thing for you. By separating the two communities, you’re separating centuries of combined struggle within the two communities
Yup. AND the radical Mad communities for that matter. We need to resist the temptation to focus only on those groups that can claim that they are not medically ill, both LGBT and neurodiverse communities have had a tendency to focus on the ‘not mentally ill’ narrative at the expense of community members that are mentally ill.
Our story absolutely includes people that are mentally ill and we need to acknowledge that as queer people we are also disproportionately struggling with mental health because of how violent the world treats us and as people labelled mad we are disproportionately queer because it makes no sense to many of us to follow societies messed up ideas about sex and gender.
Our focus should never be “we were labelled mentally ill and freaks when we’re actually sane and normal”. No no no no. We may look back with horror to times when we were forcibly locked up in institutions for being gay and bi and trans, but we should look with the same horror at the now where we are forcibly locked up in institutions for experiencing the world in a ‘mad’ way. It’s the same violence.
It should be “we were labelled mentally ill and freaks and abnormal and regardless of whether that was true, that made us the target of violence. Fuck that. We’ll be freaks and mad and queer all we want. We’ll be whatever the fuck we are and we want the violence to stop”.
We’re united in the struggle against the violence we face when we are branded ‘not-normal’ and in knowing the potential for liberation in being not-normal.
EVERYBODY knows (or should) that you DO. NOT. STOP. in Vidor, Texas.
It’s best to just run out of gas elsewhere. Whatever you do, black folks, DO NOT STOP IN VIDOR, TEXAS.
There’s a good chance you’ll get lynched or just come up missing – and I’m not joking.
also do NOT stop in Harrison, Arkansas!!!! (relatively close to OK and MI) a nazi town with a BIG KKK organization.
Reblog To Save Life
Unsurprisingly, Harrison also has a fuckingterriblecrime rate and really bad education. So much for “no bad neighborhoods.“ I suppose that’s technically true, when the entire town is bad, but not exactly in keeping with the image they’re attempting to project.
I mention this not because it really matters if their sign is true – their overt racism and facism is reason enough for anyone of conscience to avoid their cesspool of a town, and certainly reason enough or anyone of color to avoid it for their safety. But rather, to make the point to anyone who remains open to persuasion that “diversity” is ever the source of any issue whatsoever that there is no such thing as a peaceful bigot.
Hate is an internal poison which has nothing to do with any external factors. Even once they’d manage to scare off or kill all the POC, they just turned to attacking each other instead, because that is what hateful people do. In a town that’s 97% white, I wonder who the fuck they want to blame for their abysmal rape, assault, and theft rates.
things like this puzzle me just because finding real friends is so damn rare
if i had to exclude cishets from the running in principle, i’d be pretty lonely
i mean a lot of my friends are queer but dude what
this tumblr thing puzzles me more and more with each passing day
Hmm. I remember somewhere reading a bit by someone who had visiting a foreign culture where he didn’t speak the language and hit it off with the only other American there, and they bonded quite strongly over the course of that trip and made plans to meet up back in America, but when they did, he found that they didn’t actually have that much of a connection, and in the foreign country it was simply their unique shared experiences in a sea of foreignness that gave them a sense of closeness.
The linked post seems like it might be the same sort of thing. Friendships tend naturally to continue along at the same level of intensity until there’s a “breakthrough” that drops you down to a deeper friend level, and that can take a long time, but if you’re able to share a close personal experience with someone that the rest of society is unable to relate to – something that maies you feel alienated normally – that can drop you into a very high level of intimacy almost immediately. That can be valuable since it happens when it’s most needed, but it has the drawback alluded to in the story I mentioned: the initial similarity is rarely enough to support a lasting and functional relationship, so when the dust settles you may find yourself on extremely familiar terms with someone you just aren’t that into.
Yeah. That was basically my experience with the kink scene—since those were THE ONLY PEOPLE I COULD TRUST WITH MY HORRIBLE SECRET I trusted them immediately and fully.
I made a lot of real friends, yes!
but I also got way too close to some iffy people way too quickly. And found myself going “what the HELL?” fairly often when the shiny wore off.
That’s why I feel so uneasy when I see kids here going “queer GOOD cishet BAD.” Because the actual fault line for “this person is a true friend” isn’t “this person has similar life experiences to me.” It’s “this person is someone I consistently like and respect.”
That can be someone who shares a lot of traits with you OR someone who shares almost none.
This was also my experience with the kink scene, which was also my first experience with the Queer Scene (as opposed to just queer people, who I’ve been around all my life :P). Insta-connection based on a shared, deep, stigmatized part of How We Worked.
That insta-connection sure made a good bond for abusive people to fall back on. “Oh, she’d never rape anyone, she teaches consent classes, she’s one of us!” She was more involved in the scene so she had more connections, and I was the weird critical outsider (I thought I was an insider) and I had to be a liar because she couldn’t have done what I claimed. Except she did, and I hope she doesn’t do it again, but I have little confidence.
