Finally, an informational post on genderqueer identity!

(Image description: ten square images with blue, white, and lavender gradient backgrounds; every image has a border across the top and bottom with a thin black line framed by a black diamond on each side and every image also has black text.

1) Large centered text that reads “A Brief Introduction to Genderqueer History and Identity”, below that is the instagram handle “@genderqueer.positivity”

2) “Genderqueer is a term that was created in the mid-1990’s to cover a wide range of Queer experiences of gender, as well as marginalized gender identities and expressions. In its earliest usage, "gender queer” was a term for those who were Queer specifically because of gender, rather than sexuality.“

3) "The earliest usage of "gender queer” comes from the April/May first edition of the zine GenderTrash From Hell, edited by Xanthra Phillippa Mackay.“ Below this is a quote from page 19 of the zine reading "gender queers & gender outlaws are what we & only we are, since lesbians & gays seem to think that queer means lesbian/gay (& sometimes bi) only”.

4) “The terms "gender queer” and “gender trash” would appear in another set of zines two years later, the In Your Face newsletters published by Riki Anne Wilchins. It’s unclear if Wilchins drew inspiration from the GenderTrash zines, or if she created these terms independently; however, she claims to have coined the term “genderqueer” and she is the one most commonly credited with creating and defining the term.“

5) A quote that reads "I coined the term “genderqueer” back in the 1990s in an effort to glue together two nouns that seemed to me described an excluded and overlooked middle: those of us who were not only queer but were so because we were the kind of gender trash society couldn’t digest.” Smaller text below attributes the quote to Riki Wilchins, from an advocate.com article titled “Get to Know the New Pronouns: They, Theirs, and Them”

6) A second quote that reads “It’s about all of us who are genderqueer: diesel dykes and stone butches, leatherqueens and radical fairies, nelly fags, crossdressers, intersexed, transexuals, transvestites, transgendered, transgressively gendered, intersexed, and those of us whose gender expressions are so complex they haven’t even been named yet.” This quote is also attributed to Riki Wilchins and comes from the first edition of a gender activism newsletter called In Your Face, published in Spring 1995.

7) “Today, Genderqueer is both an umbrella term and a specific gender identity label. As an umbrella term, Genderqueer still covers a wide range of Queer experiences of gender. As the basis for a gender identity, Genderqueer can be used as a label by any person who feels that their gender is best described as Queer, or anyone who actively chooses to Queer their own gender identity and/or expression.”

8) “Genderqueer is used by some individuals to describe having a gender identity outside of the male/female binary. However, it is also possible to have a binary or binary-aligned gender and be Genderqueer. Genderqueer can be used as a stand-alone label or as one of multiple gender-related labels used by an individual.”

9) This slide has text along the bottom that says “This is the Genderqueer pride flag; this version was created by Marilyn Roxie in 2011.” Above that is a square image of a Genderqueer pride flag on the left side; the flag has three stripes of the same width: a lavender stripe on top, a white stripe in the center, and a chartreuse green stripe on the bottom. To the right of the flag is text which describes what each color represents. Lavender represents “queerness and androgyny”, white represents “gender neutrality and genderlessness”, and green represents “genders unrelated to the binary”.

10) The last slide has a stock photo in the top/center of the image; in the stock photo a person stands on a staircase with beige walls and a white ceiling in the background, holding a large genderqueer pride flag up to a natural light source which isn’t visible in the picture, the person wears khaki pants, but otherwise can’t be seen from behind the flag. Below the stock photo is text that reads “Genderqueerness is radically inclusive, deeply personal, fiercely political, and beautiful.” After the sentence is the outline of a black heart emoji.)

The QPR History Discourse: where we are.

An update on the situation: (because I know all of you are glued to your seats about this one 🙄)

It looks like we may have to pack it up, lads. I’m currently having discussions with a (frankly terrifyingly) influential ace blogger and it seems the people who created the label QPR strongly object to the perspective that they (as Ace bloggers who happened to be aro-spec) could, in any way, represent the aro community. So I will probably be officially retracting my previous statements that QPRs are aro history.

Where that leaves the aro community in relationship to QPRs, I don’t know. I’m honestly shocked that the weight of this should fall at my doorstep at all. If any other aro blogs want to chime in, feel free. But as of now, QPRs are ace history, not aro history.

It seems to me, though I may be about to drop a Bad Take, that whether the term was originally created for aro people is immaterial if aro people use it now. Is it a useful concept? Yes. Can aro people find meaning and identity in it? Also yes.

