Is Queer A Slur?

is queerer hi my name is trash and I love online queer discourse I love it so much and if you love it too consider subscribing I post like about every other week videos about mainly queer discourse but other stuff too it's mostly chronically online queer discourse like this one queer is a slur and you shouldn't say it n queer is a useful label for the entire Community because it's easier to say than lgbtq I a a2+ so doesn't exclude anyone but I'm gay and I don't like it shut up nerd so I think it's time that we solve this discourse once and for all and determine whether or not queer is a slur so I looked at the Wikipedia page for anti-lgbtq plus slurs and look that queer is right there it's right it's on the list queer is a we solved it mystery solve kids we did it don't look at the runtime don't look at the runtime we did it it's solved okay it's more complicated than that you knew it would be more complicated than that when you clicked on this video because words are complicated and you know how much I love talking about words let's talk about history the word queer started out meaning odd unusual strange bit funny in it something like that and that meaning lasted into the modern day it kind of still means that in some contexts and you can see that in um old children's books from the 70s like this one something queer is going on are they trans investigating are these children trans investigating what's going on with the kid in the bush what's what's with the bush you know what bush is a beautiful name for a whatever that is the first recorded use of the word Queer as a slur for gay men specifically referred to Oscar wild it was during his trial Oscar wild comes up in a lot of queer history actually um but his trial was so like popularized and publicized in the media at the time that it popularized the word Queer as a slur for Gan but before that it was used to refer to giman and other similar people um in sort of a euphemistic way it was kind of like oh a bit he's a bit queer isn't he um oh your cousin's a little odd or um you know is he it's kind of used like that from the 1800s through to the 21st century it's been used as a slur for Gman specifically but not exclusively it's also been used against gay women crossdressers um transvestites whatever terminology they had at the time for like gay women what we today might call Trans people or non-binary people fairies you know those kinds of people the queers but during this time period there are sporadic examples of gay men specifically using it as sort of a neutral self- descriptor referring to themselves as queers or saying going to go meet up with the other queers and it's used seemingly as just a neutral descriptor of themselves though it may have been self-deprecating it's unclear in the 1960s the community began reclaiming queer in Earnest this was a time of major political upheaval when gay people and other queers were like hey we exist and we're not going to hide anymore we're not going to hide anymore you got to confront us homosexual was illegal and they were trying to change that and it turned out the community was very diverse the queer Community is incredibly diverse and this is one of our greatest strengths but when it comes to labeling it presents a problem the most prominent and visible people in the early Gay Liberation movement were of course upper middle class gays and lesbians doing respectability politics that just doesn't change really um and these people definitely liked the gay banner and by the time the HIV crisis came around the entire Community was under the gay Banner for the most part Gay Liberation gay rights that kind of thing and it developed into gays and lesbians for a long time gay and lesbian rights gay and lesbian Liberation the gay and lesbian rights movements and then of course we got the bisexuals so then it turned into LGB and then finally LGBT which was the dominant model for the long a long time the correct politically correct way to refer to the community was LGBT but there are a lot of people outside the LGBT who are still kind of identifiable as Queer as gender diverse as different in a way that is queer which presented a problem with labeling of course but before all of that was happening there were a lot of different people arguing over what the correct terminology should be long before we had LGBT long before we even had Gay Liberation there were people arguing over what the preferred what the ideal terminology for the community at large should be and a lot of the respectability politics people landed on the homophile movement they called themselves homophiles instead of homosexuals homosexual and homosexuality were firmly rejected because they wanted to desexualize the community they wanted to get those sex perverts out of it and focus on the pure love between two men and two women and focus on how normal they were how they were just like any other couple it was love it wasn't sexuality so homophile was the dominant idea for these people they wanted to insist it's not about sex it's not about sex we're not sex perverts don't look at the leather daddies don't look at the leather daddies we're normal they were basically doing like Proto no Kink at Pride discourse why do you hate him why do you hate him so yeah there were a ton of disperate labels people arguing over what the ideal labeling should be for the community at large and one of these labels was