Be careful out there, folks. Someone can have all sorts of things in common with you, someone can “get” you on a truly deep level, someone can volunteer for wonderful causes and write amazing theory, and that someone can still abuse you.
100%. I stayed with an abusive girlfriend because I was a feminist and the other feminists around me kept saying “there is no power dynamic in lesbian relationships like there is in straight ones.”
Which my brainweasels interpreted as “whatever this is, it isn’t a power dynamic. You must deserve this.”
It took me a while to not give a damn what it was and decide it was ok to “fail at being gay.”
All great points above, but also, being queer/gay/lgbt/whatever doesn’t actually necessarily mean you’ll have the same experience being that as other lgbt people around you. That’s what confuses me, personally, when people go on these extended tangents about how great and necessary it is to have friends that are gay/women/your ethnicity/your whatever, etc., just like you, and how you’ll be instant friends bc of that shared experience, bc … it doesn’t really work like that??
so many lgbt people have the experience of being that – that’s completely different from my own. on top of that, there are plenty of lgbt people I just don’t like hanging out with for various reasons. also plenty of women i can’t stand. and plenty of nonbinary people. we may have smth in common, but we still have a bunch more things very much NOT in common.
The big reason I’m for non-bar non-club non-school-affiliated accessible-to-teens LGBT+ spaces is not that I’m a non-drinking asexual who wants to invade.
It’s because my college had a Gay Straight Alliance.
And if your personal politics about other issues didn’t mesh with the leadership but you claimed to be LGB? The bullying started.
And if you grew up with abstinence-only sex ed and were still working through it, saying you were LGB without becoming sexually active yet? The bullying started.
And if you’d remained any sort of Christian after coming out, even if you were the sort of person who’d gotten through the darkest points by believing God still loved you even if no one else did? The bullying started.
They literally drove one of my friends into withdrawing for the crime of wanting marriage equality and wanting to ‘save himself’ for it because he still wanted the life path he’d been taught his straight age-peers could have. (He finally got a degree with the support of his husband over a decade later.) I was scum of the earth to the GSA in part because I ate meals with a group of gay men they had rejected.
The GSA and BSU agreed that gay Christians could not be permitted to exist at a traditionally Christian college where over half the student body was raised evangelical. They worked together to hurt people. I was scum to both for helping the people they targeted.
The most dangerous organization to come out to for the majority of students was the one that ran the unofficial Coming Out Day events. And that fact was not widely known, not enough for the freshmen standing up and talking for the first time to be forewarned.
And I see these posts about how teens don’t need welcoming places that don’t serve booze and don’t check ages on IDs because ‘more schools have Gay Straight Alliances now, and the solution is to get one in every school’ and I think, ‘So, what is a kid supposed to do if someone in leadership hates them for other reasons? What are they supposed to do if they have a bad breakup and the other person never misses a meeting so avoiding them means leaving? What are they supposed to do if the internal culture turns toxic? Are they supposed to just drop out of the community and lose access to awareness material about how to stay safe until they are old enough to legally consent to all adults and/or legally get drunk, then be set loose on the world without the equivalent of the How To Spot Abusive Relationships information their straight peers got?’
If there’s only one accessible LGBT+ organization around, there’s no way to get away without losing support in general. And I see people acting like that’s acceptable way too often because obviously the community is a monolith that accepts everyone who qualifies as LGBT+, never argues about the definition of that, and never ever turns toxic.
#GrowingUpUgly
When guys in middle school would get dared by their friends to ask you out and see if you say yes as a joke
How about growingupugly and then turning out sort of okay looking but you don’t know for sure because your self esteem is shot and you’re convinced you look awful?
#GrowingUpUgly Being so wholly convinced of your hideousness that as an adult you now literally cannot even imagine that someone would pay you a compliment and mean it; the only conceivable thing that could be happening is that they’re either a) taking the piss like the boys in school used to or b) so repulsed by you that they feel sorry for you and are telling you you’re pretty because they think you need to hear it.
Hurts how true this is though
I don’t know if this helps, but I’d like to say it anyway just in case it does.
None of you were ugly.
The other day I found a class picture from fourth grade and I looked everyone in it, and then I saw the “ugly girl” – the one people constantly harassed, whose desk kids would pretend was contaminated, the one kids would invent complex songs about just to voice their disgust toward her.
And she looked like a normal little girl.
She looked no different than the rest of the class.
She was never ugly. And I know that you may be thinking to yourself “but I WAS ugly” – I just want you to consider for a moment that maybe you weren’t.
Maybe you were tormented by your peers for no reason except that they were experimenting with and learning the rules of callous human cruelty that would define the rest of their lives – and recognizing this, the adults who should have protected you, let it happen. Cruelty and social shaming – the foundations of how human beings police their society is learned and it is practiced.
