one day some of you will actually go outside and go to pride and you’re going to meet old black queens who refers to themselves as femme, you’ll meet people from small towns who still use the word transsexual, you’ll see that your local activist organization set up a stall about your local LGBT history that includes leather bar’s history, you’ll see lesbians in groups refer to themselves as “guys” and “boys”, you’ll see someone with breasts and pasties and little else have “he / him” painted on his chest, and you’ll be so caught up with your terminally online attitude that instead of appreciating the wide diversity of people who exist in the LGBT community who are brave enough to share themselves you’ll just be formulating posts and tweets in your head for when get home about how “problematic” it all was and it’s honestly tragic
Once, back when I worked in an LGBTQIA dungeon, I encountered a significantly older person who remarked to me that they hadn’t been to “this type of place” in decades. They struck up a conversation with me and told me how amazing it was to see an openly transexual youth such as myself. I asked them about their experiences with gender and they said “oh, well, I’m a bit male and a bit female. Men’s and women’s clothes, sometimes makeup in a suit, sometime fresh faced in a dress when I’m at home. You know, bisexual” Obv this puzzled me at first until I realized this person was using bisexual in a very, very, literal and old fashioned sense, as in, dual-sexed. Non-binary.
Y’all gotta understand there are generation gaps in the language we use and you open yourself up to a LOT of very interesting stories if you stop blocking off the past.
One of the biggest problems with modern community is the idea that (white) western, post 2000s LGBT vocabulary is the only correct way to speak about sexuality and gender.
Like the freak outs under pictures of protests from the 70s-90s because signs and shirts say faggot and dyke and queer, as if these words weren’t a key part of identity and activism.
Beyond just English, I saw a couple people making fun of the term “gender x” in an anime…but why would a Japanese production adhere to English standards?
Or the way people talk about pronouns as if every language uses pronouns the same way as English.
It’s just…it indicates a mindset that these words are objective and written in stone and western youth culture is always the most correct in a way that…feels icky. Diversity in people includes diversity of language.
