I hate that queer is such a hipster trend and straight people are now saying it thinking they’re being more pc and progressive. Having a straight person refer to me as a queer woman or part of the queer community makes me want to set a city block on fire. You’re terrible.
But isn’t queer the appropriate term?
it’s a slur
It’s not a slur to everyone. Lots of us reclaimed queer when we were figuring ourselves out and it’s still our preferred term. For as long as I’ve known I was asexual I’ve used the word queer. I don’t relate to any other term for myself.
It’s fine if you don’t like the term applied to you, but don’t demonize it for those of us who really identified and continue to identify with it.
Queer is the only term for us that is both fully inclusive and functional. MOGAI (Marginalized Orientations, Genders and Intersex) is inclusive, but it’s not functional because most people haven’t heard it before and don’t knows what it means.
LGBT places four queer identities in a preferential order, which is particularly grating for people in the latter half of the acronym who already feel marginalized within our own community, and even more grating for those of us who are left out of the acronym altogether.
Gay was inclusive once upon a time, but cissexism, monosexism, and misogyny both within and outside of the community have over the years alienated anyone who isn’t a cis homosexual man from this term. We no longer feel as though we identify with it. We instead associate the term with marginalization and erasure.
Queer is a problematic term, because it has been used as a slur in the past and many people within the community have negative associations with it. A lot of people don’t like having this term applied to them.
But on the other hand a lot of people, myself included, don’t like having the terms LGBT or gay applied to us for the reasons I just mentioned.
If you’re going to address problems with the term queer, you must also address problems with the alternatives.
The reason I personally prefer queer is that it does not force me to apply inadequate labels to myself, encourage people to make assumptions or to disclose private information to strangers. ‘Queer’ is good enough for most times because most times no one really needs to know exactly how queer I am and in which ways (not to mention they also cannot try to validate or reject my queerness according to their standards.) . If it’s an issue of relating to a particular experience, if there is a need to know what I can and can’t relate to, which lane is and isn’t mine, I can get more specific.
But the benefit of ‘queer’ is I don’t have disclose any specifics unless I want to.
All the while of course I try to remember some people may not like the word and I wouldn’t refer to anyone that way if they didn’t want to. But @lierdumoa is right to say, I think, that it’s the only fully inclusive and functional term out there right now?
There is also a reason I’m not all that into MOGAI is that I don’t really fancy referring to myself as ‘Marginalised…’, true as it may be. MOGAI describes a common experience of being oppressed, but it’s not a good term of identity for me. I do not identify as a ‘marginalised person’. I mean the whole idea is to make it so that I cease to be.
LGBT on the other hand is grouping identities without determining their belonging on their marginalisation, since none of the letters have that term built-in, but it’s incomplete.
I’ll take queer. I can do the most with it.
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