Since I’ve become an adult, I don’t recall ever seeing an “ugly” kid. Kids are all just strange-looking works in progress that the artist seems to have abandoned intending to finish them later.
I want you to think about our racist and unhealthy “standards of beauty”. Are any of the things that society fixates on as “ugly” truly ugly? No. We take things that are beautiful and we associate them with ugliness and badness and coarseness – to control them – to batter the will of the already oppressed down to the point where they think the abuse they receive is justified.
The children who demeaned you were learning to crush the human spirit to the point where the target internalizes all that hate and keeps hating themselves even when the bullies are no longer there. Those children were learning the sadism that defines our social hierarchy – we live in a culture where success is achieved through exploiting others.
No one deserves to be treated that way. LGBT children shouldn’t grow up ashamed of themselves. Black children shouldn’t grow up thinking white children are inherently prettier.
You were not ugly. You were told you were ugly so that people could have an “excuse” to target you, to ostracize you, to other you, and to abuse you.
An “ugly child” wouldn’t know they were ugly until someone TOLD them they were. They don’t grow up ugly, they grow up emotionally abused.
And still if you feel that you were the exception and you were objectively and unquestionably so ugly as a child that everyone noticed – even if you feel you are still that ugly now…
That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve love. It doesn’t mean you won’t find love, and trust and happiness.
You are worthy of respect. You have worth. You have value.
And if the rest of the world doesn’t seem to notice your worth – look at the evil and vile things the world does value and count yourself lucky not to be among that number.
There are people who will see your worth. There are people who will look at you and not see “ugliness” – they will see a friend, a mentor, a hero and even, yes, a lover.
If no one else says it today, and even if you can’t say it yourself, I would like to tell you that you are not ugly. That you were not ugly. That you did nothing wrong. That you did not deserve to be treated the way that you have been and that you deserve happiness and love and respect. And you will find it.
I was about to reblog this and add at the end that I thought I was the ugly kid but I looked back at pictures of myself and was like “I was never ugly????” And also kids suck. Thanks for the addition, poster before me.
here’s a scary post that’s probably going to get me in a lot of trouble.
please understand that i am speaking from experience as best i can and contextualizing those experiences with what i know. please understand that i am not trying to step on anyone’s toes. that doesn’t mean i won’t, but if i do, i am open to discussion and to clarifying anything that i have said poorly.
that said, i want to talk about collateral transmisogyny.
trans women are the targets of transmisogyny, obviously. they’re the reason we need to fix this. most of all GNC/butch/otherwise non conforming trans women, who get shit from every side.
but it leaks. an ideology so simplistic and indiscriminate cannot possibly only hurt its prime target.
we’ve all seen that post about the cis woman getting kicked out of a women’s bathroom. we all understand this.
i have been braced for misplaced but direct transmisogyny since i gave up being a binary trans man and began retransitioning in idk 2014 or whenever it was. my gender now is irrelevant but my presentation fluctuates between butch and femme chick. however, i have a deep voice, facial and body hair, etc.
i haven’t dealt with nearly as much of it as i expected to. i can think of many reasons for that, top of the list I’m Not Actually A Trans Woman, but people on the street don’t automatically know that. i can think of things that might make people think one thing or another but what does anyone gain from this sort of speculation.
anyway, this post was prompted by the fact that my selfies were recently reblogged to a “TV” chaser blog. i don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about any of this. i just realized i was afraid to say it because i am scared to upset anyone which tends to mean someone else probably feels the same, so i have to say it.
i guess i do have something to say. having some similar experiences as a group of people you do not belong to is not appropriation. neither is talking about it, as long as you couch it in language like this that makes it clear that my experiences of collateral transmisogyny are not the same as experiencing it directly because of who you actually are.
to be very clear: i do not claim to share any of the actual experiences of trans women, just that i occasionally take some shit because of shitty attitudes about y’all.
i didn’t want to make this post because i don’t want to hurt, upset, or offend any of the trans women i love dearly or any trans women at all. but i think it still needs to be said. and i hope i’ve done this in a way that isn’t harmful to anyone. if i messed it up, i’ll correct as best i can.
Tbh I think a big issue is how we look at the problem? Like it has been more accepted in feminist spaces to be inclusive to transwomen…. but the current narrative still frames any “alignment” to masculinity as evil.
Like something that really bothers me is how “radfem” got replaced specifically with “terf” (or twerf even) and changed the narrative of bad feminism being specifically about transness and genitals and not that it is shitty to make people jump through hoops to prove themselves.
Like the problem is not genitals. It is one of the aspects of it but not the only one. The actual root issue is the enforcement of a narrow definition of what gender labels mean that excludes people from their chosen label for not fitting properly in the mold.
