For the love of Pete, don’t reblog this fucken post and label it ‘q slur’ if you agree with it.
Queer is not a slur. It has been an identity label for decades. It has been MY identity label for twenty years.
The lie that ‘queer is a slur’ comes from THE EXACT SAME RADFEMS AND EXCLUSIONISTS who have been trying to steal ‘femme’ from the wider community.
Radfems and exclusionists don’t like ‘queer’ because it’s INCLUSIVE. It includes ace and aro spec people. It includes trans folk. It includes nonbinary folk (who may or may not identify as trans) for whom labels like ‘straight’ or ‘gay’ don’t sit right because they assume binary genders.
Queer is radical in the very real sense of the word. It breaks down boundaries. It welcomes many different types of people and recognises the things they have in common. Queer is playful; it allows for you to find what things make you comfortable and happy in your own gender and sexuality. It provides room for playful experimentation so you can find the label that fits you best, whether that label is ‘queer’ or something else. Queer is an umbrella label you can use when you don’t want to explain what being a grey-ace bisexual means to you to a new work colleague.
Queer is not a new term. It was claimed by us as a label over a hundred years ago.
In comparison, ‘gay’ as a queer identity label only dates to the mid 20th century.
Claiming one of our proudest and most inclusive labels is a slur is another rewriting of our history, and it’s yet another radfem campaign, dating from about 2013. Male-attracted men were referring to themselves as “queer” as early as 1910, according to George Chauncey’s Gay New York.
When we started studying our community within an academic context in the 1980s, we called those studies ‘Queer studies’ and ‘Queer theory’. This means queer as an umbrella term for our wider community is over thirty years old.
The fact that homophobes and transphobes have used it to insult us when it has been one of our identity labels for over a hundred years says more about the bigotry endemic in our society than it does about us, or our labels.
If you or someone who follows you on tumblr dislikes the word ‘queer’, or has trauma about it, all you need to do ensure that posts are tagged with the word ‘queer’. So long as the post is tagged with that word, all you need to do is go into your tumblr settings and add it to your filtered tags. It’s easy, it’s free, and it means you’re not tagging people’s actual identity as a slur.
Don’t fall for radfem and exclusionist lies. Don’t let them rewrite our history. Queer is not a slur.
