We Really Need To Stop Defining Queerness By How Much Someone Has Suffered For It.

we really need to stop defining queerness by how much someone has suffered for it.

which is to say: no more "I don't claim [label] because I haven't experienced the suffering they face"

look. trans means you don't identify with the gender you were assigned at birth. it doesn't have an implicit "and people are EVIL to YOU SPECIFICALLY because of it!" attached. because if that's how we define it, then a trans woman with supportive friends and family in a generally accepting area... what? doesn't get to call herself trans? because that's what you implied.

I think this is where a lot of exclusionist discourse comes from. "they're appropriating our struggle by calling themselves queer!" they aren't. they really aren't. they're calling themselves queer because they're queer. there is no struggle inherent in being queer. the struggle is imposed on us by the cishetallo-normative world we live in and bigots in our communities. the queerness comes from within.

"what if a cishet aro man--" no. I don't care. if a cishet aro man wants to be included in queer spaces, he can be, because he's queer. aromanticism falls under the queer umbrella and we will therefore treat them the same way we treat everyone else in our community. "But what if he's lying about being aromantic to be a predator?" then we kick him out for being a creep, not because aromanticism isn't queer!

we are absolutely allowed to remove people who are making us uncomfortable from our circles! you can kick a person out of an event! you can ban a person from a space! you can block a person! there are plenty of valid reasons to do this and plenty of queer people of all identities who suck and would rightfully get kicked out of a lot of spaces! but you can't tell someone else they aren't queer! you don't get to invalidate someone like that just because you made up a scenario or defined queerness by how miserable it makes you!

as time goes on we're going to have a lot more people coming out into a world that accepts them with open arms and if your sole metric for how deserving someone is of a seat at the table is how much their life has sucked, you will be excluding a lot of people of all identities!