i’ll never understand why we don’t call countries the names they actually call themselves
like, i know this is a weeaboo-sounding example, but let’s start with Japan. They call themselves Nippon or Nihon depending on… i guess, the speaker’s accent??? or their level of formality while speaking??? I dunno. But we still called them Zipangu for like a few hundred years. And now we call them Japan.
All because Marco Polo asked someone in China about that island over there and they said “oh that’s Cipangu” and Marco Polo was like “Oh, Zipangu, cool.” And then he went back to Italy and said “Y’ALL THERE’S THIS DOPE-ASS ISLAND CALLED ZIPANGU” and people back in Italy were like “An island called Giappone? Dope.”
And this pattern of people mishearing people kept repeating until we got to “Japan.”
And we still call them Japan even though we know better. Because fuck you, Marco Polo asked the wrong person 500 years ago and misheard them and we’re sticking to that, I guess.
that was literally just the world’s worst game of telephone
some of u all evil fucks: lol what did i just read.. fuckin cishet apologist. stop putting this mogai shit on my dash. lost all hope in this hellsite
What REALLY happens:
Y’all: This is the queer community, we’re all queers here!!
Us: Hey, queer is still considered a slur in many places and to many people; the reclamation is very Anglo-centric, so please don’t use the word to describe a whole coalition when you don’t have the permission from everyone to do so.
me: im queer
some of u all evil fuck: you calling yourself queer is somehow about me because i say it is.
like? ok? what i just described btw has literally happened, and i have literally never pushed queer on anyone else, but i’ve had people derail posts about my struggles with it, and people attempting to invalidate me…. if people call you queer against your will, that has absolutely nothing to do with me. so i have no clue why you bring that up to me.
the original post literally just says “im queer”, i never use queer to mean what people call lgbt+ and mogai, and if you say i do you’re just putting words into my mouth to make your points…. which is incredibly lazy and does not in fact equate resemble anything that anyone could make a good point.
anyway, you can say “it’s ok to reclaim” as much as you want but if you make everyone feel unsafe in identifying as queer. anyway, my cis pal, i can’t bother with more cis women talking over me on my gender or orientation so stop bothering me.
how the fuck is the reclamation anglo-centric. LGBT isn’t even a thing around here. it’s literally all individual identities or “queer”. i live in southeast asia, never stayed in a predominantly english-speaking country in my life
oh yeah that’s a thing i didn’t even notice… like i would rather say that lgbt is an anglo-centric approach isn’t it lol … like if you look at the different community names around the world? the limitation to those four identities?? not intuitive. at all…. and literally, the acronym is based in a very simple understanding of things, and it is based in the english names of things…
like yeah, most of those words have been shoved into other languages because of anglo-centrism in itself lmao … but not all of them? there’s local identity names, and also as i said…. acronyms aren’t intuitive… in most countries… queer is though? like i know in europe people favour the local variation of queer or even 100% reclaimed the word queer as the community term, and i know that’s the case other places too…. and yeah… it’s funny being called anglo-centric i’ve only known english for 4 years, and irl have not come across “lgbt” but have come across queer and other similar labels… (also like the insistence of lgbt being the community name is the anglo-centrism, innit?)
“what REALLY happens” aka “i know more about queer experiences than you, a queer person”
Can confirm that “queer” is used, instead of LGBT+, in a lot of east asian countries that use loan words.
퀴어 = kuieo, Korean for queer
クィア = kuia, Japanese for queer
酷儿 = kùér, Chinese for queer (mostly used in Taiwan + Hong Kong. Literal meaning from the characters is “cool kid”. There are actually quite a few reclamatory words in Chinese, such as 同志/tóngzhì which literally means ‘same intent’ or ‘comrade’, as well as
怪胎
/guài tāi which means ‘freak’ or ‘abnormal’)
Just to name a few. There are also various terms used throughout all of Asia in similar reclamatory fashion.
I can’t cite sources on this bc it’s basically anecdotal and mostly comes from interview subjects with BBC Africa (a colonizer media outlet), but my impression is that queer is broadly used as a preferred umbrella term in most English-speaking countries on the African continent as well. would love verification or rebuttal of this from somebody with concrete linguistic info.
I coined the term “genderqueer” back in the 1990s in an effort to glue together two nouns that seemed to me described an excluded and overlooked middle: those of us who were not only queer but were so because we were the kind of gender trash society couldn’t digest.
A prominent gay columnist immediately attacked me in print for “ruining a perfectly good word like ‘queer.’” (Harrumph!)
Joan Nestle, Claire Howell, and I then used the word for the title of our anthology of emerging young writers. But I don’t think anyone expected the term or the concept to really catch on.
