I find it suspicious that you never see posts along the lines of “cishet people should stop using the word ‘queer’, that’s a word that only queer people get to use.” Not because I think that it’s necessarily true, but because that’s the normal way social conversations around reclaimed slurs & pejoratives evolve. You rarely hear people on tumblr saying “black people/hispanic people/asian people aren’t allowed to say [slur that has been used specifically against them].” Because most of us recognize that that’s nonsense, and that you don’t get to tell minorities which words they can and can’t reclaim.
But tumblr didn’t do that with the word 'queer’. It didn’t go the usual route of discussion around who can and can’t say what. Tumblr just jumped straight into trying to erase the word completely. And that is because the discourse around 'queer’ isn’t a conversation that evolved naturally within our community. It was purposefully (and successfully) created out of thin air from a sudden, relentless onset of terf propaganda. Terfs who hated having a trans-inclusive umbrella term for our community, who wanted nothing more than to disrupt unity. Well congratu-fucking-lations, it’s been disrupted.
2 years is all it took. 2 years of relentless comments and inbox messages from people pretending to be concerned strangers, friendly anons who wanted you to know 'you should maybe not use that word 🙂.’ 'a lot of people have trauma around it so maybe use a different word 🙂 a less inclusive word 🙂.’ 'queer isn’t an identity it’s a slur 🙂.’ and suddenly our most powerful trans-inclusive umbrella term is blacklisted.
2 years of this and suddenly you had half a generation of lgbtqa+ teens who had been told this over and over again, by friendly trustworthy strangers, to the point it passed the evidence threshold and just became a Belief. because young teens heard it so often from so many 'random’ people, and weren’t aware of where it was actually coming from. hint: the discourse around queer has ALWAYS been about disrupting unity
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antique-scarecrow posted this I find it suspicious that you never see posts along the lines of "cishet people should stop using the word 'queer',...
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