Yes. That is literally what they mean. They benefit from turning “lesbian” and “radical feminist” into synonyms, so they insist on using them as synonyms constantly.
The end result of this is, of course, that anyone who distrusts radical feminist rhetoric avoids lesbian spaces, meaning that young lesbians are surrounded on all sides by radfem propaganda and, unsurprisingly, become indoctrinated into the authoritarian radical feminist manner of thinking.
I’ e noticed this too, such that I find myself wary of anyone online (offline is very different imx) who identifies as “lesbian” and immediately go searching to see if they mean “radfem but maybe some trans women can come in as long as they’re not bi or nb” or if they mean “gee golly I love me some girls and never found men sexy”
Cis people attracted to non-cis people aren’t inherently lgbt lmao. Nonbinary genders and attraction to nonbinary people doesn’t function like attraction to binary genders.
i think thats very invalidating of nonbinary genders. its like saying we are not enough to make someone “count” as queer.
we do “count”. as a nonbinary person who is stellarian most of the time, it’s tiring to see so many people treat people like me like we’re just neutral or we are whatever is convenient to others at the moment
sorry guys, only binary genders are real enough to count. /sarcasm
Exclusionists: what do you mean our worldview is inherently hostile to nb people?
Also exclusionists: there are only two genders and if you’re not one of those you’re just a fetish object, sorry I don’t make the rules.
…
Also, OP? I’ve heard of multiple situations where a lesbian didn’t realize another person was a woman at first, and became attracted to her upon finding out.
In your estimation, is attraction to women solely a form of fetishism based on the fact that this can happen? Or does that seem like saying that would be unfair and dehumanizing to women?
Anyway: it’s also dehumanizing to nonbinary people. We exist and our genders are real.
Maybe you, personally, would not be able to date a nonbinary person without treating them like that, but for the sake of social justice it’s better to cultivate self-awareness and take responsibility for your personal failings rather than to pretend everyone behaves equally offensively.
You are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That’s it. Aces aren’t LGBT.
I mean for one your forgetting a bit of that. Like the Q+.
Mod Bethany
The full acronym is LGBT.
I love me some ahistorical bullshit
The “full” acronym at one point was “GL”, after lesbians fought against male homosexuality being the “face” of the movement (i.e., the Alliance for Gay Artists (AGA), founded in 1982, was renamed the Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists shortly thereafter; and the Gay Activists Alliance never included “Lesbian” in their title).
The “full” acronym at another point was “LGB”, only after bisexual activists campaigned fiercely to be included, and is often still not even included in acronyms
The “full” acronym at yet another point was “LGBT”, only after trans activists campaigned fiercely to be included
Queer was added to the acronym after it was reclaimed and re-politicized by ACT UP off-shoot Queer Nation in the early 1990s. LGBTQ has been a thing since the 90s.
ONE Archives, which is the largest repository of LGBTQIA+ materials in the world and was founded by some of the principle members of the early (1950s-60s) homophile movement, which led to the gay rights movement post-Stonewall, uses the full acronym LGBTQ on their website and also freely uses the word “Queer” interchangeably.
As of 2014, NOW (National Organization for Women) agreed to switch to use of the full LGBTQIA acronym, and it likely isn’t the only large social rights organization to have done so
Many LGBTQ+ magazines use LGBTQ, including One (which has existed in some form since the 1950s) and The Advocate, use LGBTQ or LGBTQIA as the full acronym and regularly use “queer” as a phrase (and, in fact, some articles have welcomed asexual people and their narratives as part of the queer experience).
The acronym is constantly evolving. It’s not static. To claim otherwise is blatant ignorance. The modern-day LGBTQ+ community is a result of decades of political activism, social inclusion, and community outreach. It’s not a rigid structure that operates by a strict set of rules about who can and cannot join.
The full acronym is LGBT. Cishets don’t belong in the community. Aces aren’t inherently lgbt. We don’t want our oppressors in our community.
“we don’t want our oppressors in our community”
as if trans people don’t already have to deal with their oppressors (cis people) being in their community
as if LGBTQIA+ people of color don’t have to deal with LGBTQIA+ white people in the community
as if LBTQIA+ women don’t have to deal with GBTQIA+ men in the community
as if disabled LGBTQIA+ people don’t have to deal with able-bodied LGBTQIA+ people in the community
the LGBTQIA+ community is huge and consists of people with multiply-overlapping identities and privileges. we all (unless you’re a cis, able-bodied, wealthy, white gay man) have to deal with a member of our oppressing class in the LGBTQIA+ community
ETA: “Straightness” is a position of power. Ace people, even if they are in heterosexual relationships, do not necessarily perform “straightness” in ways that are acceptable to the Straight class.
