lines-and-edges:

golbatgender:

Ok you know what really scares me about REG culture and “if you interact with people more than a year older/younger than you it’s creepy”? How the fuck are these kids supposed to make connections?

Completely non-sexual connections. Just being friends with other queer people of varying ages, sometimes receiving helpful suggestions or minor, occasional material support, having someone to talk to who can give you advice that your straight parents probably can’t (if you’re even out to them and they haven’t dropped you), maybe even being able to pay that forward someday.

If you don’t develop those connections within the queer community, you’ll only have connections through relatives or maybe a religious organization or a workplace, and those are much more likely to go poof if those people find out you’re queer. Or the “help” may be unsafe for you—the connection leads to a hostile workplace, but if you give that kind of feedback, it risks that particular connection or your connection’s connection.

So for REGs, being a REG is likely to hurt them in multiple ways. One, REGs are encouraged not to interact with older queer people at all (except to harass). Two, even if they disregard that message, exclusionary, reactionary politics will alienate them from the vast majority of adult queer people, and the rest don’t generally give a shit about helping anyone other than themselves and are as nasty and abusive as any other REG—hardly a safe or desirable connection!

So yeah, even though they might have some popularity now, in the long run REGs are going to have increased levels of social and professional isolation and dependence on heteronormative social structures. Fuck all the TERFs and SWERFs that started this—thanks for destroying the futures of hundreds or thousands of queer kids for your little power play.

I’m seeing this already and it breaks my heart; socially isolated traumatized kids being dragged into this environment where anything they can do to make themselves less socially isolated or heal from trauma is verboten. It’s fucked up.

And then the flip side is, if they habitually consider interactions outside their age group to be automatically skeevy, when they do get too isolated and seek out other company it’s much harder for them to identify when someone is acting predatory. Because when “my new friend is 35” is automatically red-flagged, why bother looking for red flags, shouldn’t you just expect them to treat you terribly? (After all, ‘friends’ of their own age do, in these social groups.) Non-abusive people are a myth spread by Big Adult, or something.

On the more encouraging side, I’m also starting to see people get tired of it and quietly pull out of the slide.