queer in 1990 we nation was founded by former act out activists and people who were still in the act out movement um we're here we're queer get used to it that was them queer Nation they were originally an unnamed organization but they became queer Nation eventually and their queer focused activism definitely centered the queer label for the community at large and was focused on visibility and queer Liberation the queer focused activism the terminology of queer for the community at large um came around the same time as queer theory developed in the 1990s in reference to queer Theory queer theorist J Stewart says queer Theory and politics necessarily celebrate transgression in the form of visible differences from Norms these Norms are then exposed to be Norms not Natures or inevitabilities gender and sexual identities are seen in much of this work to be demonstrably def to be demonstrably defiant definitions and configurations which is true that's why we have all these weird complicated identities and presentations that don't easily fit into LGBT you've got bisexual lesbians asexual pan Romantics F boys uh Butch lesbians who are more masculine than the average man uh or who you can't even tell the difference between a lesbian and a twink which are they impossible to tell impossible to tell sometimes okay people who don't easily fit into this categorization of lesbian gay bisexual trans you're like I don't know what they are but they probably do have some kind of complicated identity that they're willing to tell you but CIS people don't really understand that they don't know anything about that but they can still easily identify that person as some kind of queer the way people's genders presentations and identities interact in ways that can't just be summed up with gay and that's kind of what queerness is queer Theory and queer activism arose specifically because the community is so diverse there's all kinds of messy overlapping identities and presentations and sexualities that don't easily fit into the categorization of gay or even bisexual or just trans and and we like to have words for things even if they're just big umbrella terms there are all these people who aren't gay specifically aren't transp specifically but who are queer and these people have always existed throughout history we see examples of non-binary people throughout history really but especially in this early 1960s and70s queer Rights Movement we see people who were labeled like Beres or bent or terms like that who clearly today some of them do identify as non-binary or today they probably would because now we have a word for that that isn't fairy or bent or just like androgynous which is the terminology that was used for it back then there were definitely asexuals especially within the political lesbianism movement there were a ton of asexual women in the lesbian rights lesbian separatist movement back in the day they might not have identified that way at the time but a lot of them do now and a lot of them would be identified that way nowadays based on their writings The Human Experience is weird and it's messy it's queer the assimilationist gays did not like the word queer and they still don't but we're here we're queer get used to it you've had like 40 years to get used to it at this point it seems like a you problem this anti-queer discourse is not some righteous movement fighting against this evil slur to protect the innocent lesbians if anything it's a scop to divide the community that's a crazy conspiracy brain thought but I have thought it from time to time after reading some of this god- awful discourse I tend to put the people doing this Queer as the slur discourse into three distinct categories there's malicious turfs and transphobes trying to divide the community there's assimilationist gays slrm medalists who just want to you know do whatever the Straits are doing and there's ignorant young people and allies just young ignorant people who are queer or Allies who hear the term and they're like oh I don't want to use a slur so they just repeat what they hear the Turfs generally aren't even gay a lot of people who are turfs who are like I'm supporting the lesbians aren't lesbians JK Rowling is not a lesbian the other ones generally most of these people aren't even gay but they're saying these things because they want to divide the community they want to turn the transes against the queers they want to turn the good gays against the bad gays some of these turfs consider themselves lesbians under the political lesbian definition of just not sleeping with men but a lot of them are just lying on the internet people do that you know crazy most of the people in the LGB without the tea movement are Straits that's self-reporting most of them are Straits most queer people support the term queer being used as an umbrella term or are neutral on it surveys show that almost 73% of lgbtqia AA plus people support queer being used as an umbrella term they feel positively about that of those who said that they didn't support the word that they were strongly against it most of the people in that category self-identified themselves as exclusionists as true scum or as swerfs and if you don't know what those terms are don't Google them do not Google them stand up step back from your computer and walk into the floor Forest you're free a lot of CET people don't like the term queer for the same reason that a lot of these