Reblogging because osirisjones is completely hitting the nail on the head.
ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK
wait, what does the “i” stand for? i’ve never seen it in the acronym before?
I assume you’re talking about this post. Well done on missing the entire point, I guess?
Let’s see how your ask holds up when we replace queer with another reclaimed homophobic slur: gay.
reclaiming a slur means using it for yourself. you can’t just say calling other people gay without their permission (incl. using it as a blanket term) is ok just because it “has a history of being reclaimed”, that doesn’t change that it’s a slur. it’s no different from the f slur. how is some people being fine with it more important than the people who are Not fine with it? if you forcefully call OTHERS gay, thats not reclaiming it, it’s just calling others a slur
Oh no, no one is allowed to say “they gay community” anymore because you might accidentally include men attracted exclusively to men who don’t identify as gay! /sarcasm
If you want the long-form, researched and sourced answer to your frankly insulting, asinine ask, it’s under the readmore, but tl;dr:
When I say “queer people”, I am (shockingly enough) referring to people who identify as queer.
If you don’t identify as queer, I am not talking about you.
If you’re going to police queer people about their identity because it’s a slur, but not any of the other IDs that are also reclaimed slurs (gay, bisexual, fag, etc.) or that have a pathological history (homosexual, lesbian, trans, etc.), all you’re telling me is that you’re being hypocritical and perpetuating exclusionist/REG/radfem rhetoric.
“When I say “queer people”, I am (shockingly enough) referring to people who identify as queer.”
I hate to be That Guy, but wouldn’t this make it hard to talk about the community as a whole? (Or actually in a weird way get what exclusionists want—having to say LGBT+ when we mean everyone, because on this definition, exclusionists are not queer?)
It seems to me this could have the unintended (?) consequence of shutting people out of conversations and communities they actually should be part of even if we disagree with them or even think their views are toxic.
(By which I mean, like, if something gets called the queer community center or queer resource center, does this mean you have to philosophically commit to identifying as queer before being allowed inside?)
I don’t think so; after all, I spent a hell of a lot of time swimming in the YMCA pool as a kid, while being neither a young man nor a Christian. And I took gentile friends with me to events at the JCC, too. One doesn’t have to be a Sikh to eat at a Sikh temple, either.
I think it is a perfectly fair stance to say “the queer community” refers to people who identify as queer, but also that one of the ideological stances of this community is generally to have open doors and share resources with people who need them, whether or not they identify as queer.
More pragmatically I think it’s the only workable compromise we’ve got.
The queer community is my community. I don’t think we need to dismantle or erase our identity and history in order to share resources with people who exist outside that identity for one reason or another.
If people require that we dismantle or erase our identity and history before they are willing to break bread with us, they can find another table to sit at, but only because they choose to be intolerant and wish to do us harm (cf. Karl Popper’s tolerance paradox.)
So someone who doesn’t use the word queer but who goes to the resource center for education and condoms is a non-queer person using queer resources?
I guess I can see the logic, but it still makes more sense to me just to think that person is being a little precious about what other people who don’t even know them call them.
(Like, an example from my own life: I find the prefix allo- unfortunate. I would prefer people specifically not refer to me as “allosexual” or “allistic” when they want to say I’m not ace or not autistic. I think I should be able to tell them I’m not a fan of those words (though not to *demand* people specifically remember not to call me that; people know a lot of other humans, generally.)
But I don’t think it’s my place to get mad at random posts that are like “hey any allistics who read me, what’s up with Thing x?” That person isn’t using a word I dislike AT me, they’re just talking. I don’t get to demand they talk in ways that don’t bug my ears.
They’re also not saying “hey anyone who, specifically, BOTH isn’t autistic AND is okay with this word.”)
Well, I do think that you’d be within your rights to decide “since I don’t like being referred to by that word, I’m going to choose to assume you don’t mean me with that comment”.
