@antiquityashley / antiquityashley.tumblr.com
Gonna start a post with blank memes. Please add any you have on hand and reblog to spread them.
very good content
Here’s a few I’ve accumulated over the years
Ah, some gold!
Omfg, a goldmine
This is a blessing look at all of these templates
Th
Meme post
radfems on their way to the mitski concert after a busy day of calling trans women hentai addicts
Bangs aren’t short enough
This is the payday meowth, reblog in the next 24 hours and money will come your way!!
real birds tweet on twitter
The 4 primary gay moods:
i’m so sorry for being a customer, i want to leave you alone but sometimes i have to buy things or eat. please understand i use self checkout whenever i can
Dysphoric trans girl cheering herself up with a greyscale filter, 2018 (colorized)
-SuperNova☆
Saying “Gender is fake so how are people trans?” is like saying “Money is fake so how are people poor?” Like as much as we facetiously say gender is fake, “social construct” is not synonymous with “fake”
“Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.”
Language is a social construct.
Let that sit with you for awhile.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. The best analogy that I can come up with is capitalism. Capitalism is a social construct, one that you may think is bullshit, but you don’t get to just opt out. You can actively work against it, but until it’s gone, the best you can do is to figure out how best to navigate and survive in the system.
The fact is, that even if gender were abolished tomorrow and differences in reproductive systems were treated as no more significant than differences in eye colour, people would still have the need and desire for all the medical treatments that trans people currently receive. If that weren’t the case, why are there trans men and butch lesbians who both want top surgery and testosterone? Heck, there are cis men who get top surgery.
Paraphrasing myself from twitter today, riffing on the above:
Gravity is a theory. Language is a social construct.
“Theory” doesn’t mean “guess” or “unsupported”. “Social construct” doesn’t mean “not real” or “lacking in material impact”.
So, the OP’s argument still misrepresents both gender and social constructs, but I love the language angle because language is a great example how we can have real biology underlying a social construct. While language might be a social construct, the facility for language is neurobiology. We have parts of our brain that evolved such that we can communicate with speech and gesture in extremely complex ways, allowing us to create language.
My point is that while social construct may not mean ‘not real’ or ‘lacking impact’, it also doesn’t mean that it makes a suitable one-size-fits-all explanation for concepts like gender. It’s overly simplistic, is what I’m saying.
Some social constructs are based on the idea of something that’s real, whereas some are not. Language is based on something real, the ability for the human brain to interpret complex forms of communication. Another example might be the status of being a refugee. It’s a social construct because it’s just another way human beings differentiate themselves socially, in this case by constructing conventions around the idea of national borders and what sort of status changes occur when you move through a world dominated by those concepts. By comparison, while money is a social construct, it’s not based in something real. It’s just an abstraction of value that allows us to easily trade with one another for resources that we might need or want.
There’s also a few simple tests that you can use to gauge whether or not you’re looking at something that’s just a social construct, and this is where I think the whole ‘ignore the traffic light and get hit’ argument can be seen most plainly to be a fallacy.
First, you can deny a social construct, change how you interact with it, or even replace it with a completely different one. A few examples:
In other words, since a social construct is a way that we collectively rationalize our reality, they are highly mutable and can be ignored/overridden/denied/changed as needed. In fact, one of the ways that society evolves is by pruning social constructs in this way. Progressivism can easily be described as the need to change our social constructs to eliminate harmful ones and refine poorly built ones.
This is what I’m getting at when I say that gender isn’t a social construct. Because you can’t ignore/override/deny/change gender. There’s real biology there in the way our brains form identity and if we ignore that biology to describe gender as a social construct then we are also accepting all of the implications that brings.
If gender can be changed, then trans people should be able to change their actual gender to fit their assigned gender. Even though that sounds horrible, I have no doubt that there are some of us who have such problems with dysphoria and transition that we’d choose that path if it was offered if only to make the pain stop. And yet this doesn’t happen. You might also know this process by another name, conversion therapy.
If gender can be denied, then it should be possible for a trans person to repress their own identity their entire lives. You just don’t have to engage with it if you don’t want to. And yet we know that this is one of the things that kills us, because that kind of repression is intensely harmful to our well-being.Finally, if gender is a social construct then there should be societies that don’t have gender or have a radically different interpretation of gender. While there are societies throughout history that have respected the existence of trans people and non-binary genders, we’ve never had a human society that’s lacked gender or has reinterpreted it so radically that gender becomes unrecognizable.
This is what I mean when I say that gender is not a social construct. There’s actual biology there, biology in the brain that gives us fundamental aspects of our identity. While you can explore your gender and your understanding of it can change, it’s not something we can just change or override because it’s not a shared understanding, it’s a part of our sense of self. Gender informs our social constructs, not the other way around.