assimilationist gays and transmedicalist and whatever don't like the term queer it's because it's not specific enough they want to know what genitals you have who you're having sex with how you're doing that and you know all these very personal details about you and if you just say I'm queer you're not telling them what genitals you have you're not telling them who you're having sex with and how uh you're not giving them any specific information and they just really want to know that information they love to know that information they really want to know what genitals you have I don't siset people have some kind of weird fetish about this I bisexual here can't relate can't relate but they do they really want to know uh even if they're not part of your dating pool I I don't get it I don't get it it's weird fetish thing uh no Kink shaming here but it's a little weird it's a little weird they like to put people into these neat boxes of gay straight bisexual transsexual neat organized boxes that don't overlap in any way they're distinct they're easy you know something that has never existed in reality because most dr's people are by B seual that might be a news flash for you it's true but they also like to have this one final category lying fakers looking for attention and they like to put a lot of the queer community in that box so they don't have to think about them and that's kind of what the transm medalists do too the assimilationist gays like those are not real queers those aren't real gays like us please don't associate them with us they're sex perverts we're normal anyone who doesn't fit into the dominant sis hat worldview often gets put into the lying Faker looking for attention category that's why they don't like the term queer though because they like to have these neat little boxes for everyone and queer defies definition which is a criticism that a lot of people have with it these assimilationist gays and transm medalists are more than willing to throw the rest of us under the bus to get the approval of the larger sis Society the kind of people that formed the matachine society and the daughters of btis who are all about assimilation being straight passing fitting in being normal and this is a very dominant worldview into the modern era you've got your Kelly cagans your Blair whites your buck Angels they don't like the term queer because straight people don't like the term queer and they want to fit in with the Straits these people largely don't actually care if the word is a slur or not they don't like it because straight people don't like it they want things to be easy they want to hand things to The Straits on a platter gay straight which are you do you have a dick or do you have a vulva which is it easy simple and so they took this language of like it's a slur which is a kind of a valid criticism that some older gay people had because that was the slur that was used when they were kids um they took this criticism and they co-opted it to more effectively lick the boots of the asset Society so instead of saying yummy yummy straight boots give me more they say queer is a slur you shouldn't use it real transsexuals do this and that whatever we don't say queer because that's a slur we're transsexuals okay how does the boot taste this is unfortunately the history of our community um since at least to the 1950s and 60s the more assimilationist gays like the matachine society and the daughters of elitis were more than happy to throw the more marginalized queer people under the bus to further their agenda as upper middle class white queers you'll often hear people say that homosexuality and transness are the decadence of the wealthy it's the decadence of capitalism those are for Rich weirdos only real workingclass red blooded Americans don't care about that queer [ __ ] but that's not quite true while Rich weirdos tend to get away with being queer weirdos a lot easier than poor people like Elton John was able to get away with this in a time when being gay was not socially acceptable um Oscar wild was able to get away with being gay for a really long time before his tribe and subsequent sentencing but they're not the only people who are queer they're just the ones that are more able to be themselves because they have the buffer of privilege and power allowing them to do that poor people have to do different things poor people have all kinds of weird identities too the star house in the 1960s star stood for Street transvest action revolu ution Aries U Marsha P Johnson was involved in this it was basically a squatter house for mostly trans women or people today we might call non-binary transvestites fairies um effeminate gay men and trans women mostly and these people lived in this burned out old house basically squatting because they were all homeless most of them were engaging in survival sex work and yet they were trans they had weird identities because that is not unique to the upper classes it's not unique to westerners it's not unique to rich people it's just part of human society came free with your being born a human being now the star house was extremely short-lived but it's a good demonstration of something that we know and is obvious which is that poor people are queer too a lot of queer people live in poverty more more than average actually a lot of people who were born middle class are kicked out by their parents and end up homeless living on the streets