So like… what do gatekeepers… DO in the real world? Like if they’re at an LGBT+ event and a bi woman is like “Hi I’m Emily and this is my boyfriend,” do they like… confront her? When a person at a support group says “I’m asexual” do they just sit silently and stew in their own rage? Like how do you people function in the real world??
An enormous amount of gatekeepers don’t interact with local queer groups and communities at all. The younger ones don’t have access, and the older ones got black listed a long time ago for being vile.
That lack of access, for the younger ones, is why they are so easily targeted by older radfem types, and is why the age of gatekeepers is so skewed towards young people, btw. They have no way to experience actual queer communities, so they get sucked into this awful, dangerous parody of it.
That was a rhetorical question but this is a damn good answer
Tag: lgbt
the most important thing to me ever is bi kids knowing that it’s ok to be 10% attracted to women and 90% attracted to men or 10% attracted to men and 90% attracted to women and still feeling ok to identify as bi, and still feeling like their identity is valid, and still feeling like they can lead fulfilling lives with both (or other) genders. like that’s just so fricking important.
I’m a bi adult and you know what? I needed this. Thank you.
it’s also important to remember that it can be a fluid % like sometimes it’ll be 50/50 some times 10/90 and then drift into a 45/65 or even 2/98 and it’s still okay. It’s just where you are at that time in your life.
I’m so done with entertaining opinions about queer identity from people who don’t identify as queer. It’s easy to look in from the outside and complain about how queer as an identifier is “vague” or “useless.”
That is, it’s easy to reject queer as “vague” if you’re completely unwilling to listen to queer people. It’s easy to say that queer is “useless” if you have the ability to identify with labels that are already widely understood and widely accepted in LGBT spaces. What is telling, to me, is that most of those who I’ve seen reject the reality of queer as an identity are those who have no use for it.
For many of us, queer is obviously not a useless term.
When I was questioning, when I am questioning, in the future when I am questioning again–queer is my constant. A fact about who I am, a connection to my community and history, an open canvas of possibilities. Clarity.
Even as a constant, queer allows for fluidity and change. How I identify has changed a few times over the past decade. Across all that time, the queer community welcomed and supported and celebrated me, not in spite of my other labels, but because of them.
If, ten years from now, I identify in some other way than I do now, I know that I will still be queer, and that I’ll still be welcome in the queer community.
The same has not been true of my experience in the LGBT community. The farther I’ve moved away from being easily categorized as L, G, B, or T–the more intracommunity hostility I’ve encountered.
And, even so, I’m queer. Sometimes queer as in fuck you, always queer as in proud.
When the constraints of the gender binary and even the limitiations of nonbinary identity are too stifling, when I am a gender that is outside of what we consider to be gender altogether, when I am no gender at all, I am still queer.
As long as the LGBT community continues to define LGB identity as “For SGA’s Only”, I am still queer.
Queer is the rock I’ve held onto and the rock I’m constantly tossing through the window of every queerphobic and transphobic assholes’ house of cards.
Queer is and will always be the most accurate and most honest way for me to identify myself. Gender: queer. Sexuality: queer.
Queer is the quickest way for me to communicate that I’m not cisgender or straight without being forced to other myself.
“Why can’t you just say you aren’t straight, everyone knows what that means?” I thought we were fighting for the end of heteronormativity and straightness-as-default. Or is that a right reserved only for those at the front of the acronym?
Queer is breaking down gates and replacing them with solidarity.
Queer is smashing binaries and replacing them with freedom.
Queer is how these words are mine, and another queer person will have a different story, and yet we’re connected by shared pride and history.
Queer is anything but vague or useless to me.
In honor of Janelle Monáe coming out I put together a lil graphic about bi & pan identities! This is based on my own experiences within the community as someone who uses both terms. It of course does not cover everything! Image description under the cut.
i'll apple your turnover 