And this is really not helpful for transwomen because like, if my gnc ciswoman friends are basically experiencing imposter syndrome and I as a nb person am a mess, do people REALLY THINK that every single OTHER way a transwoman might “fail” at womanhood being held up as making someone not a real woman is helping???!?
You didn’t get rid of terfs at all. They just switched from “if you have a dick you aren’t a girl” to “if you don’t preform gender correctly you aren’t a girl”. Like fuck man I legit do not know if I am nb or a girl and probably never will because I have spent my whole life being told I was failing catastrophically at being female. I sit here and watch transwomen abused by ciswomen with identical language and behavior as I used to get trying to be a girl seeing people say it’s transmisogyny. But for some people it’s more failing to conform to gender then transness itself and if people don’t recognize that it goes beyond that they aren’t actually making the spaces safe. Like if you kick out ciswomen for being gender non conforming even if you make specific exceptions for transwomen because they have it harder that just sends the message that if they rock the boat they will lose their Girl Card and be ejected from their own supposed safe spaces built for them. It’s like the whole “you can ship but only to cope!” Turning into harassing people about their health statuses and eventually “we changed our minds we hate you too”. That isn’t real support it’s a damn threat to throw people to the wolves.
Where I’m living now, I was initially pretty surprised when I started running into spillover trasmisogynistic BS. That hadn’t been an issue before.
The difference, AFAICT? A particularly ugly combo of rigid expectations, shitty hypervisibility for trans women, and frankly more than a little xenoracism.
In this particular case, bigots aren’t sure what to think when they encounter some weird foreign AFAB person who is taller with bigger shoulders than a lot of local cis men, and very “wrong” body language because foreign. (Yes, I am also queer and NB, but never even came across as particularly GNC under some rather different cultural standards back home. I never felt like I was expected to actively try to pass as my assigned gender before in anything like the same way.)
So, they jump to the best match explanation they can think of for what type of Social Abomination™ they’re looking at. Which is pretty far off the mark, but they’re totally sincere in the hatefulness.
Like with other spillover transmisogyny? It mostly appals me just how much regular daily scrutiny actual trans women must live under while they’re just trying to go about their business, with so much hostility ready to erupt–and just how entitled these jerks feel to hassle anyone who sets off Possibly Transfeminine alarm bells.
Basically, this shit is too good an indication of just what a huge problem transmisogyny is. That’s what makes me really angry about any of it.
Occasionally getting aggressively sirred, that flavor of street harassment, or the stinkeye from old ladies when I’m trying to pee (where trans people do have actual legal protections, I might add)? Obviously not at all the same as living with that garbage constantly, and under more correct assumptions about what kind of person you are.
But, it’s still frustrating to deal with, and speaks to some way bigger problems. That’s why I will even bring it up, definitely not to suggest that it’s exactly the same experience, much less some type of competition. More than enough shittiness to go around, unfortunately, and it’s all part of the same disgusting social package 😑
Uuumm actually it has been illegal to fire anyone based on gender race religion or sexual orientation for several decades in the US unwad your panties and read the employee handbook, and state and fedral laws
I should learn to not read the comments.
But since it’s been brought up.
About half the LGBTQ people I know have been fired for discriminatory reasons. Every person of color I know knows someone else who has been fired based on their skin color. And if you read Patheos or any of the alternative religion news blogs, there’s usually a story about someone being fired for their religion every few months (and more that don’t make the papers).
The thing is that the legislation in many states doesn’t say explicitly that you can fire someone based on their personal identity. But it does say that if you fire someone that you don’t have to give a reason. So you can fire someone just because you don’t like them. And if you don’t like them because of their personal identity you can avoid a discrimination suit by just not telling them.
Which is why they told me ‘its just not going to work out’ the day after I came out of the closet to someone who was disquieted by my outedness. I asked for a reason, they didn’t give me one.
This is why people stay in the closet. This is why people of color have to work twice as hard to keep jobs. This is why people don’t display their religious leanings publicly, even though it’s perfectly acceptable to ask a person what church they attend.
It might be illegal to fire a person based on these things, but if there is a way to do it while covering their ass they will find a way. And that’s how they do it- they don’t give a reason.
So pardon me for being able to put two and two together to get four.
And I’m absolutely baffled that people will use the phrase ‘it’s illegal to do this, so it didn’t happen’ when it applies to us in the margins, but will absolutely use the phrase ‘making it illegal won’t stop people from doing it’ when it applies to things like guns. Or murder. Or theft. But I digress.
The list gets even longer if you’re trans or a person of color or disabled. Or a veteran or homeless.
And this is why our activism needs to be intersectional. And this is why when we were given the right to marry, there was a rumbling cry of ‘this is a first step’ among the cheers of ‘we won.’ Anyone who has ever fought for their rights will tell you that it does not end with a single legislation.
So maybe your panties could stand to be in a tighter wad.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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