Then one year I was attending the Creating Change conference and using the (wonderfully gender-neutral) bathrooms, and saw someone had posted a sticker on the wall that read, “A Genderqueer Was Here!” I thought, Hmm … that’s really interesting. Someone is using that not as a descriptor, but as the basis for their identity. So it begins.
Fast-forward about 20 years and I was just reading Matt Bernstein’s anthology Nobody Passes, and in it writer Rocko Bulldagger bemoans the term’s very existence, declaring, “I am sick to death of hearing it “
Such is the arc of a new idea.
But if you opened your eyes at all, you could see all this coming a long way off.
At Camp Trans, outside the now-defunct Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, I’d meet one young person after another simply known as “boychik,” “demigirl,” “transmasculine,” “tryke,” and any number of exuberant genders few of us had contemplated.
Camp Trans itself was always overrun by one set of teens and 20-somethings explaining patiently, if exasperatedly, to their lesbian mothers — who’d brought them in tow to experience the beauty of womanhood — that they needed to move beyond their transphobia and accept trans people as women and not men. And a totally different set of teens and 20-somethings were joyously destroying by example the categories of men, women, lesbian, and transgender.
We’ve spent almost 40 years fighting for a bunch of identity categories that are based entirely on the implicit acceptance that there are two and only two basic sexes, with the associated possible gender identities and sexual orientations that come from them.
And now young people are about to blow all that up.
I was reminded of this while watching Showtime’s hit TV show Billions, which introduced a new character, Taylor, whose gender I was having fun trying to puzzle out.
Taylor is an intense, brilliant intern, who wears a shirt, tie, and buzzed crew cut, but otherwise has no identifiable landmarks by which the viewer might navigate the gender terrain.
Finally, they are introduced to Bobby Axelrod, the head of multibillion-dollar hedge fund Axe Capital.
As played by Asia Kate Dillon, they reply: “Hello, sir, my name is Taylor. My pronouns are ‘they, theirs, and them.’”
Cutting-edge stuff. And a signpost for where the gender dialogue is going. Just like when student Maria Munir, 20, came out to a nonplussed President Obama as “nonbinary.”
In a recent article at Refinery29, Dillon explained that they didn’t just read for the part. As they read the part, “I did some research into non-binary, and I just thought, Oh my gosh, that’s me… When I read the script for episode two and I saw the ‘they, theirs and them,’ that’s when the tears started to well up in my eyes. Then when I read Axe’s response, which is, ‘Okay,’ and then the scene just continues, that’s what ultimately moved me to full-fledged tears.”
This is powerful stuff. And it’s only the start. The trans movement is going to have to accommodate and open the boundaries perhaps more than it would like.
But if it’s the job of young people to expose and explode their elders’ paradigm, these young people are off to a wonderful start.
“Hello. My name is Riki. My pronouns are ‘they, theirs, and them.’“
Riki Wilchins, “Get to Know the New Pronouns: They, Theirs, and Them
People who complain all the time about lesbians wanting to retain butch and femme as terms intimately connected to lesbianism are honestly so deeply self-centered that it’s absurd. Imagine looking at a contemporary culture set on erasing every single aspect of lesbianism that many of us hold close, from the term, to the concept, to our attractions not being phrased properly, to the specific way lesbianism connects a lot of women to other women not just sexually but broadly, seeing a group of women struggling to even be allowed to name ourselves let alone realize and act on our sexualities in the face of a culture which wants us to collapse into any number of categories, from “queer” because it is more progressive to no longer seeing yourself as a woman if you’re too gnc, and going “Uh those mean dykes won’t let me have this word that I want because I think it’s pretty.”
It’s not even like we’re in the majority- the culture that’s set on erasing lesbianism from its conceptions of sexuality has already almost fully appropriated our terminologies and concepts to be for everyone rather than for lesbians. So a few lesbians on the internet retain a special respect for a historically important way of living and seeing yourself in relation to lesbianism, and that’s too much? Fuck you honestly.
I hear and understand this frustration but that’s never what those words meant. this claim is ahistorical. there are lots of ways in which people are shitty to lesbians specifically, but saying butch and femme are not now and never have been terms exclusive to lesbian identity is not among them.
no offense to people named aaron but who the fuck decided two a’s were necessary??? now i can’t converse with someone named aaron without calling them a-aron
not to be That Bitch but it’s another example of an anglicized disaster of a name from biblical hebrew, which was aharon and imo infinitely more badass than aaron
others in this cursed category: elisheva (elizabeth), yirmiyahu (jeremy), mikha-el (michael), matisyahu (matthew), shoshana (susanna)
you really are that bitch huh i feel educated as fuck right now
alder-knight 