Of course, you’re also perfectly within your rights to just, in general, decide not to respond to general talking-into-the-void-of-tumblr posts that you don’t feel like you have anything to say to or just find annoying for any reason and want to ignore. In fact I generally recommend that people consider doing that thing, where the annoyance is objectively petty (such as, “this person used a word I personally dislike but which is in common usage, with intent to refer generally to a group that I’m technically qualified to consider myself a part of”.
…but that’s apparently a lot of emotional maturity to ask of people and they’d rather scream about how queer is a slur every time you so much as speak of “queer people” or even call YOURSELF queer.
This is exactly my issue with it, right here.
(And yes, I think you’d be within your rights to assume it, but I also think you’d be rude if you said the person didn’t ask you, only “allistics.”
Kind of the same way I think ink it’s rude when a radfem uses her objections to “cis” (some of which I share!) to be like “oh you couldn’t have meant me, I’m a WOMAN not a CISWOMAN.”
Like, you get to dislike the term but you don’t get to… evade consequences for publicly screaming at people who see things differently for reasons that don’t involve being mean to you on purpose.)
Agreed. It’s one thing to refrain from commenting at all because someone used a word you personally dislike, it’s quite another to be snide about it and go out of your way to tell the person that you’re Not Acknowledging Them until they bow to your nitpicky linguistic demands.
the 80s was such a weird time to like be doing feminism. You might think you see some bad things on tumblr but like people were publishing things like this back then. The more things change the more they stay the same I guess
Love that you can just drop this weird sentence in a footnote at the beginning of a chapter as if that statement on its own doesn’t require like a massive amount of theoretical work behind it that is just handwaved away. Like a ‘realization’ is self authenticating evidence. This is like Berdyaev “this was once revealed to me in a dream” level citation but not even in theology.
Good God, no wonder sex posi became so big.
This is EXACTLY what sex positive feminism was about, and why “it’s just frivolous feminine girls who worship men” was creepy sexist radfem judo.
Oh, and this is also why I misunderstood ace people at first. I’d seen so much “we criticize sex and orgasm as inherently oppressive to women” that I assumed “ace lesbians” were… these people.
I was mistaken and I’m sorry… but I was sympathetic to what I THOUGHT exclusionsits meant because I thought they were saying “we really don’t want those people defining lesbianism for us again”
Yeah, there was this rather hair-raising dynamic where ace exclusionist stealth-radfems leaned really hard into this perception for a while to farm sympathy, then flipped the script once they got people agreeing with them. I’m glad you bailed out of that ideological trap when you recognized what it was.
I think there’s *now* also a second-order dynamic where some number of younger sex-repulsed aces (who don’t have the referents to recognize the dynamic or its toxicity) have been gaslighted by bullies into believing that they can’t possibly really be asexual, because ace means Those Weirdos Over There, and so they’re resurrecting the “extra pure lesbians who must tragically hate sex for political reasons” identity in its entirety.
When I chat with older lesbians about this stuff they’re always like, “Oh fuckssake, this again!?”
ive been working on a Discourse Thought about terfs lately, and here it goes:
you know that super precious, stifling, ‘women are so important and precious and vulnerable’ rhetoric that gets used about white women to rile up racists? i feel like that exact sentiment is what terfs are using to rile up transphobes, and they’re getting young lesbians all caught up with them in it. there’s this very smothering, matronly sort of attitude that older women can have towards younger women, and towards the whole concept of female sexuality, and it’s all about fear and control and hatred.
it says, ‘as a woman, you are vulnerable. you are physically vulnerable, you are mentally vulnerable, and you’re definitely sexually vulnerable. you are vulnerable to corruption and to predators and to violence and to sin. you must be kept safe and pure from Bad Men, of which there are many, all of them extremely eager to abuse you physically and emotionally and sexually. you must also be insulated from harmful media, which can corrupt you utterly and lead you right to all those Bad Men, or perhaps even make you Bad too, like the Bad Men. and of course you must be trained to recognize the terrible danger you are in! all the Bad things and ways that could destroy you! you should be scared at all times, and listen to us, your elders, your sisters and mothers, who know all the horrible dangers of the world, and will keep you safe from it, and pure, and good, right on this clean little pedestal where we can keep an eye on you, and you must never get off.’
this isn’t a very good kind of feminism. it’s hard to see it as feminist at all, in any possible light, because it’s note-for-note just regular old sexually repressive bigotry, but now with an invitation for lesbians to come join their straight sisters in this Safe Space that’s definitely-for-sure-we-promise not a cage.
feminism should be empowering. it shouldn’t be one more shot of poison in the ear of girls who are already scared enough. because women are people, not things. they are valuable, and, yeah, they’re vulnerable. but they’re also capable of strength and bravery, and they deserve the scary and dangerous freedom of being allowed to live in the world on their own terms, not the safety of a cloister.
terf rhetoric won’t make you safe. it’ll just make you scared. and you deserve to be free, instead.
