Okay, hold up. This ask is conflating trigger tags/content warning tags with reclaiming slurs and using them as a personal label.
Triggers don’t have to be logical. If someone needs the word ‘queer’ to be tagged for because it gives them panic attacks/flashbacks/other trigger reactions – or even just because it’s an upsetting word to them – they are within their rights to ask for someone to tag it.
But ‘this word is upsetting/triggers me’ is a valid reason to ask for a tag all on its own. ‘Queer’ being Schrodinger’s Slur doesn’t ever have to come into the equation if you need it tagged for emotional/mental health reasons, and it doesn’t have to be remotely reasonable. Brains are weird and pick their hangups at seeming random sometimes.
Otoh, if you want ‘queer’ tagged or censored by someone else *because* you define it as a slur, you should probably be ready for a fight – especially if the person identifies as queer. because consider: you’re functionally telling them ‘that word is only for your oppressors to use against you. trying to take away their power to hurt you with this slur by taking it for yourself is not allowed because I – an unrelated third party – have not chosen to reclaim it myself or feel the word as a reclaimed label does not apply to me. As such, anyone whose experiences may be adjacent to mine should also not use this word in a positive way.’ It’s just invasive. And, if you’re not personally reclaiming ‘queer’, not really your business!
(On that note, I’m curious if you’d feel comfortable telling people who call themselves these other reclaimed or partially-reclaimed slurs that they can’t call themselves that/they need to tag for it/they need to censor the word in their posts because it’s a slur: Dyke. Slut. Whore. Bitch. Even Gay (which, incidentally, was the ubiquitous insult of my youth, treated as synonymous with ‘stupid’.) and this list is far from exhaustive.
I think the reason ppl are primarily going after queer as a reclaimed slur is because of a deliberate effort to ignore & erase the reclamation history of ‘queer’ – a reclamation that was so near-complete (in the US) that college classes were named ‘queer studies’ – so that a label with purposefully fuzzy edges and definition would pass out of common, unquestioned use, making it easier to determine who is ‘allowed’ to be LGBT+ and who isn’t. But that doesn’t mean everyone has to claim queer as an identity or that it hasn’t been used to hurt anyone. I just want people who accept ‘the q word is an unreclaimed slur and always has been’ narratives to think critically about where they got it from.)
The point is: identities are messy, and a lot of minority identities (and ppl in widely denigrated employments, like sex work, and/or nonmonogamous sexually active women and/or ppl misgendered as women in general, etc) have names that are or were slurs. Some people choose to reclaim and own those slurs, and telling them ‘it makes me uncomfortable so please censor your label’ is kinda shitty.
So if someone uses a word as a label that you cannot stand to see, even in the context of being reclaimed as a self-identifier/proud label, you should probably just block that person so you can’t see it anymore. You can also use blacklist functions and tumblr’s tag filtering features to help you avoid slurs being used as reclaimed labels. (And This is also where I remind people – including myself – to carefully consider what to censor with asterisks or slashes b/c doing so can put triggers past blacklist functions. and remember to tag if you do choose to censor certain words.)
Good post! Also, I will recommend that people who need to not ever wish to see a particular word use the desktop version of Tumblr with Xkit, which allows more extensive blacklisting than Tumblr’s own settings. (The only thing that won’t block is images with words in them; and content tagging is still good and I generally support it. But Xkit will save you from seeing posts with particular text in them.)
I’d just like to add to FoF’s very good answer: you can always ask someone to tag for the word queer. But that Does Not Mean that they have to. Trigger-warning for your own identity can be extremely taxing, and a person does NOT owe that emotional labour. Your mental health does not come before theirs, and I wish that was more acknowledged in these debates, and that it was more widely accepted that it’s not always as cut and dry as “if you don’t tag for triggers, you’re an asshole”. Part of me wonders how much that social rule of tumblr has been used to coerce queer people into treating their own identities like awful words even when they didn’t want to.
Good addition that’s very important! I meant to say this explicitly but forgot to.
Tag: lgbt identity
i hate like Starting Discourse but like … as somebody who has seen kind of a lot of messed up posts this pride, i want to point out that inter-community violence and exclusionism is … frankly inherently anti-pride. just… listen for a bit and if you don’t agree, that’s fine. but listen.
there’s a reason people say “no homo.” even though we hear all the time about how we’re *special snowflakes who get special attention*, people know that this isn’t a safe community to be in. i mean belonging to it – identifying openly – is a scary thing, one that paints a target on your back. so when someone voluntarily says “this is where i belong”, what the heck am i saying when i say, “no, you don’t.” they don’t get special buttons, they don’t get hugs and kisses. people who come out get kicked out of houses, abused by parents. we know that, but we lose sight of it for some reason. i was kicked out of my school’s lgbt+ group by some of the students because i was “not gay enough”. i believed it. i couldn’t say “i’m bi” for another four years after it. i said i was straight but like, playing. i said i was straight and i went home to catholic parents and i said i was straight and i went to prom alone because the girl i loved was out of state and i said i was straight until i was nineteen and drunk and whispering “i like her” to myself in a completely dark room. i still sometimes wonder – do i belong at pride? because of how much people seem to think we don’t.
and i might be alone in this but it makes me sad when people say “oh such and such an identity is taking up our space!!” there’s not a limited amount of space. that idea is something that the straight world wants us to believe, that we can only fit into this tiny little corner and that’s it. but the more of us there are, the more space we take up, the more force we have. so of course the outside community wants us to silence those who “aren’t gay enough,” because if you have only those who qualify shouting, you’re not going to have nearly enough voices. but if all of us – and i mean every person you call “fake bi”, every person who “just went through a phase” – whatever – if all of us are shouting, how much louder would that voice be? if we didn’t kick out every teenager who said “i’m just experimenting,” if we included every mom who “had a fling in college,” if we…. were together…..
those who oppose us want us to fight. divided, we are a mess, as every revolution is. they want our pride to be spent biting at each other instead of turning around and fighting. stonewall wasn’t where we fought each other. stonewall was when it finally stopped mattering, we were all angry, and hurt, and willing. and that fight? that’s what started us on the path to being free. an entire tide of people, all “enough”, no matter where they fell in lgbt.
i know this: people cannot steal my identity. just in the way that stars cannot steal each other’s beauty. let them in. if you won’t love them, send them to me. but a nation of gates and locks and tests is not a community.
Flying through Storytelling 