Saying “Well, the Q is for Questioning!” is not enough to make the community a safe place for questioning people.
It’s great to include them, but it doesn’t mean a lot if in the meantime you constantly joke about people having an oppression fetish, trying to opt-out of their privilege out of guilt, or being silly cishets desperatly wanting to be “kweer” to be cool.
This! So much this!
I always maintain that exclusionary rhetoric of any kind harms many groups beyond just the one supposed target, but in particular this is true for questioning people. Already, there is a lot of self-doubt surrounding yourself when you’re questioning, and having people continually claiming that there’s this huge issue of people pretending to have LGBTQ+ identities are fakers, oppression fetishists, or are just following some “new trend” only makes it that much worse. I guarantee that if I had seen this kind of stuff directed at any LGBTQ+ orientation or gender group when I was still in the questioning stage about being bi, back when I was a tween/young teen, it would have taken me much, much longer to come to terms with my orientation – if I ever did.
The safest place for people to question their orientation or gender is within our communities, and we shouldn’t be turning these people away just “because they might turn out to actually be cishets!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”. Because if we start doing that, we make information harder for them to access and potentially put them in more danger of coming across extremely harmful information and/or people as they go along.
Exclusionary discourse is inherently anti-questioning and I firmly stand by that statement. You cannot allow people to safely question while gatekeeping suspected “cishets” from this community. These are mutually exclusive aims.
Count the number of exclusionists and exclusionary politics that base their stance on how they accidentally identified trans/bi/ace/nb when they were younger and how that is proof of how evil those sexualities/genders are. Look at how pervasive that mindset is in TERF circles, in Biphobe circles, Truscum circles, and aphobe circles.
“Detransitioned trans man” is a TERF hallmark. Rebelbaze’s main reason for hating asexuals is the fact that they identified as ace when they were younger and it did “irrepairable harm”. That was the main position during bi discourse too. How teen girls just pretend to be bi/trans/nb/ace in order to seem edgy and cute (amazing how much misogyny is steeped in their politics too, i wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that society likes to control women’s sexualities? nah)
It’s just a phase > therefore it’s bad and evil and should be gotten rid of, lest, god forbid, people comfortably and safely ease into their preferred identity.
I never understood what the heck is wrong with phases
like
how is it a bad thing to change your opinion after you’ve learned something
that’s actually a pretty great attitude towards anything
YES THAT EXACTLY.
If it is a phase? Okay, so this person spent some time getting to know your community and considered themselves part of it for a while. They’re going to make a damn good ally if you fucking let them.
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Thoughtfulfangirling 