wait WHAT??? They can do that!?! And like every single parent of a baby that I’ve ever known just had no idea what their baby wanted half the time and just assumed there was no way around it?!! That they’re just dumb nonsense crying machines with just kind of “cranky for whatever reason, who knows” emotional states?!! They could have just taught them some non-verbal words all along??!!! And it works as young as six months?! An entire period of ours lives at which we are capable of clear two-way communication is just fucking unknown to most of society?!?!
it’s shitty but tbh sometimes being an adult means drawing lines in the sand for yourself and knowing when to stop putting effort in where it will be wasted, even if that means walking away without closure or learning to accept that they might always see you as the bad guy
i just saw someone completely seriously, without a hint of irony, refer to it as “Q-slur Eye” and my intestines started melting like so many Salvador Dalí clocks
I’ve seen “don’t call the show Qu**r Eye if you’re a cishet and can’t reclaim the q-slur” so nothing surprises me anymore.
“Don’t normalize this word that people fought really hard to normalize! Let it keep its oppressive power because I don’t understand queer history”
God I literally fucking hate this rhetoric. It’s exclusionary, gatekeepy, TERFy, and supports a totally revisionist queer history that erases so many marginalized people, especially people who are marginalized on multiple axes.
“LET IT KEEP ITS OPPRESSIVE POWER BECAUSE I DON’T UNDERSTAND QUEER HISTORY”
Wow that really sums it up.
I lived through the “take back the word queer” movement, so let me further sum it up
The entire point was to strip the word of the power to hurt us. We embraced it by refusing to be offended by it. We were saying “you can’t hurt us with that word, we now feel empowered when we hear it.”
During this time I saw an interview with a gay man who’d been arrested while wearing a “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used To It” t-shirt. He was put into a holding cell with other detainees who tried to verbally abuse him. They started out by calling him queer but after seeing his t-shirt, and him not reacting to that word, they started stumbling over their words trying to find a name to call him. They finally settled on repeatedly calling him a “sissy” which, by the late 90s, had become a very out-dated slur toward queer men and was a laughable effort by these hyper-masculine and sexist bullies
When they tried to call him a queer it had no power because embracing the word, no matter who said it, had taken away that power
tl;dr We took back the word Queer with the intent of it no longer having the power to hurt us, but people now calling it the Q-slur are giving power back to the people who hate us
lovingdread 