Y’all are some of the most disingenuous motherfuckers. I am exhausted. And I am really done with this trauma argument.
A confession: I have been harassed and verbally abused with it/its pronouns before.
I don’t fully understand why some trans people choose to use it pronouns for themselves, and I don’t follow anyone who does anymore because seeing someone referred to as “it” upsets me.
However, I do not shame or belittle trans folks who use it/its pronouns in a reclaiming fashion because it’s none of my business and I am not a piece of obnoxious shit.
If you have trauma associated with the word queer, then you need to respect me and yourself enough to not interact with my blog.
This blog literally has QUEER in its url, name, and description. Every other post on this blog contains the word QUEER. This blog is about QUEER people, for QUEER people, by a QUEER person.
No one is forcing you to interact with this blog. No one is forcing you to interact with the QUEER community. No one is forcing you to apply the word QUEER to your own identity.
Block blogs that have queer in their url. Add the word QUEER to your Tumblr tag blacklist. Download one of the many different apps and browser extensions that exist and use it to hide posts with the word QUEER in them.
Try taking at least some responsibility for your own mental health.
You aren’t queer? You don’t like the word? That’s fine. Your feelings and your trauma are valid.
But hear this: y’all need to leave QUEER people the FUCK alone.
Stop adding “queer is a slur” to our posts.
Stop inviting yourselves onto our posts to whine about the phrase “queer community”.
Don’t reblog our posts if you’re going to tag them with “#q slur”.
Stop making discourse of our genders and sexualities.
Stop trying to create rules over who is allowed to call themselves queer when you yourself are not queer.
Stop sending us invasive messages demanding to know “how” we’re queer or if we’re “really lgbt”.
Stop trying to make the queer community responsible for your personal baggage, as if we aren’t surviving with our own.
Let QUEER people live.
god yes OP
“Stop trying to make the queer community responsible for your personal baggage, as if we aren’t surviving with our own.”
This was exactly my reaction when, in 2015, a 15yo on Tumblr came and sent me a load of hate for being “an OMG ACTUAL ADULT” calling myself ‘queer’ and using ‘queer community’.
Like, how to put this. In Australia since the early 90s, ‘queer’ has been the accepted term to call that community. It’s a mainstream word. We say ‘queer theory’, ‘queer community’, ‘queer organisations’, etc. Another Australian who words for the government said it’s a perfectly acceptable term to use in policy documents and funding applications. Here, in Australia, queer hasn’t been a slur at any point in my life. The only Australians I’ve ever come across who think it’s a slur are people who spend too much time around American youths on social media.
I did a post about the international queer community, it got 5-7k notes (ish) and people from at least 10 other countries said ‘queer’ is not a slur in their country and it’s just the word that’s used for the queer community.
This is why it drives me nuts when a 15yo from South Carolina, USA assumes:
1) Her experience with ‘queer’ is the same as everybody else’s
2) A small number of people having a bad experience with ‘queer’ is an acceptable reason to deny and police usage by the entire wider international queer community
The short of it is that it’s not acceptable. Many older queer folks have used this word for decades – it’s been in common use since at least the 80s. In the past 3 years it’s become very fashionable (mostly only on Tumblr, but on pockets of social media elsewhere, too) to treat queer as this Big Bad Slur (forgetting that there are many other slurs and most of our language gets used as slurs at some point by various people) and to pop up on every fucking post that mentions queer like “UM EXCUSE ME IT’S FINE FOR YOU TO CALL YOURSELF QUEER BUT IT’S LITERAL ABUSE FOR YOU TO USE IT FOR OTHER PEOPLE LIKE AS AN UMBRELLA TERM AND YOU ARE A BAD PERSON!!!”
like. babe. I’ve never met you in my life. You live an entire world away from me and you can’t tell me what language I’m allowed to use for myself and my own community. If you don’t like the word, you have trauma associated with it or whatever, I accept that. I feel for you, I have trauma about some words, too. USE XKIT BLACKLIST. Your trauma is your problem, just like my trauma is my problem. Yes, really. Get counselling. It’s not everyone else’s responsibility to change their identities and language because of your trauma. That’s not a lack of empathy from me, that’s a hard life lesson you need to learn about the world not revolving around you. I am not abusing anyone by using the language I’ve always used about my own community.
