I posted this because I liked the open nature of the video, that it includes opinions from different perspectives and because I enjoy Mainely Mandys content.
My personal take: I see no reason to police someones queer identity, so if someone says they are queer then they are queer to me.
I agree entirely. It’s true that some newly added groups will be more privileged than some older groups. But so what? Playing oppression olympics and insisting on a certain level of pain in order for someones minority-status to “count” is a slippery slope towards all kinds of horrible gatekeeping.
Where I live we had a big fight in our largest queer organization decades ago about the inclusion of bi people. Some argued that many bi people have a differently-gendered partner, are thus straight-passing and therefore do not suffer the same level of discrimination as gay and lesbian people do. The fight was so big that the entire organizatio ended up being split in two. And for a while we thus had two competing queer organizations; one that included bi people and one that did not.
Eventually the “bi people count” fraction won, and the two organizations were fused back into one.
Then we almost repeated the failure over the inclusion or not of trans people.
I don’t know how many times we’ll have to do this until people start noticing the pattern.
Yes! And the factions against inclusion are often from a cohort debated just a few years prior, so you’d hope they would remember what it was like to be excluded.
I usually go with the flow in those organizational meetings but never again on this issue. It’s too central to the work and there’s a strong bystander effect when no one sticks their neck out for the outsiders.
The usual protest is some kind of slippery slope “ok then who’s next? How about [insert identities currently considered straight-adjacent]” and I always say “yes” to every example because ofc that’s the damn plan.
We’re entering the phase where social conservatives and RWA types shrink normative bounds by carving out smaller groups subject to arbitrary stigmas in order to isolate and target them (e.g. ace, nb, 2s). So yes, more will seek refuge, including those who were not our allies before or who are new to the experience of being marginalized. And we will welcome them with solidarity and support, because that was what we wanted ourselves not too long ago and it’s been our ethos all along.
Now someone might ask “what if I don’t care about any of that? What if I just want the revolution to begin?” To them I would say this is the revolution, or a version of it at least, and here’s why:
Somewhere down the road is a tipping point where normative identities, carved away as they are by conservative/RWA repression, become too sparse to cohere around a shared notion of normative identity held by a solid majority. That is, at some point most people will have had one or more aspects of their person targeted. At this point, I expect normative hegemony to rapidly collapse (for a few reasons but mostly because RWAs are pathetic cowards). What’s left will be smaller clusters/cliques. Once the process is complete, the idea of heteronormative dominance may sound like artifacts of yesteryear to the average person for whom diversity and divergence is the norm. And at that point, I hope we are able to focus more on the larger arena of economic justice, the common denominator of all social justice causes.
But for any of this to happen we have to reach the critical unification threshold described above, which only happens if we follow through on our alliances and commitment to inclusion and belonging. We cannot win by excluding people for stupid reasons.