TL;DR
Gender is not a social construct because despite social constructs occasionally carrying a heavy weight and real consequences, they are rationalizations and agreements we make about how to interact with the world and thus are open to change or reinterpretation. By comparison, gender is an identity trait that’s inherent to us as an organism and forms a core aspect of our sense of self, rather than being defined by society at large.
But that’s just it. These two things aren’t mutually exclusive. My gender is female, and I express that through things that are cultural constructs (how I dress, how I style my hair, the name I go by, for examples).
As my biologist friends are fond of pointing out, the thing called “biological sex” is itself a social construct. Because the concept is socially constructed.
Actually, chalk that one up to me being unclear about my thesis. I agree with you, these things aren’t mutually exclusive and I believe that gender as identity (who I am) is biology while most everything else (how I do it) is socially constructed.
The thing I’m railing against is the idea that if gender has socially constructed elements then it cannot have any basis in biology. That’s what I think is unsupported and is ultimately harmful to understanding gender.
And yes, I completely agree that biological sex is a social construct, it’s literally just a way to organize people on the basis of genitals and doesn’t actually tell you someone’s underlying biology.
To come at this from a different perspective in the hopes that it will make my point clearer, the root of a social construct is behavior within a society. That’s the source of authority for this particular attribute. Your social constructs are not defined purely by you, they are defined by you and everyone around you, language being a perfect example. By comparison, there are traits by which you are the only source of authority, namely those that describe your identity as a person, gender being a perfect example.
So, putting it through that filter, I submit that the source of authority for gender is the individual. You are the gender you identify as, it’s part of who and what you are and you can take that gender to any other culture and any other time and you are still you. Your gender cannot be defined by other people, it can only be defined by you. So even if you wear social constructs atop it, as we all do, the source of authority for your gender is unchanged. It cannot come from society, it can only come from you, therefore gender is a biological basis that underpins all aspects of gender as a social construct.
Honestly “queer” is so useful for people like me w/ a “complicated orientation” b/c instead of having to say I’m “asexual panromantic” and explain what that means, I can just say “I’m queer” and it tells you all you need to know (that I’m not straight).
yeah sure good for you but don’t ever ever use that word for someone who doesn’t identify as it themselves, it’s not an umbrella term for everyone. also “pan/ace” would definitely work, even if you don’t want to use it, other people could. i use ace lesbian and definitely not the q slur.
Wow its almost like they were just talking about using it on themselves for individual reasons and you butted in to be an ass and be condescending because you think you’re superior for not using queer, then you called their identity a slur right to them. But that can’t possibly be what you were trying to do, right?
Anyone is allowed to use it for themselves, I never said no one should do that if that’s what they want. Queer is a slur though. I just want people to be aware of that, I have no idea if OP is aware of that or not but some people using that word aren’t. I’m tired of people including me and other people who don’t want to be included in that word, and before anyone asks, I never meant that OP did that, because I literally have no idea if they do.
Queer is a slur as much as any other LGBT+ word, I just want you to be aware of that.
“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella - gay rights, gay marriage, gay community - when discussing the entire community.
Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.
Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.
Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.
So if you’re not going to come onto gay people’s posts for the same behavior, maybe critically analyze why exactly you feel the need to be so condescending to Queer people, specifically on posts that ONLY have to do with personal identity. Why you feel the need to insist to Queer people that their identities are slurs, to directly slap away the power of reclaiming a word from them by demanding it remain in the hands of the Straights as a perpetual slur.
I think an important difference between gay and queer is however, that queer started out as a slur used against members of the community and continues to be used as a slur in many places. Whereas gay began as a word the community chose itself to describe itself and was then later used by homophobes and heterosexuals in general in a negative way, meaning however, that gay doesn’t hold the same negative connotations as queer for many people simply because it was our word that they took, and not a word that they forced on us to make us “strange” or “other” like queer means.
That’s…. Not true. People think so because the history before gay was reclaimed is way older (older than any love community member’s lifetimes, probably,) but gay had the exact same origins.
It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.
The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”
There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.
The more recent history of the mid to late 20th century more prevalently favored queer as a slur, as is represented in our media. However its clearly undeniable that the switch back to gay as the popular community slur (along with the ever present f slur,) happened in the 2000s. Which is trying to be denied and rewritten by the anti queer crowd, who completely ignore the words popularity with community members who actually lived through when it was a popular slur.
Yes to all of this. When it comes to words for “not straight” there are hardly any choices that didn’t originate as ways to stigmatize or pathologize us. We are all using reclaimed slurs to describe ourselves.
Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet.