engaging in survival sex work or doing very lowp paid service jobs this is a very common story in our community having a weird gender presentation often keeps you out of traditional well-paid jobs so a lot of the poor queer people in our society survive on Survival sex work cam work or low paid service jobs and things like that it is not uncommon at all when we look at who in the community is the most privileged who lives in the most poverty we see that trans people have about a 30% poverty rate which is really high 16% is the average for the whole population uh bisexual women are the exact same as trans people about 30% and lesbians it's only about 17 to 18% and G gay men are actually less likely to live in poverty like sis gay men are less likely to live in poverty than the average person I personally think this is probably because there's very little chance of accidental pregnancy for gay men accidental pregnancy is really expensive no matter what you choose to do about it and they don't have that problem which is nice for them so this creates a bit of a disparity in the community because all of these services for the community cater to the people who have the money the people in this assimilationist group are generally middle class CIS gays and sometimes like transm medalists and they want to fit in with the upper classes and they can't do that if queerness is weird if they're associated with all of these weirdos that's why they're assimilationists they want to rise the social ladder have upward social mobility and they can't do that if they're a weirdo so they distance themselves to fit into the status quo a lot of times when you kind of press these people and say like whatat is your problem with the term queer really like what is your problem they say oh it means weird that's my problem with it the term means weird and that's homophobic because being gay is not weird and yeah queerness is normal it exists in every society it's relatively common but that's pretty disingenuous um they don't like it because straight people don't like it and they don't want to say yummy yummy boots so they say it means weird and that's homophobic because frankly the people who hate us the people who hate the que they don't care if you're a normal gay or if you're some kind of I don't know Bender panromantic hypersexual something or other they don't care they don't know the difference they don't see the difference they don't care if there's a difference queer is this lur for queer people for all of us it's not being used in the context of odd homosexuality is odd it's moved beyond that meaning at this point it's no longer used that way in this specific case it's really not it refers to queer people it refers to homosexuals and other sex perverts to quote the US government it was used more broadly than other slurs which was very helpful if you couldn't identify what type of queer person you were trying to hurl a slur at you know sometimes it's hard to tell the difference sometimes it's hard to tell you're like is that a lesbian or is it a cute twink could go either way easy mistake anyone could have made that mistake okay anyone could have made that mistake but they can't tell so they just yell queer it's an easy slur you don't have to you don't have to figure it out well the Community has reclaimed the other slurs I mean we see people using slurs on their signs at Pride those are slurs and people are using them because they're reclaiming them and queers are reclaiming queer which applies to all of us and a common criticism is it's too broad if it's so broad then it's meaningless but yeah it's broad because it could apply to any of us and it was applied to any and all of us for a long time lesbians were called queers too they couldn't identify what kind of queer you were they just went with the you know queer so it's useful for the same reason that the alphabet sou thing lgbtq I A A Plus is useful because it applies to the entire Community only you know queer is a lot shorter and easier to say than lgbtq I AA 2+ it's a lot easier to say I don't even know if I got that right the assimilationists don't like queer because they don't want to include those weird queers they want it to be LGB maybe the te's sometimes but only if they're not annoying which frankly is a big ask for a lot of te's they want the straights to accept them and they think that we're the thing holding them back but um when the Straits sent us to camp in the past they didn't really differentiate they didn't just Purge the weird Gaye and The evangelists preaching about how gay people should be killed for being gay they're not just talking about the weird ones they want you dead too people are constantly sending hate and death threats to Blair white who is probably the best boot licker we've got and people still are sending her constant death threats telling her to un alive of herself as the kids are saying telling her she should detransition I mean just constant parades of hatred her way and she's on their side so what was the point of all that it doesn't matter how good your boot looking game is you can be the best boot licker in the world and they're still going to want you dead when it comes down to it they won't pick you over their imagined siset Utopia where all of us are dead or gone in some other way a lot of that is just internalized queer phobia they don't like being queer they don't like that they're gay they wish