Politics & The GESo, How Are Things Are Going.?1 - The Tories Are Universally Condemned For Mocking Jeremy

Politics & the GE So, how are things are going….? 1 - The Tories are universally condemned for mocking Jeremy Corbyn for wearing a bright green tie at the start of the Parliamentary debate on the Grenfell Tower fire….the symbolic colour of support for Grenfell and the at least 72 who died. 2 - The Tories produce an edited video to make it seem Jeremy Corbyn refused to condemn IRA violence. 3 -The Tories produce a video of Kier Starmer making it look like he couldn’t answer a question. 4 - Tory Alun Cairns claims he knew nothing of his adviser wrecking a rape trial. 5 - Arch Tory Rees-Mogg claims those that died at Grenfell lacked the common sense to leave…..forgetting the whole mass of mistakes and scandals surround this fire. And claiming he would have survived because he was smarter than those who died. 6 - Tory Andrew Bridgen says Ress-Mogg was right. 7 - Tories Rees-Mogg and Bridgen have to apologise to save their jobs. 8 - Tory Alun Cairns resigned when it’s shown he knew all about the deliberate wrecking of the rape trail. 9 - Tories are told to stop its ‘Universal Credit’ advertising campaign, as it is untrue !

Have I missed anything ? There seems to be common themes here - Tory nastiness, incompetence and and a total lack of understanding and compassion. But, carry on sharing meme mocking Dianne Abbott.

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

The most adorable “pop pop”.

you ever read something so fucking stupid you want to blow your brains out

Photos of gay trans male activist Lou Sullivan throughout his life, as presented in Lou Sullivan: Daring to be a Man Among Men by Brice D. Smith

the opening riff to Jackboot Jump breathe if u agree