Why do you think it’s ok to use queer as a blanket term? As a bi trans person I find it incredibly hurtful and offensive
Do you really want to know my answer? Like seriously, are you actually open to listening to what my answer may be and absorbing any new information I may offer on the topic?
Because from here it doesn’t seem like you are.
Let’s be honest with each other, you started out with the phrase “why do you think it’s ok” which is aggressive language, and then you justified your disagreement with your identity. Which I always found to be an interesting tactic, because when this clarification exists in an argument it assumes that by having this particular set of identities you are somehow more qualified to discuss this problem than someone else, while at the same time personalizing you so it is harder for anyone to disagree with you.
You then use the words hurtful, and then offensive. Both button words that illicit a certain type of response, hurtful in how inarguable it is. That is your feeling and I would never argue what a stranger is feeling to them. Then there is offensive, which is a word that is very well used in the LGBT+ community to discuss important issues surrounding our dehumanization.
I don’t think that this message was a carefully crafted masterpiece of debate and trickery that you spent hour figuring out the direct phrasing of obviously, but I do think you had an intent when you wrote this message and the words you chose make that intent clear.
You don’t want to talk to me. Hell I doubt you even follow me. I have anonymous turned off on my ask box, but I am almost 100% sure that if I didn’t you would be sending this under the little sunglasses wearing icon.
Also if you checked my FAQ you would have found a helpful little link explaining to you my views on the queer discourse. You may have noticed that I have my own reasons why I decide to use that word, and my own history with it. You probably also would have seen my post saying that I don’t mind people disagreeing with me. Or you could have seen that I have a link set up that blocks the word from all my content so no one has to see it if they don’t want to, and they can still have access to the history that I give insight into.
But you didn’t care about that did you? Because you aren’t actually interested in what I have to say, if you were you would have already seen all of this and you would have seen my request for people to stop asking me to drag out my arguments for why I use the word again and again. You probably would have realized that either A) it is a lost cause so why bother B) that I have nothing left to say on the matter that I haven’t already said and you may have respected my professional boundaries enough to leave it alone.
But here we are, you uninformed and angry, and me annoyed and tired. We aren’t going to have a good dialogue, and I am near certain you wouldn’t have accepted one if I offered it. You are not here to change my mind, because I have to assume that you at least did a basic check to see that my entire project has the word queer in it and it is pretty clear that isn’t changing. And you are also not here to have your mind changed.
And to be honest I have no desire to change your mind. I don’t mind people disagreeing with me on this. It actually isn’t that big of a deal to me if someone doesn’t agree with my viewpoints all the time.
I have read a lot of arguments in favour of removing the word from our lexicon completely. I disagree, but I understand them. As I have said before, this isn’t a huge dividing point for me.
I have given people access to my work without the word queer in it, and that is the extent of what I am going to do here.
So why are you sending this in? Nothing is going to change from it, and honestly it is a pretty boring message so I can’t believe you thought something would.
I think the sole reason you sent this was performative.
You wanted to show that you tried to convince that big mean queer person without actually trying to convince them. Maybe this was a performance; for your followers, maybe you will screenshot my response and share them in a group chat. Or it is also possible this is a performance for yourself, maybe you want to convince yourself that you are doing something.
Maybe you feel ineffective or like you need to make a difference so you are sending this message to me to feel proud of yourself for trying to change something that you don’t like.
But you aren’t doing this to actually do the hard work of changing something.
And it is fine if you aren’t able to do that work for any reason, but leave other people out of your sense of inadequacy. I am not here to be your punching bag that you hit so you can feel big and strong.
I am tired, and I am bored of people sending me this performative garbage.
Which of course lends itself to the question, why am I answering this publicly?
I will admit there is a little bit of performance from my side as well, I want people to see how right I am and how much this behavior sucks. I want people to see me destroying this ask, and I am not going to lie I am totally going to send screenshots to the group chat.
What makes us different, is that I didn’t seek this performance out. I clearly did not send this to myself, and I haven’t made a post about the queer discourse in months. Which means, this person had to search for me so that they could get mad at me. Whereas I just had to check my inbox this morning and respond to what was there.
But outside of the performance of it all, I want my answer to sit with you for a couple of days. I don’t care if I change your mind about the queer discourse because honestly I do not care about the queer discourse. But I do want to change something. I want you to stop sending asks like these, because this doesn’t seem like it is your first.
And if you were just sending them to me I would be fine with it. I can delete asks, and they roll off my back if I decide to let them. But not everyone is like that.
I could now give a rant about the little baby queers I am protecting, but it is not just about them. It is about all of the people you send this kind of thing to (who almost certainly don’t deserve hate mail), whether they are affected deeply by it or not it doesn’t make what you are doing any better.
And if me writing this long message publicly makes it less likely for you to send something like this again, then it is worth the five minutes I have spent crafting it. Because if you are a little more self conscious about doing something like this again, then hopefully I will have spared a couple of people the annoyance of having to deal with this kind of garbage message.
This is also a very educational response because it takes apart the question in a very useful way. A good exercise for those of you who are interested in rhetoric and logic in discourse.
It’s also a good insight into the motivations and psychology of people when they send this type of messages. It’s couched as a personal attack on you (and it is!) but behind that is a person who is working through stuff badly, and trying to assign the blame for that to a different person (you). By studying that, you can understand more about the Discourse and the motivations behind it. It can also help to heal you (and others) from attacks of this type. When I read the initial ask, it made my body flinch: I felt that I myself was being publicly attacked by a strange and hurtful person, and that I had to defend myself, flooded with instinctive responses. Seeing the blogger’s thoughtful response calmed me.