It’s not the end of your world, though. You’re not doomed to read ‘queer’ all over tumblr forever. There are many many many tools available for you to protect yourself and avoid triggers. You should be responsible for yourself and your experience online and protect yourself from seeing things that upset you.
“BUT I’M A MINOR!!”, you cry! okay, true. Get up from the computer, go directly to your parent or guardian, and let them know you’re not old enough to police your own internet usage and ask them to do it for you. It is not my responsibility to take care of you. It is no one else on Tumblr’s responsibility to take care of you. The internet is not just for kids. If you can’t take care of yourself, your parents need to help you do that.
The short of it is if you’re old enough to know the word ‘queer’ upsets you, you’re old enough to download xkit blacklist and add ‘queer’ to the blacklist words. If you’re not doing that, I have to assume you’re actually trying to pick fights with queer people and it’s more of a power struggle to you than anything about semantics.
“BUT I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO USE XKIT! IT’S AN EASY CHANGE FOR YOU!” Dude, you’re asking me to change my whole identity. You’re asking me to change my lexicon for you. It’s not an easy or fair change for you to ask me to make. Xkit is a quick and easy solution for you (and now, you can use the tumblr innate tag blocks, too). If that’s too much for you to do, I have a feeling you’re just looking for a fight and not actually traumatised by ‘queer’.
NEVER. NEVER. Come onto a queer person’s post and start telling them anything about how to use their word. Queer folks get policed and oppressed enough by cishet folks. We don’t need people from our own community trying to police our language and language we’ve used for decades and continue to use in many countries and in many parts of the US.
There is absolutely no reason to derail posts being “””””””helpful”””””””” by repeatedly, constantly, aggressively spreading rhetoric that shames people for using language we have used for ourselves and our community for decades. Your problem with the word queer should not be my problem, so don’t make it my problem.
This is interesting. It’s dehumanizing and sexist, of course, but there’s a kernel of an interesting idea there. If I’m honest, I don’t think that most men can possibly grow up in our misogynistic society with an excellent grasp of how to relate to women as people 100% of the time. I have met one or two who really seemed to have it down, I guess. I don’t think that if I had been a man, I’d have it down; it’s simply too difficult. At the very least it requires years of practice and consistent rejection of dehumanizing ideas.
Because of all that, there’s almost always an unspoken difficulty for women who are trying to interact with men, made all the worse because many men don’t understand the difficulty exists. The difficulty is how to navigate an interaction in which, at any moment, I might encounter the perception that I am weaker and less worthy of respect than he is. I can pretend the difficulty doesn’t exist, which sometimes means swallowing indignities. Or I can confront the difficulty head-on and be branded as angry and uppity. Or I can non-confrontationally lament the difficulty, in which case I seem sad and self-defeating, and possibly confirm the preconception that I’m weaker.
It doesn’t always bother me because I’m not always paying attention to it – no one could; we’ve got jobs and lives – but it’s there. (Perhaps it is not there for all women. Perhaps, for example, it isn’t there for powerful women who by necessity spend most of their time interacting with people who are less powerful than they, like Hillary Clinton.)
I think…hmm. I don’t think this is untrue, but I also don’t think it’s unique to men. I don’t really think anyone has a solid grasp on how to relate to others as people 100% of the time, especially not others from groups you don’t belong to or don’t know very much about. Any take on the issue that handwaves the fact that *everyone* is capable of this behavior is missing something, I think. Ironically, the post you linked spends quite a lot of words bemoaning male dehumanization while itself talking about men in a very dehumanizing way – and it’s all the more dangerous because the author seems completely blind to her own capacity for dehumanization.
It’s true that different people are likelier to dehumanize in different ways, some more harmful than others, because of the particular messages they’ve received. But I think it’s important to spend as much time interrogating that tendency in oneself as in others. Being a subjective creature means putting real, continuous effort into understanding the full breadth and depth of other people.
I honestly feel like I’m rolling the dice interacting with anyone of any gender, to be honest.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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