Somebody else pointed this out earlier to me, and of course I’ve lost the post, but it’s really suspicious that of all the reclaimed slurs, the one that gets the most pushback is the one that is most radically accepting of all identities
“hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it.
Queer is an ideology and an identity, historically and now. It is an umbrella for that ideology and an umbrella for those identities, historically and now. They can’t be conflated (with LGBT) and it’s super fucking disingenuous to pretend one is just the tarnished besmirched dirty slur version of the other. They’re different. In my particular work for example, Queer bioethics is different from LGBT bioethics and conflating the two will muddle any discussion you try to have about them because they lead to literally opposite conclusions in some cases.
Yeah I freaking love pancakes
Wait wrong post
By far the best addition to this post
This is one of those things where I feel like an old. Like, *the* slogan I associate with pride is, “We’re here, we’re queer – get used to it!” There was a TV show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that was total mainstream pap. (Not that the show wasn’t riddles problematic elements from the concept out, but ‘queer’ in the title was clearly meant as a positive.) I just have a hard time processing queer as anything but reclaimed.
They actually shot “Queer As Folk” in my city!
TERFs and radical gender/sexuality bianarists are flooding social media and blogging sites with propaganda smearing the word queer in the hopes of silencing all of us who don’t identify with their hate politics. I fought hard to reclaim the word queer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s the one word that doesn’t worship exclusion. Which is why these people are trying to convince you not to use it. fuck that noise. there is literally no word i could use to identify my sexuality that hasn’t been thrown at me in hatred, fear, and violence. No way am I giving up the one of those that allows me to talk about all of my community without trying to put people in boxes they don’t fit in.
I will never not reblog this post. Queer, queer, queer here.
“Queer” has been claimed by queer people as a self-descriptor since at least 1910. It’s an insult to those historical people (and all the generations of queer historical people who have identified as queer since then) to pretend that the people using it as a slur owned it more than the queer people who used it as a self-descriptor.
Source: George Chauncey, “Gay New York,” page 101
They don’t want us to use queer because they don’t want to be lumped in with anyone who’s not cis gay or cis lesbian. So fine. You don’t like the word queer? You don’t want to be in the “queer” community? Get the fuck out, then. Y'all don’t welcome us in your community anyway, so we’ll just have our own.
And it’ll be queer as fuck.
I fucking love the word queer ❤
Or, to put it another way, using a great old slogan of the community: I’m not gay as in happy, I’m queer as in fuck you.
Yes yes yes yes yes! These younglings today don’t know their queer history but feel so free to comment on it. Trying so desperately to assimilate into straight culture by turning your nose up at queer, and all the people who take refuge under its umbrella. Queer accepted me when nobody else would, not even the LGBT groups.
Queer is full of the types of people who don’t make good poster children for the middle class assimilationist cis gay couple just looking to get married and have some kids. Queer forces us to realize the fight didn’t end with gay marriage, and cis gays are gonna have to step out of the spotlight sometimes, and realize cis gays have privilege, and fight for someone with less. Trans people, nonbinary people, people in nontraditional relationship structures, aromantics, asexuals, sex workers. Heck more and more bisexual people these days are switching over to queer because the amount of biphobia in the so-called lgBt community is so alienating, and also because so many of us feel the term bisexual reinforces a false gender dichotomy and we’re too tired of jokes about kitchenware to use pansexual.
Part of what I love about the term queer is that it does make people uncomfortable. It makes them aware of their privilege, exposes certain biases, even within the LGBT community. What’s so wrong with a movement that strives to fight for everybody, huh? Huh?
Proudly bi, proudly queer, and being part of this movement when I was young was an honor.
Text of a manifesto originally passed out by people marching with the ACT UP contingent in the New York Gay Pride Day parade, 1990. -
An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred. (We have been carefully taught to hate ourselves.) And now of course it means fighting a virus as well, and all those homo-haters who are using AIDS to wipe us off the face of the earth. Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it’s about gender-f— and secrets, what’s beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it’s about the night. Being queer is “grass roots” because we know that everyone of us, every body, every c—, every heart and a– and d— is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored. Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility. We are an army because we have to be. We are an army because we are so powerful. (We have so much to fight for; we are the most precious of endangered species.) And we are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is. Desire and lust, too. We invented them. We come out of the closet, face the rejection of society, face firing squads, just to love each other! Every time we f—, we win. We must fight for ourselves (no else is going to do it) and if in that process we bring greater freedom to the world at large then great. (We’ve given so much to that world: democracy, all the arts, the concepts of love, philosophy and the soul, to name just a few of the gifts from our ancient Greek Dykes, Fags.) Let’s make every space a Lesbian and Gay space. Every street a part of our sexual geography. A city of yearning and then total satisfaction. A city and a country where we can be safe and free and more. We must look at our lives and see what’s best in them, see what is queer and what is straight and let that straight chaff fall away! Remember there is so, so little time. And I want to be a lover of each and every one of you. Next year, we march naked.
guys. if you go to college and want to study our history and current political climate etc? do you know what that department is called? “Queer Studies”. So could you fucking stop, you little babies.