they were normal they don't want to be associated with this weird stuff they want to be normal because they grew up understanding that queerness is abnormal it's abor because their straight relatives taught them that and they really internalized that and now they kind of just project it onto the weirder aspects of the community while insisting that their part of the community is normal please accept me I'm normal but they won't they won't sorry these people who really genuinely hate us they just won't accept you I mean like they won't the larger society has accepted homosexuality but these people who hate you are just going to keep hating you just like they hate the rest of us I don't know what to tell you and then I guess I should talk about the third category of the ignorant young queers um these are just young people I really hold these kids at fall it's like people under 22 who read this discourse online they read we is a slur and they go oh I don't want to say a slur so then they start reposting that content and policing people's language because queer is a slur I heard it was a slur I don't want you to use it and you know they'll grow out of it or they won't Whatever I don't fault these kids they're confused but they got the spirit generally the thing we as the queer community really have to understand is that not everyone in our community can twist themselves into something that's palatable to the larger toet society not everyone in our community can stay in some kind of closet situation because people can recognize their queerness just by looking at them just by interacting with them they're not able to hide their gender non-conformance they're not able to hide their inherent queerness these people will never be able to twist themselves and it's something that's palatable they'll never be able to hide who they are a lot of times we call this the glass closet where it's so obvious to everyone around you that you're queer and you think you're hiding it really well but you're not a lot of people can't they just can't hide who they are so what we're doing when we insist on only caring about these straight passing queers who are palatable to the larger sad Society is abandoning these people who are simply unable to twist themselves into something presentable to sad Society they're simply not able to and we're just throwing them under the bus abandoning them for for nothing for what nothing we're just abandoning them with no benefit because the people that don't accept us the people that don't accept them don't really accept us either so what was the point what was the point of all that and there definitely are some older gays who don't like the term queer because that was the term that was hurled against them in their childhoods that was the big slur when they were younger and that's the reason they don't like it and that's understandable to me the term hurled at me as a child was gay gay was the slur when I was a kid that was a huge insult when I was a child oh that's gay you're so gay what are you gay so you know the popular slur changes gay isn't considered offensive homo osexual in the mouth of a Southern Baptist preacher is far more poisonous than queer in the mouth of some punk Street kid who loves his community these things have context if you don't personally like the term queer that's fine whatever whatever but pretending that it's the problem is that it's a slur when we've reclaimed all of the other slurs um that's silly that's disingenuous just say I don't like being called queer I personally don't like being called queer just say that don't say you can't call yourself that because people are gonna people have been doing that since at least the 90s it's been very well reclaimed for a long time all of this discourse is just incredibly disingenuous and silly most of it has come up from people who are actively malicious towards our community and trying to divide us if someone says don't call me queer don't call them queer we should just use people's preferred terminology just as a baseline if someone says don't use the term queer at all that's not a proper term you can't use that ask who the hell are they to tell you what to do who the hell are they to tell your community what it should call itself what are you a cop it's important to know that this outrage is largely manufactured a very small portion of the actual Community feels this way and cares about this and most of this is coming from people actively malicious towards our community as just an intentional way to divide us uh turfs love doing that they love doing that um and that's what this is so is queer slur definitionally yes yeah absolutely we should use it I think so uh but let me know what you think do you think that queer is a good overarching umbrella term for the Community or do you hate it and think it's a slur do you identify as queer or do you identify as something else or both uh just let me know and I'll judge you accordingly what are you a cop

Channel: Trash Discourse

Views: 4,154

Keywords: Queer, LGBT, LGB without the T, Queer Nation, Queer LIberation, Gay Rights, Gay History, Queer History, Trans Rights, Kelly Cadigan, Transgender, Trans, Gay, Bisexual, MSPEC, is queer a slur, queer is a slur, the q word, q slur, etymology, homophile movement, homophile, matachine society, queer theory

Id: DimaYTEMUhE

Length: 32min 17sec (1937 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024