via
http://ift.tt/2b36Pw4:
ardatli:
autismserenity:
ahippiemadeofasphalt:
fennic-schmennic:
ifiwakeinthemorning:
hmmmmmmmmk:
metal-thimble:
eyelovedog:
just wanna remind everyone it’s canon that Lisa is queer
just wanna remind everyone it’s canon that Lisa is queer
A lesbian. Lesbian. LESBIAN. Thanx
THIS ^^^^ LESBIAN NOT QU*ER TYVM. STOP THIS LESBIAN ERASURE.
… She likes men as well though. She marries Millhouse and dates other men as well (after this image, I know many lesbians have past relationships with men). She’s also polyamorous- the following year she has two girlfriends.
She’s queer.
She dates men and women.
And is poly.
So…….queer erasure it is then!
in todays issue of ‘monosexuals claiming the very existence of bi people is gay erasure’
[picture is of a Simpsons couch gag, the one where they show shots from the future and Lisa is on the couch with her college girlfriend]
This is also the most direct individual example I’ve seen of this phenomenon.
The more I think about who uses “queer”, the clearer it is that it’s a ton of people under the bi umbrella - especially because there’s so little bi visibility that MOST bi people are afraid to claim “the B word” - and, especially, a ton of trans people. IIRC, one survey had a majority of trans people identifying their sexual orientation specifically as “queer”.
This is undoubtedly also partly because there’s such a huge overlap between bi and trans people, and because our communities have always been allies.
The more I look at who opposes the word, the more restricted it is to the various branches of the radical feminist communities telling everybody not to use this terrible slur. People outside that community pick it up because it sounds important, when you say something is a slur. Or because they personally hate the word. But that’s where it seems like it originates.
So, it’s coming primarily from a community that’s known for having an extremely anti-trans branch. And which has an overall philosophy that’s toxic to bisexuals, genderqueer/nonbinary people, and aces/aros. And which also has a pattern of wrapping abusive acts in faux-social-justice terminology - pretending that trans people invade women’s spaces, labeling any terms people use for calling them out as “slurs”, etc.
And the “q slur” meme spreads, because it sounds social-justice-y. It makes it seem like the larger community has rejected the term, instead of a subculture of a subculture being very very vocal about…
how we should ban a term that is primarily used by bi/trans people…
that is the only word many people feel safe using to describe themselves, thanks to rampant bi erasure and bi demonizing and to the pressure to fit your sexual orientation into a binary…
and that is the only word any of us has that lets us identify people like us in history without a ton of “but they didn’t have that identity back then”…
or to identify what we all, including aces/aros, have in common today, the essence of what is wonderful about all our different flavors of queerness as well as what the rest of the world…
It’s the only word we have that can build that community and hold it together, without all this infighting about terminology. (All right, I know that people can fight about any term. It’s the one that doesn’t explicitly exclude anybody that it shouldn’t.)
It’s also a word that a huge number of bi people use to identify themselves. A minority of gay and lesbian people prefer it over “gay” or “lesbian”. But in the bi community, it’s a HUGE thing for people to call themselves “queer” instead of “bisexual”. It’s so common that it’s one of the things people include when the spell out what “bi+” includes.
It’s also a word that almost 25% of trans people use to label their sexual orientation (with 52% of trans people identifying as some flavor of “bi+” including this “queer” 25%). (It’s in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which surveyed almost 2,000 trans people.)
It has seemed to me for a while that the effort to go back to the “queer’s a slur” fight of the fucking 1980s is an unconscious attempt to center things around “same-gender attraction” and push issues that are specific to being intersex, trans, ace/aro, and bi+ out to the margins. Or, anyway, farther out to the margins. Just the same as the tendency to label everything “the gay rights movement” does, or the pattern of referring to “gay and trans” issues and leaving everything else out.
So yeah.
Lisa’s queer.
“It has seemed to me for a while that the effort to go back to the “queer’s a slur” fight of the fucking 1980s is an unconscious attempt to center things around “same-gender attraction” and push issues that are specific to being intersex, trans, ace/aro, and bi+ out to the margins.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Read it once, then read it again.
I fought this battle once already–in the 90s, when we had to. Why are we still eating our own this way now?
If I didn’t know better (hm.) I’d be very suspicious of instigators deliberately trying to trigger in-fighting in order to serve as a distraction from the very real work that still desperately needs to be done. Why are we fighting about a word we took back more than twenty years ago, when our people are still dying on the streets every goddamned day?
Use that righteous energy where it will do some actual good.
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