A Tale of Two Queers
Kira: No need to be shy, it’s just us queers here.
Gery: Don’t call me queer.
Kira: Ah, don’t be like that. You know I use it as an umbrella.
Gery: It’s a slur.
Kira: My identity isn’t a slur.
Gery: Tell that to people going queer-bashing on weekends.
Kira: They would hurt us just the same with a different word. Queer’s been in use for decades! This is just TERF bullshit, trying to divide us.
Gery: How many times does the word have to be hurled at me in harm before you give a shit, Kira?
Kira: How many times are you going to refuse to call me what I am?
How many times have we seen that conversation, or one like it? How many opinions are there on the word ‘queer,’ what, in the end, does it mean, and why’s it important?
I will offer a different perspective from just saying one is right and the other wrong: the word ‘queer’ is really two words, two queers, the reductive, and the expansive. In the end, I think there’s a space for synthesis of those two meanings as well, a transformative ‘queer’ that creates a bridge between reclamation and solidarity.
The reductive queer. The slur. The word hurled in violence and blood, meant to make us small. It tells us we are other. Less than. Abnormal. Strange. Monstrous, even. It’s the word of choice for cishet people to express their scorn, lumping the enormous variability and breadth of the LGBTQ+ community into a small, hateful set of five letters. A single syllable to label us as wrong. This is used to strip us of the complexities of our identities, and reduce our experience to a single uniform perverseness, to identify the threat we pose to the careful constructs which maintain our oppressors.
The expansive queer. The political identity. The statement of intent. Queer is radical. Queer is subversive. Queer says to break down boundaries and adhere not to the restrictive categories that cishet people, and even our own community, try to box us in with. It says that the systems of oppression cannot hope to contain our multitudes, that we are beyond and above the limits they would put on our love, our bodies, our lives.
So, when someone says ‘queer’ what do they mean? Who is queer? Who are the queer community? Well. Who’s asking?
When I talk about the queer community, I do not intend it as synonymous with the LGBTQ+ community. That Q in LGBTQ+ is intentional, a subset of a larger community. Queers I trust. Truscum are LGBT+. Aphobes, biphobes, transphobes, exorsexists, binarists, etc. They are all LGBT+, or can be. LGBT+ doesn’t inherently carry with it the memory of our oppression, of the prices we’ve paid. Not like queer.
Queer is separate. Many queers don’t even consider themselves LGBT(+) anymore, if they ever did. Queers I stand beside in solidarity, in defiance of those who would break us. Queer says that we have to prioritize our most marginalized. The queer community centers radical acceptance and rejection of oppressive power dynamics. The queer community rejects the boundaries of the patriarchy, the horrors of colonialism, all the structures built to confine and erase. The queer community is intersectional.
That is not to say that those uncomfortable with the queer label, those hurt by it, do not believe in those things. And that is not to say that every person who uses the queer label feels the same as I do. It is just a trend, a general activist thrust that runs strong in one and is less reliable in the other.
But others, often cishet people, think ‘queer’ is just another word for LGBTQ+. A convenient shorthand. They reduce us to a single concept in their mind. Cishet people are not allowed to call me queer, they have not earned the right to shorthand, because they have not proven to me their understanding of my complexities. Cishet people, with little exception, fall to the reductive queer, even when echoing the very same words they’ve heard us queers use ourselves. They weaken it in this way, make it lesser. It’s not a word I want in cishet mouths, save for use for those of us who specifically request it. The LGBTQ+ community and the queer community are only interchangeable within the reductive framework, a framework that aims to destroy all of us, queer or not.
So. The transformative queer. I cannot trust cishet people to use it. I have spent too much time interrogating my own identity to have cishet people try to lump it neatly into their ‘queer’ labeled miscellanies. Yet, I am queer. The political experience of my identity is inseparable from the LGBT+ experience of it. They inform and engage with each other until queer comes out like tea, leaves made of my identities and the hot water the pressure of society all around.
If an LGBT+ person, even one who is not queer, calls me queer, I acknowledge that. They see me as part of them; they know. They do not reduce me with it, at least, they recognize my separateness from their experience which is often so invisible to those outside the greater LGBTQ+ community in its entirety. They recognize queerness as just a part of me, not an easy substitute for the whole. I will stand, and shout, alongside them and others:
We’re here.
We’re queer.
We’re militant.
Don’t fuck with us.
This is my family, and I will defend them. That is what queer can mean.
And so the transformative queer. The last, where I take the slur, not the well-meaning reductive version which I reject, but the one of active violence and intentional malice. That queer I will own. Because I am a threat to their assumptions. I am that bitch. That tranny. That dyke. That fag.
That degenerate, fucking, queer.
They can’t even place me well enough to know what to call me, so it’s all fucking mine. That queer, I will own. That queer they have given, and do not realize the power they’ve leant me. By taking it with pride, by active reclamation, I reject the negativity, and the assumptions on which it is built. By taking their accusations as complimentary, I reject all the hateful structures they have built their worldview on. That intentional hate is not only wrong, but in reclamation I laugh at the very fundamentals of their worldview, reject the entirety of their vitriol, root and stem. Their proper and propriety is worthless to me, and I will revel in the perceived degeneracy from which they recoil. I take that queer they’ve hurled at me and turn it into the political force of queerness which, in the end, will outlive them. That transformation, taken from spite to solidarity, will drive me forward.
So. Queer is a slur. And it isn’t. Queer is an identity. And it isn’t. Queer is reclamation, and it may not be. Queer isn’t one thing.
And if someone asks you to call them queer, do so.
And if someone asks you not to, then don’t.
And if someone mentions the queer community and you are not queer, they are not talking about you. Please don’t derail us just to insert yourself in a conversation you never wanted to be a part of.
And if you’re going to talk about the queer community, maybe pause a moment to consider: Which queer?
Written by Archangel|December
Archangel|December is a white, ND, non-binary transfemme, omniromantic, abrosexual, relationship anarch. While faer degree is in neuroscience, fen works in IT for a day job. In their spare time fae tries to help with trans education and activism, runs an intermittent podcast, and plays tabletop games.