The big difference between liberal LGBT identity politics and revolutionary queer politics is:
That the goal of liberal LGBT identity politics is to present four (or 5, 6, 7, depending on the acronym) clearly defined LGBT identities with an easily digestable narrative to them to so that LGBT people may be understood, incorporated into societies notions of normalcy and turned into respectable citizens under capitalism.
While the goal of revolutionary queer politics is to complicate identity, to defy definition, to disrupt clear narratives, to continue to be confusing and paradoxical, so that queer people can not be incorporated or turned into respectable citizens and can continue on their struggle to destroy normalcy and respectability, which is a struggle that connects us to all struggles against oppression.
If we seem blatantly sexual or grotesquely unfuckable, if we make polite company uncomfortable, if we seem self-contradicting, if we wear slurs like badges of honor, if we’re bad rolemodels, if we seem weird or dangerous, that’s the point.
This also intersects with neurodiversity. The goal of neurodiversity is not to make autistics fit in neatly into the system where everyone “tolerates” us, it is to dismantle the ableist system entirely.
That’s a nice mindset but a rather privileged one. It was legal to sterilise trans people in my country until a couple of years ago lol
Privileged? Yeah, I was actually sterilised against my will in 2009. https://queeranarchism.tumblr.com/post/125076035423/my-transgender-sterilization-or-why-my-consent/
That is exactly why I don’t want to assimilate.
I know first hand how violent our supposed ‘civilisation’ is and I don’t want to be a respectable citizen in a system this fucked up while the violence against other marganilized people continues. And the violence will continue because the capitalist systems of exploitation can only function if some of us are seen as sub-human.
No one is free unless we all are free.
My radical queerness, my rejection of ths system as a whole, comes in part precisely from those scars below my belly. There is nothing privileged about that.
Sit the fuck down with your ‘that’s a privileged mindset’ bullshit.
I am not reblogging black-brunswickers a second time but as you can probably still see for yourself in the notes:
After this person accused me of being ‘privileged’ in their first reply, they went on to accuse me of hostility (for real?) AND accused me of a ‘privileged attitude’ again while, in a bizarre twist, claiming that ‘I didn’t know the first thing about them’ (while my own reply assumed nothing about them?).
So if you were hesitant to reblog this because maybe black-brunswickers made an honest mistake… yeah, no.
Like quite a few others, they’re stuck in the ridiculous mindset that ‘radical = privileged’ and ‘wanting nothing to do with that = the real victims’.
As if radicals don’t have a VERY good reason to reject integration into this system. Our understanding that the whole system needs to go comes directly from our suffering. Our refusal to leave others behind for the illusion of safety through integration isn’t ‘edgy’, it’s the best part of who we are.
My radical activism has always been a struggle I’ve shared with the most marginalized and most amazing people alive, while the organisations calling for moderation continue to put forward their all-white all-cis councils of wannabe-politicians.
If someone tells you that your refusal to conform to the system is ‘coming from a place of privilege’, shut that bullshit right down.
And like, I don’t wanna claim first prize in the oppresssion olympics, far from it. I’ve got my share of privileges, quite a lot of it, and I am very aware of it. I do catch myself speaking from privileged assumptions sometimes or get corrected by others. That all happens.
But my radicalness is not part of that, it comes precisely from the moments when I had the least power and experiences the most violence done unto my queer body for my failures to conform.
And I think it is important to talk about how it is our most violent experiences of oppression that create our understanding of just how unfixable the system is and it is our double or triple marginalization that creates our understanding of how likely we are to be sacrificed by assimilationist movements.
Wherever radical queers publically oppose lgbt assimilationists offline it is so obvious to see where most of the trans people are, where the people if color are, where the refugees are, where the lgbt people with disabilities are.
Our radical politics don’t come from privilege, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
QueerAnarchism 