I am officially Old as Fuck ™ compared to most Tumblrites.
I came of age after they discovered HIV and before they discovered how to treat it. THAT is how old I am.
I worked and marched with friends and loved ones and the banner that brought everyone together was “Queer.” The word doesn’t need to be reclaimed. It has been reclaimed. Before a lot of y’all were ever born.
Trying to school your elders about shit of which you know nothing doesn’t build community. It’s part of a rejection of the idea that the LGBTQ community is multigenerational. It’s a rejection of the idea that there is gay, lesbian, QUEER life after 30. Its refusing to consider that those who went before did an awful damn lot to make where you are now possible.
Can I have this framed
the Queer masterpost
so glad to see that this post finally got into the difference between the identity politics that is being gay, and the political identity that is queer.
Hey look my fave post is back, exclusionists go choke 🌻
Btw, in case anyone was wondering about the “gay as slur” thing:
The word gay by the 1890s had an overall tinge of promiscuity – a gay house was a brothel. The suggestion of immorality in the word can be traced back at least to the 1630s, if not to Chaucer:
But in oure bed he was so fressh and gay
Whan that he wolde han my bele chose.
@brookietf @asymbina @drfitzmonster Have any of you seen this amazing post yet?
I haven’t seen this specific one, but I’ve got another one that’s also awesome which I will link to later when I’m not posting from my phone, because in it I link to an article that demonstrates, specifically, how the “q-slur” discourse is specifically originating from TERF circles. It’s a polemic against the word “queer” as being anti-lesbian, and it’s published on Feminist Current, a TERF and SWERF news blog run by Meghan Murphy.
Which, y'know, FUCK THAT
Once upon a time, “gay” was an inclusive term, until cis gay men decided that it was their word; thus, we have “gay and lesbian.” The pushback against queer is entirely because it’s an inclusive term, which TERFs hate because they’re opposed to inclusiveness.
Queer also gives us the convenient alternative to allocishet that is “unqueer”.
I specifically coined “unqueer” to center queer folks :).
Like, I could say, “I’m a transmasculine nonbinary aromantic bisexual,” or I could say, “I’m so fucking queer, y'all.” Gee, I wonder which one I’ll choose.
It makes me so sad to see all these young kids being tricked into TERF ideology. My heart breaks for children who are free(er) to discover who they are, but tear down the history of what gave them that freedom. The world didn’t begin at marriage equality. We’ve always been here, and we’ve always been fucking queer.
Also the term unqueer is amazing and should be used by everyone forthwith.
Here’s three other posts about this “q-slur” bullshit:
And I say, again:
So fuck them, and fuck anyone else who fights back against “queer” as a term for us. I am a queer gay homosexual female tranny dyke and you can have have my reclaimed slurs approximately fucking never.
Everyone who reads my blog, here’s another post that I would suggest that you read. It’s long but there’s a lot of history here that really puts the lie to the whole ‘queer is a slur’ argument that’s been coming from TERFs and radfems for a while now.
Queer is a reclaimed word. It’s an umbrella term. It’s a point of pride, not shame, and I’d really encourage you to become familiar with the history of both the word queer and this recent bullshit about trying to make us ashamed for using it. Again.
Also, side-note, work to reject authoritarianism in all of your communities. This is one of the ways it manifests in the LGBTQ+ community, with anti-queer authoritarians who try to redefine our language to exclude us and deny queer people a space to exist.
Recognising lesbian couples in art gives me a warm feeling. paintings by Joseph Lorusso.
Where my liches at?
(For this I tried drawing a version that was slightly more cosplay-makeup friendly.)
I haven’t painted in, like, over a month
Warmup Lup because I still love her! So much.
I cropped some of my TAZ fanart to fit into phone wallpaper sizes since I get a lot of messages of people trying to edit them to the proper resolution. Here are some Lup-centric ones (I plan on doing more but these are just the first). In case tumblr destroys the quality on these, here’s an imgur album with the proper 1080x1920 resolutions: http://imgur.com/a/nDYzj
You can edit these into your theme or icons, I don’t mind. This goes for playlist covers, album art, AMV usage as well. Just don’t remove credit and give me a shout out when you do so! I’d rather people not just completely reupload these to other sites though.