Does using it in an aromantic way in any way hurt the asexual usage? Idk. I don’t follow The Discourse well enough to answer that question. But my guess is gonna be that it doesn’t hurt anything for an even more marginalized group than asexuals to use a term made by arospec asexuals to describe their relationships. Even if that wasn’t the original purpose.

Basically, QPR will have to be pried from my cold, dead fingers before I give it up. If allos can use it so can I.

So uh. Maybe it wasn’t aro history at first but if aros are using it now, it is now aro history. Because we’re making history all the time.

If ppl think this is a bad take, I’m sure I’ll hear about it.

That’s what I’ve been saying all along.  The idea of a QPR originated in a community that I was personally involved in, but it was explicitly acknowledged from the outset that it was open to everyone, and it’s great to see it used extensively in aro spaces.

What’s not great is to see people get the history wrong, and for what?  It’s not like a word needs to originate in the aro community in order for it to be part of aro history.

Dude, the objection is coming from two places. One, when we were having those discussions, the aro community as a thing outside the asexual community did not fucking exist. It is gross to see the conversations within my specific community appropriated away from its context, and having it labeled aggressively as not belonging to the specific community context that all of us would have described it as coming from at the time. This is maybe the fifth or sixth time I’ve had to make this point. Where is your community continuity? Why does this keep coming up over and over and over again? How is your community explaining its own history such that this piece of knowledge annoys someone and gets “rediscovered” every two years? 

Two, when we were having those conversations, there was a slow split as folks dropped off the radar of what the nascent aro community became: there seems to have been a quieter contingent of folks who went “hang on, are romantic relationships even a Real Thing?” and slipped off to question whether romantic orientation was even a universally useful question to identify (see here me*, @aceadmiral​, @kazaera​) and another set who went off to construct identities around not experiencing conventional romantic attraction. I am part of that former group, and the thoughts I have had about romantic relationships both then and now have honestly erred in the direction of deciding that romantic relationships are not, in the end, much different from any other kind of relationship, and encouraging people to consider ways in which our cultural categories of relationship are artificial boundaries imposed on a wide variety of human connections and attachments. 

I have never felt much kinship with the discussions that aro groups are having because the reification of romantic relationships as a quintessentially different category of relationship from other forms of attachment weirds me out. So it is doubly annoying to me to see myself seized as a figurehead for a community that is based on a concept that I think is way too heavily shaped by modern cultural assumptions about how chosen family and other relationships should form, begin, and feel. 

All of that being said, none of that has any bearing on my opinions about who should and should not feel welcome to use the concept of QPRs, which is (and has always been) that anyone who thinks the concept is useful should pick it up and have at. I don’t believe anyone involved in those conversations has ever said otherwise, even if the history thing is a pervasive irritation. Go forth, muddy the waters between those artificial categories of what you can do with any given relationship, and love one another with my blessing–not, frankly, that you need it. It belongs to you. It’s belongs to everyone. Just don’t tell me who I belong to, dammit. 

*sciatrix

Yeah, hi! I’m one of the co-originators of the term (s.e. smith was the one who came up with it, but it was on my blog in a conversation with me, and Sci above was another participant who was heavily involved in spreading it afterwards). I dropped out of ace discourse in 2011 and discovered this issue fairly recently.

I also want to underline that I absolutely do not want to take queerplatonic away from anyone. Like, something I said in the original convo was that I wished someone had had these conversations before us so that I wouldn’t need to go through them myself, and that I hoped the work we were doing now could be useful for others later. From the looks of it, this succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, which is fantastic! Anytime I see someone use the word “queerplatonic” my heart grows a little larger. Please, if you want it - go forth and use it! As Sci said, you have my blessing, not that you need it.

What annoys me is the historical revisionism involved in claiming the term as originating in the aro community. Like Sci says, there was no aro community at the time, at least not one I or anyone involved knew about. The participants were ace bloggers for the most part, participating in an ace community discussion. And, again like Sci says (it is possible this entire reblog could be replaced by “like Sci says”…) a bunch of us reacted to this discussion by essentially rejecting the notion of romantic orientation.

It is… weird, and not exactly pleasant, to find oneself suddenly retroactively co-opted into a community one has never been part of (I’m sure y’all are lovely people, but as mentioned above I dropped out of this sort of discourse back in 2011), to the point of having the community you were part of at the time erased and your identity redefined - I don’t and didn’t ID as aro - so that other people can… what? Score political points against the ace community? Claim ownership over the word? Seriously, you do not need the historical ownership in order to use the term now, can we not do this?

And now we return to your regular scheduled Tolkien linguistic geekery.