Apolitical queers don’t deserve to opt-out of discourse
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Just a moment...
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/apolitical-queers-dont-deserve-to-opt-out-of-discourse-25bf467f9cc2
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/apolitical-queers-dont-deserve-to-opt-out-of-discourse-25bf467f9cc2
The author might not be able to hold this exact position for long. Yes, absolutely fuck those who pull up the ladder behind them. People deserve a rest though too, because burning out over your queerness sucks.
Only people who are actually fighting deserve a rest. The people who are always resting and never fighting deserve to be kicked out of the resting places until they start pulling their weight.
Until they start pulling their weight? What? I think this reveals a lot about the way you think. Being queer is not a social club. It isn't a giant apartment in which we're all living in and therefore, if someone doesn't do the fucking chores, they need to be kicked out. No.
It's not a either stay and fight or leave situation. We are born in a society that happens to be queerphobic as queer people. There is fighting it, but there is no escaping it. And not everyone wants to fight. I don't blame them. Because they already have to deal with the fact that they are queer in a queerphobic society, which is already a fight by itself.
Listen, Grail, this isn't the first time I see you post something, and I can't help but notice you have a pattern of aggressively dictating the way people should act.
Yes, I am pissed off at the people who are completely "apolitical" while being queer. When I'm talking to people in my country who don't seem worried about the imminent coming of the far right in power, while being queer themselves, while sitting with me, a trans woman, yes, I want to slap the shit out of them and tell them to wake the fuck up! I fully agree. However, I don't care about the people who are not being actively militant though. Not everyone wants to make their queerness their whole identity.
They are not the enemy. Calm down. You know which queer people are the enemy of queer people? Those who fought for themselves and said fuck everyone else, like the people who are specifically LGB activists and hate the T, for example.
But those who don't want to actively fight, those who don't want to be militant? No, leave them alone. Let them be. And fight for them. Not everyone can or want to. Yes, it can be tiring and I get it, but you don't know what's going on in people's mind.
Especially trans people. Our whole lives is already a fight. People don't understand us, they don't want to make a single effort to do. When we have to change our name, change our legal gender, it's so complicated to do in some countries and it can take quite a toll on us. HRT is sometimes a mess to get access to, sometimes it's impossible. We have to fight for every little things.
I have trans friends who are just politically conscious but don't really participate in the political things. They don't go to protests and anything. And I don't blame them. Being trans is already such a constant fight.
What about the people who aren’t interested in fighting, and who actively work to create spaces antithetical to fighting for queer liberation?
What do you mean by antithetical to fighting for queer liberation? Because from what I'm reading, it just sounds like apolitical spaces. And if so, well, you don't know that!
I frequently go to spaces that are made for and by trans people, where we avoid politics deliberately. Because we want to talk about other things, we want to talk about our lives, our own personal struggles. And not politics.
Because a lot of people want to take away our rights and we are all aware of that. How the fuck can we not be aware of it? It's all over the news. Trans people are getting killed, trans people are losing their rights and some of us want to think about something else in our already overly stressful lives.
It's like some content creators who talk about politics and the second they don't talk about anything real related they get half the views and they're burning out on their own identity because that's all they can think about.
Again, we don't choose this. None of us chose to be queer. None of us chose to be gay. None of us chose to be lesbian. None of us chose to be bi. None of us chose to be pan. None of us chose to be trans. None of us chose to be intersex. And so on and so on and so on. None of us chose to be this. And some of us just want to live our lives trying to think about something else than the fact that we are queer.
I use capitalised pronouns, please refer to Me with My preferred pronouns.
I frequently go to spaces that are made for and by trans people, where we avoid politics deliberately. Because we want to talk about other things, we want to talk about our lives, our own personal struggles. And not politics.
I recommend you check out My other article on this subject, There is no such thing as “apolitical”, and claiming otherwise is dangerous. The TLDR is that the statement you just made is an act of violence. It's a transphobic dogwhistle. There is no non-politics. The ideology of "Apoliticism" is deeply political, and deeply dangerous. The online spaces you describe where people "avoid politics", they don't. What they do is platform a specific set of non-controversial politics, and claim these politics are not politics. This dishonest course of action provides short term gratification, but in the long term it contributes to transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and ableism.
My purpose in creating the post here is to call for the destruction of such spaces. All queer spaces should be explicitly political at all times. And that is because the only alternative to explicit politics is implicit, unspoken, unconscious politics. Secret rules, self-contradictory aims, transphobic dogwhistles.
For example, suppose a nonbinary person like Myself joins an "apolitical" safe space for queer people, a Discord which is full of trans girls who like to play War Thunder together. I, a new War Thunder player looking for friends and a queer person, join the community. My capitalised pronouns are respected by about 50% of the Discord regulars, but one trans girl in particular objects to My neopronouns and says I'm oppressing her by asking her to respect preferred pronouns. The rules of the server prohibit politics.
If I or anyone else argues in favour of respecting trans people's preferred pronouns, I am in violation of the rules, and can fairly be banned. Now, so is the person kicking up an enbyphobic fuss, but you have to take human psychology into account. Moderators will think "Everything was fine before Grail arrived. We're only having this awful political conversation because of Them." If the moderators enforced the rules fairly, they'd ban everyone for every post they ever made, because everything is political. Since the mods believe in such a thing as apolitics, their impartiality is already compromised. They are already lying about the rules and enforcing them selectively according to personal bias. You cannot expect such people to make correct decisions about how to enforce the rules.
Most people only change enough to accept themselves. Nobody is a perfect leftist. If I were to believe in apolitics, I would probably end up acting racist, because I am not a person of colour and I have all kinds of blind spots from My lack of lived experience on the subject. I have a duty to constantly challenge Myself on racial issues so that I don't fall into the trap of only changing enough to accept Myself. Everyone does. Most people are racist when they believe in apolitics. Most people, including most trans people, are transphobic when they believe in apolitics. An "apolitical" space can only ever be a huge trap for these kinds of attitudes to fester and become normalised.
There are ways to have safe spaces that do not trigger or exhaust queer people, but they are not "apolitical" spaces, they are spaces which are fiercely political and fiercely allied with queer justice. The apolitical spaces are not safe for every queer person. They are only safe for white people with normal pronouns and mild or no disabilities.
Take a breath, please, and accept other people. Corporate media moderation shenanigans is not a reason for me to feel bad when I chill with (queer) friends.