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.
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.
If we allow the exclusionists and radfems to co-opt a term that belongs to the whole queer community, not only do they separate us from our history and identities, we also lose the language to talk about and call out femmephobia. Which is discrimination – and violence – that cuts across our community, from all sorts of gender non-conforming folk, feminine queer men, as well as feminine queer women.
Look, the shittiest white gay men didn’t write ‘No Fats, No Femmes’ in every fucking personal ad for fucking decades for 17 year olds on tumblr to decide that ‘femme is a lesbian-only term’
I was going through a book of slang and euphemism from 1988 for reasons (James McDonald’s Dictionary of Obscenity, Taboo and Euphemism), and lookee lookee what I found:
The text reads:
Fem (col.) A passive homosexual.
The term may be applied to both men and women, but more usually to men. It Australia it is generally applied only to men.
It is based upon the French word for women, femme, and indeed, in English, this spelling is sometimes used for passive lesbians, in preference to fem.
—
I’d personally define it differently (ugh, @ ‘’’passive’’’), and I suspect that the spelling preference has tipped in favour of femme these days for all genders, but this is a book from 1988.
Fem/me has never been a lesbian exclusive term.
I’ve gotten a lot of anonymous messages in the past year of people telling me that trans men can’t identify as femme.
I’ve ignored them, because that opinion is super not valid or important. But I came across this very good post I wanted to share. And to add something:
There is a lot of overlap between trans masculine and lesbian communities. A lot of us identified as wlw before we realized we were trans, and were active in wlw communities, and used wlw language for ourselves. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that as soon as we come out as trans, we must be denied the experiences we had as part of the wlw community.
So yeah, there are femme trans men. Some of them may have imported the identity from when they were part of the wlw community. Some of them may be gay trans men who are using it as gay men have for decades. For some, they may have just seen other trans men use the term and it resonated with them. Whatever the reason, trans masculine people absolutely can call themselves femme.
