Social Justice Embassy

i just saw someone completely seriously, without a hint of irony, refer to it as “Q-slur Eye” and my intestines started melting like so many Salvador Dalí clocks

I’ve seen “don’t call the show Qu**r Eye if you’re a cishet and can’t reclaim the q-slur” so nothing surprises me anymore.

“Don’t normalize this word that people fought really hard to normalize! Let it keep its oppressive power because I don’t understand queer history”

God I literally fucking hate this rhetoric. It’s exclusionary, gatekeepy, TERFy, and supports a totally revisionist queer history that erases so many marginalized people, especially people who are marginalized on multiple axes.

“LET IT KEEP ITS OPPRESSIVE POWER BECAUSE I DON’T UNDERSTAND QUEER HISTORY”

Wow that really sums it up.

I lived through the “take back the word queer” movement, so let me further sum it up

The entire point was to strip the word of the power to hurt us. We embraced it by refusing to be offended by it. We were saying “you can’t hurt us with that word, we now feel empowered when we hear it.” 

During this time I saw an interview with a gay man who’d been arrested while wearing a “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used To It” t-shirt. He was put into a holding cell with other detainees who tried to verbally abuse him. They started out by calling him queer but after seeing his t-shirt, and him not reacting to that word, they started stumbling over their words trying to find a name to call him. They finally settled on repeatedly calling him a “sissy” which, by the late 90s, had become a very out-dated slur toward queer men and was a laughable effort by these hyper-masculine and sexist bullies

When they tried to call him a queer it had no power because embracing the word, no matter who said it, had taken away that power

tl;dr We took back the word Queer with the intent of it no longer having the power to hurt us, but people now calling it the Q-slur are giving power back to the people who hate us  

Be queer, bitch

jfc. Queer is not a dirty word. I'm queer. Lots of people are queer. Stop erasing us.

The number of times lately I've seen people try to exclude trans and non-binary people from the "lesbian" label in particular has dismayed me. Trans women are women. Non-binary people can define themselves as women (demigirls and gender-fluid folk are two examples).

Excluding trans people makes you look like ignorant bigots, and plays right into the hands of the conservatives who want LGBT people stripped of their rights. After the trans people come the bi folks, and guess what, lesbians - you're next.